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Comment by msie | Hacker News Reader

I hope they succeed because I hate the closed systems of the big three. I would love to develop/ship some software without having to jump through the many hoops that the big three put up. That said I am skeptical that they will build a machine that I would fall in love with. There are so many problems with what's listed:

- not enough RAM

- not enough secondary storage

- no DVD/Blu Ray drive

- powerful enough video card?

- controller button layout not suitable for colour-blind people

Add those items and bump up the price $100 and I'm in. I want this to succeed and they don't have many chances to get it right.

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The RAM argument amuses me since it has twice the RAM of the xbox360 and the PS3. And a dedicated console has different RAM requirements than a generic OS box. Also games have forever been making due with what RAM is available.

The DVD/blueray player IMHO misses the point. It's an internet download game console. It's now an all-in-one media box, it's one (cheap!) thing. Get a separate blueray/dvd player if you need (cheap too)

Ok I too wonder a bit about the storage but that mostly irrelevant if they have an SD card slot

Powerful enough video card? Well, it's playing android games and the tegra is the best android video card out there right now. I'm not sure you can just drop an off the shelf nvidia/ati card into and android/ARM setup and have it go with out some expensive driver development somewhere. The tegra already works, is ready to go, and gives the current best performance of the market and games they are targeting.

Controller: I'm pretty sure at over half a year out they can tweak that. And usually as with every other console there's a decent market in 3rd party controllers.

I think the $100 price point is one of it's best features and doubling it would be terrible.

Good points there. Will people, not on Kickstarter, buy it if it can't play movies off Netflix? They will only have the budget for one console. I suspect that people will want to run it as their media player and other things, so more RAM the better (plus it will make developers happy!). This is the trajectory of the XBox 360 and the PS3 (as media players). I want this console to disrupt the current market so it has to match those machines. What's also important is a wired network port. Ok, I can forgive it if it doesn't have a DVD player but add several USB ports please! I don't want this console to be a curiosity shelved one month after purchase.

To add to the RAM/storage thing, the fact that it's always on the internet is a big deal. Media can be streamed from central servers on-demand, so cut-scenes and things like area-specific textures are less of a big deal.

My biggest worry is the focus on the television. Do you remember the head-mounted display John Carmack was showing around E3? The guy who made it gave an update [1] on the project a few days ago, saying

  1) I am talking to Valve.
  2) I am talking to id/Zenimax/Bethesda
  3) I am talking to Epic
  4) I am talking to Crytek
  5) I am talking to Unity
  6) I am talking to several other development companies

  The extent of their relationships with Oculus varies, but
  I can promise at least a few partnerships... I am working
  with hardware engineers...

  Imagine an HMD with a massive field of view and more
  pixels than 1080p per eye, wireless PC link, built in
  absolute head and hand/weapon/wand positioning, and native
  integration with some (if not all) of the major game
  engines, all for less than $1,000 USD. That can happen in
  2013!

I think next-gen "serious" gaming will move in that direction (by all accounts the immersion is stunning), and I think casual gaming will never move away from mixed-use devices like tablets.

1: http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=138&t=14777&...

While the head-mounted display is very interesting, it does not make sense for a product like this to target a platform that has not yet been released when gaming on the TV will be around for at least 5+ years. Maybe a future version could target a head-mounted display.

I completely agree on the specs; a Tegra3-based platform has more than enough grunt to deliver a "game console" experience for the sort of indie and free-to-play games this platform will attract.

The only thing i'm concerned about is whether they can get even the hardware they've committed to in a $99 budget. Consider that this has the same hardware as the HTC one X, but without the screen, battery, and 3G connectivity. So they have to not only get the Tegra3 for $99, but also the case and power supply. Even if they manage to get those parts down to $99, they still have to add the controller, which will need it's own processor/controller to track and send the inputs over bluetooth to the console. Not to mention the cost of the controller hardware itself, particularly the touchpad.

The other thing that worries me is the Android base. Is the OS still going to lock code to using the Dalvik/Java-based API? If so then I have no hope of creating any games for the platform in my favourite language, Go. What about native-development, new experimental native game engines or languages? Hopefully they'll open the platform up a bit in this respect and allow some native development through a C API or something.

I definitely hope they pull through and deliver on this project, although I can imagine it not making it's way down to the southern hemisphere very quickly, if at all.

Another way to look at it is that it's the same hardware as the Nexus 7 minus the screen, battery, camera, etc.

Android has supported C (and Mono and Unity) for about 18 months, so those complaints are obsolete.

It's supposed to be an open hackable plateform so you can root it easily and even hack the hardware. So that mean you can add RAM, a more powerful video card, use your own controller. Even if you're not a hacker, it comes with a USB port so you can plug-in your usb stick or your 1Tb external hard drive if you need a secondary storage. Also, regular people don't need all that extra stuff or know they exist.

Adding more ram isn't going to help the 99.999% of games with target the launch hardware.

There has to be enough RAM to future-proof it for the next 5 years. That's the lifetime of a console before a new version comes out. I don't want them to be releasing newer consoles each year with more RAM and capabilities, resulting in a fragmented software market.

Why would the lifetime of a $99 console be 5 years? At that price, they could release new ones faster. Also, as it will run on Android, games from previous generations will run on the new one.

It sort of defeats the point of the console if it has to be hacked to add more RAM to make it usable. Might as well buy a PC. I want the console base system to be powerful enough to make developers happy to develop on it and enable a variety of apps that can be developed.

I never said you had to add more RAM to make it usable. This will run Android games so 1G of RAM is more than enough as you'll only run one game at a time. But if you want more RAM, it's possible. And as already mentioned, it comes with twice more RAM than the xbox and ps3.

My concern is how future-proof will the device be. Will the base platform be powerful enough to support apps that developers will want to develop for it? You can't tell people to hack their console just to run your protein-folding program. I want this console to disrupt the market. People are itching to develop for a popular console. Developers, developers, developers!

You're not going to be adding a new video card to a Tegra 3 SOC.

You could replace the SOC too for another arm.

System-on-a-chip, so no, you can't. It's not a standardized thing were you just drop in another socket and mb-compatible x86 CPU.

It's not very clear what part of the system will be open source but if the whole OS and their layer on top are, you could re-install it on anything and replace any part of the hardware.

That assumes standardization of the ARM platform that mostly doesn't exist.

What makes you say there isn't enough RAM? Are you saying it from a "future-proof" point of view? You're only going to run one game at a time, and I don't think Android games can even use more than 50 MB of RAM or something (just like they can't on iOS). The graphics are good enough for this price. We're talking indie games here, not AAA games.

There's never enough RAM. :-) I do hope that it can run some AAA games because I want it to disrupt the market that the big 3 dominate.

But disrupting a market completely doesn't happen from the first generations. It took even Apple a few generations to bring down Nokia and RIM, the former leaders of the smartphone market. So I wouldn't worry about this right now.

Plus, there's this trend where people are starting to care less and less about graphics and more about gameplay. That's how disruptions happen. They change the "rules of the game". They don't try to beat the old leaders with the same tricks (graphics performance), but with different ones (better gameplay, more games from indies, free to play, cheaper console etc).

If you think this console needs to be able to "compete" with PS4 and Xbox 360, you're looking at this in a very wrong way. Most of the people that will buy OUYA probably won't even be former Xbox/PS3 customers.

I remember when the iPhone came out, 80% of the people buying them were not "smartphone buyers". They were dumbphone buyers. It took a few years before the people who swore by their Symbian and Blackberry "smartphones" (which had "many more features") started getting interested in iPhones and Android phones.

>What makes you say there isn't enough RAM? Are you saying it from a "future-proof" point of view? You're only going to run one game at a time, and I don't think Android games can even use more than 50 MB of RAM or something (just like they can't on iOS).

Agree in general but with one giant exception... Minecraft.

The Pocket and Xbox versions of Minecraft have tiny little maps due to memory limitations.

If adding more memory did one thing -- gave them an console Minecraft clearly superior to the Xbox version -- that's worth it. They'll sell a ton of them. They knew what they were doing when the one game they namedropped in their video Minecraft.

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