The Uzebox: an Open Source Hardware Games Console

angry tapir writes "Lots of people are familiar with open source software. Open source hardware, however, is still more of niche category. The Uzebox is an open source, 'retro minimalist' 8-bit games console, licensed under version 3.0 of the GNU GPL. 'The console uses an overclocked ATmega644 microcontroller and classic Super Nintendo controllers, supports 256 colors and 4 sound channels and has an SD card interface from which games can be loaded from.'"

Comments

Link to the actual project...

[Gordonjcp]

... instead of the Computerworld advert farm:

http://belogic.com/uzebox/index.asp

Sheer comedy, such a geektastic project being hosted with ASP?

Don't bother to mod this up, save your points for something less karma-whorey.

Re:Awesome

[jovius]

http://uzebox.org/shop/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=22&products_id=35

70$ + power supply + cable(s) and controllers about 20$

Other Interesting Hardware

[inglorion_on_the_net]

Uzebox is cool!

While on the subject, I'd also like to point out some other projects I've found interesting:

OpenPandora, a community-designed, Linux-running handheld. The specs are pretty impressive, by today's standards, but were even more impressive when it was first introduced. Best thing is, they're now manufacturing and shipping!

For those who like to tinker themselves, there is the BeagleBoard, a cheap (as they come) single board computer with impressive specs, designed for open source software. The Wikipedia article lists a number of alternatives, some of which may be more powerful and/or cheaper.

One interesting alternative to the BeagleBoard is the Hawkboard, which is backed by its own community. It's slightly less powerful than the BeagleBoard, but, at 89 USD, also costs quite a bit less.

And then there's the ever-popular Arduino, which comes in several varieties. You can buy them assembled starting at about 20 USD, or build your own for under 10 USD. They can be extended with "shields", e.g. to get extra I/O capabilities. Pretty cool stuff!

Personally, I am still tinkering around with resistors and transistors and the like, designing and simulating circuits with Qucs (which I feel is a lot more production-ready than that website suggests) and my Nokia N900, but any of the above hardware looks like it might be a nice next step up.

Re:Other Interesting Hardware

[ledow]

The Pandora isn't actually shipping - again. Been in production for three years and some people who ordered on the first few days **still** haven't received one.

For the past few months you could pay almost the price of the console again in order to get a "Premium" queue-jumper Pandora before even the first pre-orderers from three years ago - after the first few hundred they stopped that and they have said they only offered that because otherwise they would have gone bankrupt and been unable to ship anybody's order.

Current status is that they are abandoning their PCB manufacturer for another, because it's taken them three years to actually get the PCB manufacturer to do anything worthwhile (they accept any excuse and the "community" eggs them on to be nice to everyone because they have a shed-load of money invested in the hope of receiving a device that's not materialised in significant numbers after three years) and now all the PCB's that have been sitting in the manufacturer's storage for all that time have rotted - which means basically starting months of work all over again with another manufacturer.

And they can't even ship Premium orders any more because of that. They've shipped maybe a thousand or two units in total, and a lot of those have gone on eBay almost immediately because with only a thousand units in the wild, most of the software is just ports of Ubuntu software and a couple of emulators.

They still haven't finished "batch 1" yet, and have had a ton of returns and problems (Wifi is the latest - the new boards produced just don't have working wifi because nobody was testing it properly, so they all had to go back) - buttons being faulty, cases cracking, you name it they have problems with it.

They are currently threatening to sue the PCB manufacturer but how they intend to do that while on the edge of bankruptcy is uncertain. Basically, you aren't going to see it in significant numbers enough to attract developers, and certainly not for years (current batch orders haven't even started yet and probably won't for another year, and they have to re-order all the cases, plastics, etc. for that batch)

The running joke among Pandora-watchers is "Two Months" - that's how long everything is said to take until they are back in business and gets stated with regularity every two months for the past three years.

Re:Other Interesting Hardware

[Tapewolf]

This would be a complete 180 on what the production team have been claiming, so (as in "investor") I would be very interested to hear if you have a citation for that.

Changing supplier and threatening legal action:

http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/4058-wifi-tests-and-circuitco-2011-06-17/page__view__findpost__p__74759

Oxidisation problems:

http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/4058-wifi-tests-and-circuitco-2011-06-17/page__view__findpost__p__74948

Re:This is Open Source done right

[WarlockD]

Ok, maybe I will be modded down here, but its a damn ATmega644, maybe overclocked with SNES controllers and a crap DAC hooked up. We have been doing this for years, back even on the old Pic16f84. Granted this is in color with what looks like an impressive API but for the same price you can get hooked up with a Propeller that has a hell of allot more features and even supports VGA resolutions out of box. Not to mention the video/sound timing issues you will have with this thing when you want to try to work outside the API. This is not the 2600 days where we have to watch for Vsyinc like its life or death:P

The ARM kit over at spark fun has way more features, cheaper, AND runs at 72mhz. http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10664 Even if you want to "market" this thing for beginners, an Arduino has much better support and gaggits to play with. Game programing, especially with this kind of setup, will be hard.

Sigh. Hell, even putting a 3 dollar CLPD would help the graphic performance alot on that. This whole article seems more of a sales pitch than a real project.

Re:This is Open Source done right

[Bert64]

It's all about scale...

In hardware, yes absolutely... The cost of producing hardware is high and this will always make it extremely difficult for smaller groups or individuals to compete against the large manufacturers.

In software, where the barriers of entry are lower, open source is doing extremely well... Android, Firefox, and Linux is in everything from TVs, Routers and all manner of networking kit, Phones, all the way up to massive database servers and supercomputers. Linux and BSD are running on thousands of devices that people don't even realise and if you added them all up you would probably find that Linux is the most widespread OS by quite large a margin.

In my house alone, i know that linux runs on my TV, my Satellite receiver, my gps, my wireless ap and my phone.