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Comments: 84 +- Games: Ben Heck's PS3 Slim Laptop on Friday October 02, @04:18AM
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We've occasionally discussed Ben Heckendorn's various console modifications, and he's now come out with a new one: a laptop version of the PS3 Slim. It has volume control buttons for the built-in speakers, and plenty of vents for cooling. The display is a 17" widescreen panel, and the Slim's hardware doesn't fill that much space in the case, so there's a neat little compartment for the power cord. Ben's blog post shows details of the laptop's construction.
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Games: XBox 360 Laptop Mod Created 35 comments
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Small briefcase is more like it (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yeah, it's bulky, and it lacks a keyboard, and seemingly a battery, so it's no wonder there's space to randomly throw the cable in. Still nice, but not really an improvement to throwing a PS3 in a bag and plugging it in at your destination.
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Why? Most homes would have a larger screen available, with better placement for viewing than a laptop would provide. Most offices or other commercial places/organisations wouldn't let you plug in a console, pull out a controller and start gaming, even if the console did have a laptop format. Don't get me wrong, it's a neat project, but I'm just saying it's not very practical.
Re:Small briefcase is more like it (Score:4, Informative)
Why? Most homes would have a larger screen available, with better placement for viewing than a laptop would provide. Most offices or other commercial places/organisations wouldn't let you plug in a console, pull out a controller and start gaming, even if the console did have a laptop format. Don't get me wrong, it's a neat project, but I'm just saying it's not very practical.
Actually, most places will let you plug in. When traveling, I almost never ran my notebook off the battery. The airport, coffee shops or just about any other place where I could actually sit down and use my notebook would have a plug available for me to access. I see this as being no different.
And, sure, while nearly all homes will have a bigger screen, they may not have a better screen. Many homes still have old, non-hi-def CRT TV's plugged into their cable boxes, or have the cable plugged directly to the TV's.
Finally, I don't think practicality was the point. Sure, it's a nice feature, but this guy made this simply because he could. That was the whole point.
Parent
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Perhaps it is more of a "portable" in the sense of the old Osbornes and Kaypros: sure, it weighed 20 pounds, but it had a handle on the back, therefore it was portable!
And yeah, it's interesting. I certainly don't have those kinds of modding skills. My hat goes off to the guy.
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We called those luggables back in the days.
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I remember that -- but the marketing called them portable.
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Is he selling these on eBay afterward? (Score:2)
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"Good money"? Good money is $100,000 a year net before tax. Call it 230 working days in a year, that's $434 clear profit each and every day. Just so we're clear, that's $434 in added value on top of the original hardware costs. Remember to account for shipping, tools and consumables, marketing, and warranty work - and if he doesn't offer any warranty, that eats into the perceived value.
Once the buzz dies down, do you reckon he can add $434 of value every day?
Or did you have another definition of "go
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However, while the market might be there, I suspect that, once tapped, he couldn't hold out for long. 1 guy, using more or less standard home modding methods(albeit applied with competence substantially above average), doing b
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However, while the market might be there, I suspect that, once tapped, he couldn't hold out for long. 1 guy, using more or less standard home modding methods(albeit applied with competence substantially above average), doing bespoke pieces would have a hard time competing with a smallish pro outfit doing larger runs at somewhat lower prices, with the benefit of actual machine tools, and parts you can only (cheaply) buy in lots of 100, and possibly rework kit above the level of a soldering iron and strong nerves.
Which is why, for it to work, that one guy has to set up his own small pro outfit, improve his skills and equipment to the point where he can churn them out fast and sell them relatively cheaply. Or glue diamonds all over the thing and flog it to people with more money than sense.
Suddenly setting up as a business with a view to making a good income looks rather expensive.
Even then, I can think of two big risks which would basically put him out of business more or less immediately:
1. Sony decide they don't
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Re:Is he selling these on eBay afterward? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would agree with you that it would be difficult to make good money on this as a career move, but he could possibly make a decent amount of extra income (on top of his day job) through doing custom jobs. He would have to charge above the odds to make each individual job it worth his while, but as he would be serving a small niche this wouldn't be unreasonable.
Of course he may be of the attitude that he does not want to take money for this, as it is his hobby and he might not want his hobby to become a chore (even if it is a chore that earns him money).
Parent
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Good money is $100,000 a year net before tax
really? so all those people earning less than that but who are their own boss, doing something they love are just poor chumps? not everyone wants to work a job they pretty much hate so that they can write checks at the end of the month for shit they don't need.
Re:Is he selling these on eBay afterward? (Score:5, Informative)
From your link:
Frederick Brown 'had allegedly built up a thriving business selling counterfeit games and installing mod chips, having advertised his services on Craigslist and other web sites. He allegedly sold pirated games from his Vista, CA residence as well, including both discs and hard drives preloaded with games that he would install into customers' Xboxes and Xbox 360s.
That's absolutely nothing like what is being done in the article. This guy is modding the hardware to make the ps3 portable, the guy in your link was putting mod chips in the 360's so people could play pirated games, which he also sold. Just because the word "mod" is used in both stories doesn't make them similar.
Parent
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Yeah... that sounds like a great idea... http://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/06/26/1620240/ESA-Initiates-Police-Raid-Against-Console-Modder?art_pos=2 [slashdot.org] Ha.
Which is modder in the sense of cracking the copy protection.
Not modder as in taking the thing apart and putting it in a new case.
What earthly reason would Sony or anybody else have to object to someone voiding their warranty and making a one off device that can only reflect well on them? IF it breaks, not Sony's problem. If someone sees it, they are impressed by the workmanship. Still a Sony, still the guy's personal property.
Hardware companies have been known to sponsor case modders to make promotional pi
Slashdotted (Score:2)
Coral cached version [nyud.net]
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Ok. This is a serious question: Has anyone, ever, been able to browse the "coral cached" version of a site that's been slashdoteed?
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The link was working for me when I posted it. I still have the images in my browser cache, I guess.
Re:Slashdotted (Score:4, Funny)
that's ok... just get the cache of the cache: benheck.com.nyud.net.nyud.net:8090/10-01-2009/ps3-slim-laptop
Parent
is it discreet enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it could be sold with a couple of Lenovo|Mac stickers to bring to some of those very engaging meetings, presentations, etc...
I.-
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Because real laptops cannot possibly run games.
I must be getting old.
Sony? Apple? MS/Dell? (Score:2)
Maybe it could be sold with a couple of Lenovo|Mac stickers to bring to some of those very engaging meetings, presentations, etc...
I wonder why Sony doesn't do this, only packaged better? (Internal politics is usually the answer. Dilbert: "Before we defeat our competitors, we first have to defeat the other departments.") If they stick to legacy consoles, they can probably do a lot of this in emulation, with the emulator code running from a ROM.
Sony could probably boost their share of laptop sales by making their machines capable of playing legacy console games. In addition to bored meeting attendees, there are also game collectors
unique stuff (Score:2)
Wow. He essentially made a (bit large) portable Playstation. Why didn't Sony think of that?
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Two thumbs up (Score:3, Funny)
Will Ben Ever Learn? (Score:5, Informative)
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Will Slashdot ever learn? Why not coralize these links before posting the article? Why not refuse articles which link to toy webservers which don't coralize, or have the editors coralize such links? Oh wait, that would be suspiciously like editing.
More on topic, re: cough-positioning, FTFA: I like to make a grumbly, rumbly noise in the back of my throat like a mostly-contented bear. This makes refreshing visual items wiggle around (only at lower refreshes though! and more on CRTs than LCDs anyway) especiall
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The point is well-taken, but it would be enough to load the site via coral before slashdotting it (i.e. posting it to the front page) so that coral would have it cached before someone needs to go load it from said cache.
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The Coral Cache is working pretty well for me: http://benheck.com.nyud.net/10-01-2009/ps3-slim-laptop [nyud.net]
And the youtube videos are certainly holding up just fine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nLEVnM9Cas [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AM6NGbPQ-k [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKia22tulUg [youtube.com]
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Because it doesn't make sense to buy the server/bandwidth just for the few occasions when he's slashdotted and has a traffic spike?
There are ways to accommodate that. If he is using a "professional" hosting company, many of them allow for bandwidth scaling to meet expected changes in demand. If he is running his own webserver, he would be wise to set it up more intelligently to handle the traffic loads.
Of course, if the answer is the latter rather than the former, his poor little webserver should be a useless pile of rubble now; perhaps he will replace it with a more robust system.
Though unlike many other people whose sites are
Slashdotted (Score:2)
Does anybody have an alternative link?
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Someone posted one four hours ago. But I guess reading the comments and reading the article are sort of mutually exclusive. :)
Yeah, but.. (Score:2)
Does it run Linux? Oh...
In case you're wondering how to get it... (Score:2, Informative)
But Does It Run Linux? (Score:2, Insightful)
The original ("fat") PS3s all included an option for the PS3 hypervisor to host an "OtherOS", like Linux, instead of booting into the GameOS. PS3 Linux was a PPC distro running on the Cell's 2.4GHz PPC CPU core, with access to the bus, 6 of 7 working DSPs and other devices (but not the RSX GPU) through drivers and filesystem mapping APIs. I could run Ubuntu on the PS3, install a driver and use mplayer to watch full HD movies from the hard drive or streaming from a network fileserver. I could program the Cel
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It's a rhetorical question. The point is that it's not a laptop.
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As another poster mentioned, it's a 60GB classic PS3, which has hardware PS2 support and sure as hell runs Linux.
So yes, it CAN be a laptop.
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So it's not a PS3 Slim then. Hard to tell that when the original article is slashdotted, and the story says it's a Slim.
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The article loaded just fine for me just this moment. I don't see why everybody is having issues accessing it directly.
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The thing is built upon a PS3 Slim. Linux is not an option.
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I'm sure that with enough work, Linux could be done on the PS3 Slim, though.
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