Anyone working with XGameStation?

I don't think it was ever meant as a platform to make commercial games. It's a learning tool more than anything else.

shmoove

I don't think there is any market for games since it is meant to be a 'make it yourself' kind of platform and I'd bet that at $200 there are very very few of them out there since you could just get a real console and make games for it instead.

Yeah the deeper I've gone into the site, the more I've come to the same conclusion that it's designed more as a learning tool than an actual platform for pursuing commercial titles.

thanks everyone!

Well, I guess Andre's goal was to explain how a console is BUILT, not how to write console games, that's what makes it a unique product that is not in competition with say, a chipped XBOX...

One of my "ex-"lead programmer worked on the console and provided a few demos for it, and from what he told me, most hobbyists won't be able to do much stuff with the console as it was when he developped for it, he had a hard time making everything fit in memory for his tetris demo (he even had to remove a column to have everything fit if I recall correctly) and I think he had problems to get all the assets in memory for his pac man clone or something...

Anyway, hope this helps

The Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of memory and I hope that the XGameStation has a little more. Pacman should be possible (in fact there are games called Rem-Pac and Rem-Tetris on the site).

But this is part of the "fun" of this thing I think. You have to do some old-skool style programming from back when resources weren't so plentiful.

shmoove

Actually, "Rem" (Remi Veilleux) was my lead programmer at Microids :)

Well, well, what do you know.... [grin]
So that would make Rem-Tetris the one with the missing line, right?

shmoove

Yep, if I recall correctly he had to remove either a row or a column to make everything fit in memory. I'm seeing him Thursday night, if y've got specific questions I could still ask him!

Cheers

Eric

BTW, if you're looking into the XGameStation, I might suggest waiting for the full edition (renamed "XGameStation MEGA" so that people would actually buy the "XGameStation Micro"). The Micro architecture uses a CPU that is really not made for this sort of thing; it's designed for embedded special-purpose applications, so its code is loaded into a segregated flash ROM instead of main memory, and code size is strictly limited. IMHO, it's more of a "toy" than anything else, and does not accurately reflect the sorts of considerations involved in developing for a modern console.