It would be interesting to see exactly what you can do with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmbjgadImt8 I know this is old tech but it does seem cool how some people are taking the console industry underground.
Here is the console's website. From the looks of the RAM size in the specs section, not for a long time, if ever (unless it's expandable).
Man, I was ready to come in here and go "Oh yeah, well the GBA has 256KB RAM and it got a Doom port." But yeah. You sure won the ass out of that argument.
I believe I know one of my Christmas presents this year now.... The games for this are programmed in C... Sonic Spinball was programmed in C too, right? Does this mean there could be a Sonic Spinball port of some kind?
This seems like sort of a good idea, but every part of it also seems flawed to me. The RAM is laughably low, for one thing, and SNES controllers aren't exactly the easiest to find nowadays. Games look to be somewhere around the 8- to 16-bit range graphically wise, and what was shown in that video ranges from ports of classic games to uninteresting shit, which really makes me question why you'd bother playing them on that. More importantly though, if the point is to have a community develop games in C for everyone to enjoy even on super low hardware... Why not just develop them for computers? I really don't see the point.
Yeah you could have that poor excuse for a SNES China ripoff console. OR you could have this: http://www.hardkernel.com/ You can even order the dev hardware now and expect a commercial console soon enough. Probably within 2010. It outputs 720p over HDMI and delivers 3D graphics. It has a full OS on there to play around with with a fairly hefty "Samsung Cortex-A8 833Mhz ARM V7 SoC S5PC100" processor and fucking 512 MB of DDR2 RAM. Five hundred and fucking twelve megabytes of DDR2. Doesn't the 360 have that too? And the expected price looks to be about $200 - $300 USD (the current dev hardware is a bit higher then $300) which lands it in a pretty reasonable price range for what it delivers. If you want an open source game console to pull support behind, take either this or the Pandora. The only reason I'd suggest this over Pandora is because the Pandora honestly looks like a bulky mess to use with the way the QWERTY keyboard and thumb stick/nubs are arranged, etc. Plus I admit I have a bit of a hardon for the Android platform but besides that fact and the fact that the Pandora is in weird production limbo half the time, Odroid or Pandora are both really good open source choices.
Besides the SNES controller bit (Uh, I can find them in excess!), most of these points. If you're gonna purposely restrict your hardware so it uses "retro-style" stuff, why not just develop for the actual hardware that inspires these kind of things? Why would people who use SNES controllers use this when they could get a SNES Powerpak and play homebrew for, well, their ACTUAL SNES? Speaking of which, most SNES fans are probably bit more enthused And if you just want to make a retro-style game, well, Capcom does it on new-gen systems, and they sell like hotcakes! The only real point to this would be if there's something it could do fairly easily that other retro systems couldn't. Otherwise, the only thrill I can see from this is reliving the days of the Gaming Crash of 1983. And I don't find that very thrilling. As for the 00roid - that has a very -strange- resemblence to a Wonderswan design. o.o;;; If it has "big-haul" 3D Support, why no analog stick/nub? I'm not gonna emulate the N64 using a Touch-screen substitute, MK64DS did that so shoddily that I prefered using digital controls. (Blah blah blah, sticking to PSP Slim, blah blah)
Truthfully I don't know if I expect this thing to emulate an N64. But it does have more then enough buttons to do so considering it has 3 directional pads which are really just 4 buttons. In addition to shoulder buttons it should do fine. I'm just not sure if it has 2 or 4 shoulder buttons. So one D-pad for actual movement on the analog stick, another for the C buttons, and the remaining one for the A, B, Start, and if needed, L trigger. Most games don't take much advantage of the D-pad on the N64, but I can see there just being different button configs for games that require you to hold the N64 controller differently. It wouldn't be all that confusing. I can see PSX emulation working pretty well on it too. But besides that fact it seems to just provide a good platform for original games while giving out an extremely useful hand-held device. It even has a microphone so you could Skype with it! I only wish more devices like this had a camera. But most mobile cameras that get integrated into devices aren't that great so maybe that's a blessing in the end. Fun Fact: I realized now that the processor used in the ODROID is the same processor used in the iPhone 3GS. Talk about direct competition!
I will insist that a D-Pad is not a substitute for an analog stick. Any of the games that used the analog stick well would be a testament to that. (Of course, similarly, an analog stick is not a substitute for an arcade joystick. That's another thing many don't quite get.. )
Well this thing wasn't designed with the idea in mind that you might emulate an N64. You can play 3D games fine with a D-pad as the Playstation demonstrated for quite a quite. Maybe an analog stick is better but it's hardly required.
Good point. Pretty much that's what consoles are now a days anyways. Just PC hardware slapped together with a special bios and custom processors. Only other difference would be when you turn on a PC especially Desktop PCs you will almost always get an ugly black screen that does a memory test among other things before you can even load into the OS. Once the OS loads then you will have a screen which will show a loading bar with a logo. Then comes the OS. A console will basically do the same thing but hide the ugly black terminal screens and loading screens behind animations and flashy things to fool someone into thinking "Whoa cool this loads pretty fast". So in essence you could build a PC and if you can hardcode and do all that complex stuff, you can toss stuff into the bios, animations and stuff hiding the screens and call it a console. So this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ8dBGkswfU is hiding all that ugly stuff that you see when a PC boots up. Makes it look like its a different machine than what it really is, a PC marketed for gaming. Oh yeah and most consoles don't have expandable hardware like PCs have. But sure someone could easily buy a Dreamcast and mess with it and there would be much more that you could probably do with it as opposed to the Uzebox. I was pretty much just showing this to show that the step forward in independent console development is coming closer and closer to the console market becoming like the PC market. This is pretty much just a starting point.
I would much rather do stuff on a MD or perhaps even real SNES than on the Uzebox... RISC like 8 or 16bit microcontrollers are not too programmer friendly in ASM, and C is just waste or resource if you want high performance (which you do on such setup). Half the CPU time probably goes into building the image as I don't see a dedicated microcontroller for video, and I'm sure great deal of power goes into sound stuff too. None the less its a fun thing, just not something I go crazy over :P
It's pretty bad, I've gotta say it. System-on-a-chips don't impress me at all, but I think having a MicroSD slot is a neat idea
