Arc wrote:
Consider that, if the free software game community grows, with say 20 "commercial quality" games and a few hundred smaller ones, the system beats the mainstream systems' price after just a few games.
To reduce cost (about $80) the CD drive could be an add-on option, plugging onto the bottom of the unit, leaving the unit smaller and under $300. Plus, then a harddrive add-on could be produced as well. :-)
And as was suggested earlier in the thread, the circuit, case, etc could be under the GPL just like the GumStix, with the BIOS being GPL'ed, etc. allowing multiple manufacturers to produce these units.
I think the market is ready for a portable unit you can play at home, and which *CAN* but doesn't nessesarily have to be your portable music player too, which can run any number of different games, not just those which are licensed through a central authority.
We've designed several systems like this in the past that were either handheld, STB, aerospace or automotive/telematics based on mips, arm, SH and x86.
Software support has always been the issue. It used to be a problem getting Linux to support all the multimedia. Now multimedia on Linux is working quite well.
You'll still need to get the interest of the game developers. Can they be made happy selling $5-$10 games if they need to invest millions in development to make the games exciting enough for players to buy?
-Bari