Building Consoles For Fun

tierra writes "Indiviuals writing their own games is one thing, but try building your own console. Russ Christensen, and his team put together in class, dive into the fun of using an old Nintendo system to house their customized XSA-50 Board. They also uses a XSA Extender to hook their personal console up to a monitor instead of a TV. They programmed Tetris and Space Invaders for their console using a system they call CASM."

At $150?

[yerricde]

take the little Cappuciono PC and fill it with top notch hardware

But will you be able to get it down to $150 to compete with the Nintendo GameCube?

Re:At $150?

[MisterFancypants]

But will you be able to get it down to $150 to compete with the Nintendo GameCube?

Even if you could get it below $100 it would never compete with the GameCube unless it had a similar sized/similar quality game library. In other words, not going to happen. Not to mention a huge marketing push.

A few people, including the Linux-Indrema team, have had thoughts such as this before. Neat idea from a tech-head view, but business-wise its nothing but a disaster waiting to happen.

Re:TETRIS SUES YOU

[Zapateria]

In the United States of America, The Tetris Company [everything2.com] will sue you if your game's name is too similar to "Tetris".

And they don't sue all of the people who make and sell cheap clones of it and call it "Wibble" or something?

Strange.

Too Much Code

[nns6561]

Anybody else surprised by the fact that it took 9000 lines of code. Having done similar projects in VHDL, it should take less than 1000. Looking at their code, I understand why. They did not use any of the more complex VHDL features. No generics or loops. The entire project was just poorly thought through.

Cool idea though.

Re:Systems Engineer

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you on crack? These steps don't add up to anything that makes sense. You suggest "installing" drivers unique to random proprietary software, then designing a filesystem (why?), then somehow magically "configuring" the system so that it can play XBox games (?!), and then some trivial disk imaging described over four steps. Right.