Funding Global Domination Mk II "The Console"

Arigead captain.deadly at gmail.com
Mon Dec 8 13:23:06 CET 2008


Sorry about this but I had another thought on this subject after the 
T-Shirt thread. This one might be a bit less "easy" ;-)

Hats off to OM for producing Open Hardware for programmers to create 
their ideas on. It's has been a noble effort and I hope it continues. I 
was thinking that the choice of Open Platform (Mobile Phone) was perhaps 
one of the most difficult choices that they could have made as very 
little Open software existed out there when they started. There are a 
lot of imaginative people in the community and in the fullness of time 
this is going to be brilliant.

I was thinking that one possible area where an open platform is needed 
is The Console. I've heard of a lot of people getting the original 
Microsoft xBox to hack it so that they can run unsigned code in the box. 
They then run XBMC in it. It seems such a shame that you have to buy a 
M$ games console to run an open source Media Centre.

Along the same lines a few years ago I spent months trying get MythTV 
running in an old Desktop to enable me to record TV. What can I say I 
never quite made it. Now to my knowledge the original xBox was not too 
far removed from a regular PC in nice plastics. It had TV out instead of 
a regular monitor connection. That is perhaps an an area of difficulty 
as perhaps different countries run different TV protocols.

Anyhow some day I'd like to put together some hardware that could run 
MythTV, XBMC maybe have a huge Terabyte of storage and act as a file 
server as well. Maybe it could run Linux games as well and various 
emulators. Yes what Linux games ;-)

So you'd have a PC Motherboard, TV out don't know what standard. Do all 
modern TV's take the same digital connection all over the world? Then 
you'll have a TV in signal for recording TV. Again I've no idea if that 
would mean different hardware all over the world. Ethernet, USB, Remote 
control. Nice plastics.

A few companies have toyed with the idea of producing Open Console but 
to my knowledge nobody has ever really done it well. Yes there are 
various communities out there and that if anything shows that there has 
always been this "need".

The last thing I'd want is for OM to dilute their effort on the FR but 
maybe someday they could become the name in OpenHardware. "OpenMoko 
Purveyors of OpenHardware since the start of the new millennium ;-)"
Maybe I should join the Open Game Console Consortium and get some 
hardware specs and put my own console together that might take some time 
so if OM beat me to it I'll certainly buy their kit again.

Later






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