A friend of mine found out about this awhile back and has been documenting his research into the matter. You can read what he has found here. Basically: "While surfing the web I have found out that USDTV is renting space for 3 of its 11 channels from KULC. While I am no lawyer I think that this is illegal as KULC is licenesed as an educational station."
I just barely built one for about $420 or so with the following specs:
AMD Athlon XP 1800
Some micro-ATX MSI motherboard (I forget the exact model)
256 megs of RAM
Yuan MPG600 tuner/capture card
GeForce 4 MX440 (for TV out)
Western Digital 160 Gig hard drive
Antect Minuet micro-ATX case (it's a beautiful case and fits in perfectly in anyone's home theater)
Extra case fan and anything else I can't think of off the top of my head
It's runs MythTV on Gentoo Linux and works perfectly (although it took some time to work out the bugs with the Yuan card). If anyone has a spare computer around give Myth a shot. It's a pretty impressive open source project.
I've still got some stuff to finish configuring but before long I'll hopefully be playing Chrono Trigger with my XBox controllers after I looked up the weather and decided it was too cold to go out (but only after queueing up the television programs I want to record for the week).;)
But the primary advantage of this system is to understand how the hardware works. That's something you rarely ever see. Even back in the 8-bit days, almost no one really understood machines like the Apple II and Atari 800 on a hardware level. For example, no one ever attempted to redesign Atari's ANTIC chip, because that info just wasn't available. This hasn't changed at all over the last 20 years. FPGAs are cheap and widespread, but not the info about designing graphics hardware.
I'm glad at least someone gets the point of this system;). As for Andre's books not teach game design, honestly, they don't really have the room to do so. Almost all of them are 1000+ pages. Some of the older books games seem like he spent a bit more time on gameplay but the books aren't really to teach you how to design games. They teach you how to write games. The reason he chooses "lackluster knockoffs" is because 1) they are easy to write and 2) they are easy to understand. His writing style impresses me every time I good to read one of his books. His books are actually enjoyable to read! Do you know how rare this is in for a tech book?! Not only are the books entertaining but they teach well and cover a very large amount of information at the same time.
There are several books focused on game design (my favorite being Game Architecture and Design by Rollings, Morris). If you want to learn hardcore game design, you're going to need a book dedicated to it.
This system isn't to run amazing graphics that will put other systems to shame. It's also not here to show off it's computing muscle. What is it for then? It's to LEARN! The book tells you how to build a game system from the bottom up.
Sure, you can go out and buy a cheap DreamCast and make games for it but that isn't what XGameStation is about. To quote what Alex Varanese who is helping Andre out with this:
The difference is that the Dreamcast won't come with a book that teaches you digital engineering and how the system was built. It also won't tell you anything about how the operating system or APIs were coded, and you certainly won't get a complete SDK with it (you can get various kits online, but not an official one).
The point is, the XGS is not about individual capabilities like graphics, sound, or anything like that. It's about buying a kit that teaches you how video game systems are made, and encourages you to build and design games and software for it. There are a million great systems out there to develop for, but the XGS is the only one that teaches you how the actual hardware and software itself was created, and puts that power in your hands.
The hardware used in the XGameStation isn't powerful or state of the art. This is a good thing as the book isn't teaching you to write games. It's teaching you how to build a game system from the off the shelf parts. This is something that I've never seen before and definately peaks my interest. Sure, I can go code awesome 3D graphics with pixel shaders using the latest 3D techs from nVidia and ATI and there is about a hundred books now to teach you how to do so. Give me a list of books that teach you how to design and make a simple video game console from scratch.
If you want to see something cool download evas (gentoo users just emerge evas) and run 'evas_test' ('evas_test_old' is pretty good too I suppose).
You have to hand it to Rasterman, he knows how to make delicious eyecandy.
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A friend of mine found out about this awhile back and has been documenting his research into the matter. You can read what he has found here. Basically: "While surfing the web I have found out that USDTV is renting space for 3 of its 11 channels from KULC. While I am no lawyer I think that this is illegal as KULC is licenesed as an educational station."
- AMD Athlon XP 1800
- Some micro-ATX MSI motherboard (I forget the exact model)
- 256 megs of RAM
- Yuan MPG600 tuner/capture card
- GeForce 4 MX440 (for TV out)
- Western Digital 160 Gig hard drive
- Antect Minuet micro-ATX case (it's a beautiful case and fits in perfectly in anyone's home theater)
- Extra case fan and anything else I can't think of off the top of my head
It's runs MythTV on Gentoo Linux and works perfectly (although it took some time to work out the bugs with the Yuan card). If anyone has a spare computer around give Myth a shot. It's a pretty impressive open source project. I've still got some stuff to finish configuring but before long I'll hopefully be playing Chrono Trigger with my XBox controllers after I looked up the weather and decided it was too cold to go out (but only after queueing up the television programs I want to record for the week).But the primary advantage of this system is to understand how the hardware works. That's something you rarely ever see. Even back in the 8-bit days, almost no one really understood machines like the Apple II and Atari 800 on a hardware level. For example, no one ever attempted to redesign Atari's ANTIC chip, because that info just wasn't available. This hasn't changed at all over the last 20 years. FPGAs are cheap and widespread, but not the info about designing graphics hardware.
I'm glad at least someone gets the point of this system ;). As for Andre's books not teach game design, honestly, they don't really have the room to do so. Almost all of them are 1000+ pages. Some of the older books games seem like he spent a bit more time on gameplay but the books aren't really to teach you how to design games. They teach you how to write games. The reason he chooses "lackluster knockoffs" is because 1) they are easy to write and 2) they are easy to understand. His writing style impresses me every time I good to read one of his books. His books are actually enjoyable to read! Do you know how rare this is in for a tech book?! Not only are the books entertaining but they teach well and cover a very large amount of information at the same time.
There are several books focused on game design (my favorite being Game Architecture and Design by Rollings, Morris). If you want to learn hardcore game design, you're going to need a book dedicated to it.
I'm downloading it now to be sure but isn't the DOOM3 Legacy movie the pne where they interview developers and whatnot? The one released last year?
If you want to see something cool download evas (gentoo users just emerge evas) and run 'evas_test' ('evas_test_old' is pretty good too I suppose). You have to hand it to Rasterman, he knows how to make delicious eyecandy.