Alternative option: With a few gigs of read-only memory, you could burn a game image onto it, and market a device dedicated to that single game.
You could just about eliminate any and all compatibility and piracy issues, you wouldn't require customers to have an existing console, and conceivably you could still profitably sell the game at $50.
It wouldn't be very environmentally friendly (you're forcing players to buy a new console for every game) but it could make economic sense.
The devices are certainly small enough to stack behind your TV; you just need a decent KVM switch designed to work with these devices.
I suppose you are right, if the game were facebook and you could buy a $50 dongle that has facebook and netflix people would probably only run that game.
I don't think the consoles would take a dent from something like this. If a game market evolved from this it would likely be niche and be similar to some of the smaller/toy-ish options you can buy already. I just can't see developers jumping ship from the big consoles (especially the way they now foster indie games) and making games for this lackluster (in terms of gaming) albeit cool device. If there was a way to make the device portable/cheap (some sort of small usb monitor)--that's a different story.
I need to convince pg that an open source Dwarf Fortress implementation is worth funding. Either that, or figure out how to build a cryptocurrency around it so that all of those Bitcoin miners can help simulate my fortress when its deflationary period starts.
OK, but you could do iPad-style games. All you need is a cool input device. I'm thinking a webcam, and gloves with a specific bandwidth of color. Though the image processing might be too much.
Maybe for the input device just attach it to a big multitouch screen. Toss in a battery, wifi (maybe 3G?), ~32GB of flash memory. Then people could use one portable device and developers could write games and publish them to a central store for only ~1-5USD a piece.
"Substantially better than PS2, [possibly] about the same as XBox 1" is Eben Upton, the founders description of 3d performance. Theres an interesting interview on this here
My point wasn't that this device would defeat them, but that it's possible to make computers that are this ridiculously cheap. Add a little more horsepower you've got a serious competitor... And it should still be pretty cheap.
I was wondering when this might come to fruition. Enthusiasts are often willing to put up with a tremendous amount of inconvienience. I remind folks of this that the Altair 8800 (and IMSAI) were, in their base models, something you toggled in your machine code into directly. PDP-8's and PDP-11's had core but if you had corrupted memory you had to toggle in the boot loader to get them restarted.
On a whim I wrote a quick 'virtual machine' (which is to say an emulator) for the PDP-11 on an Arduino 328. It runs faster than a 'real' PDP-11/40 (on which it was modelled).
My thought was that you could pull a copy of 2.9BSD or V6 UNIX from the PUPS archive and build an equivalent of the same system Dennis and Ken developed C on pretty easily. Add a terminal and you're good to go. However, I recognize that if you're going to the trouble to do it you should really take advantage of modern gear.
I'm glad to see that these guys are taking that approach, Linux might be a bit heavyweight (you could do a much simpler and cheaper DOS like OS) but it does have the advantage of lots of available software.
Standard modern distros are fairly heavy, agreed. But a custom distro can be super-lightweight and still include most features you'd expect from a desktop OS. In 2003 I was running desktop redhat on an old IBM thinkpad with just 32MB of RAM. So 128 should be plenty!
One of the more interesting questions (and the Rasberry Pi creator is investing in) is 'learning about computers.' Which I truly support. (Local high school computer class was about how to use Microsoft Office, bleh!) Its one of the reasons have felt that Arduino's and their spawn are doing a great service of getting people interested in understanding what the computer is doing at a more complex level, before they open up their first kernel file and gaze upon the complexity therein.
There is a gear on the lower left that will give you the desktop version, but I must say this kind of behaviour by web publishers putting tablets into such a weird format is annoying.
This is cheaper than the Arduino Uno from Sparkfun. Arduinos are running code in a loop -- this brings the benefits of an operating system to the world of hobbyist projects. I think it's a game changer if they can deliver on it.
Now THIS is a modern Commodore 64. Really, really, really awesome. It's exactly what I've been hoping for for a while... USB in/out, HDMI out, and all in an unbelievably cheap package.
It also has a video output, making it a computer that can be used directly (especially the $35 version with ethernet and 2x USB). The "*plug" computers are more geared to non-interactive use (file sharing / backup / etc).
I'd definitely buy a couple, just to use them for streaming video around the house. Plug one into the screen, use a WiFi dongle or the 10/100 port and with a bit of code you have a streaming video receiver.
Its only $8.40, it has an external antenna, and a ralink chipset that I've had much success using on all kinds of linux distros. (Its internal antenna cousin is less than $8)
I'm so excited about this. I want to get one for my 8-year-old nephew -- does anyone know of any good simple tutorials / manuals for linux for somebody just starting to program?
I'd love if this thing could be used as a boot jump drive in a fully featured computer as well. My dream scenario is having my work house computer with my file server, music and video streamer with a netbook thin client and a portable way to securely connect to it from anywhere. If I can connect to any monitor and keyboard and be remoted to my machine, or even better, boot into a thin client on a fully fledged computer and have my environment with me all the time... that'd be great.
I'm basically all of the way there, if I could only get an NX client built for my Cr-48. I think that things like this Raspberry Pi and Motorola's smartphone-dock-powered-netbook are going to be rather big soon.
Is it just me, or does that sound like it might make a decent gaming machine, if you don't get too greedy about graphics?
If that's the case, the consoles are in trouble!