A Trivial Topic...(Maybe)...But What About An Open Videogame Console?

[RKCole]

Hello, everyone.

I was just thinking...We have all of these video game consoles available in the market which cost quite a bit of money.

I know this is probably a trivial question, but wouldn't it be kind of neat if an Open Videogame console was developed?

Just something I wanted to see some opinions about. I know it's kind of funny to think of a "blind" guy playing videogames...but it's something which I like to do with what little sight I have. :) Not much of a first-person shooter type, but I love RPGs.

So...any thoughts...?

[3rdalbum]

They have actually been developed. The reason why you haven't heard of them is because they flopped. Console manufacturers dont' make money from the sales of the consoles; they make their money from licensing the development kits to game developing companies.

If you've got an open console, then anyone can develop for free. That means that the console manufacturer doesn't make any money, and no game developer takes the manufacturer seriously; so in the end nothing gets developed.

The GP2X is a good example. It's been around since 2005 but there are only two commercial games for it.

[MonkeyBoy]

Two consoles I have which arguably fill that role are the Sega Dreamcast and the Tapwave Zodiac. Whilst they are not "Open" as such, they are both quite simple to hack and develop for which means that there is a huge quantity of free, open source, and homebrew stuff for them.

The Dreamcast hasn't been supported by businesses for years but there are still some hardcore open source development teams out there. I believe a new and improved DC linux is under development even now.

The Zodiac runs PalmOS 5.2 so, whilst it also has very little commercial support, can run most of the PalmOS apps you find on the web. There are loads of smart little games coming out all the time and it has quite a good set of emulators for up to 16 bit consoles.

A mate has a GPX2 and I am inclined to agree with 3rdalbum that it is a great piece of tech but lack of support renders it not very useful.