making hardware

I'd like to make a console prototype for a new nintendo system that I wish to send to nintendo of japan

I second the Xgamestation thing. It is like those old 1001 project boards you could buy to do electronics with,
But it is focused on being a game console.

But if you want to go from scratch, look into FPGA's, embeded systems programming, and microcontrollers. That should give you
some sort of start. But remember that you probably can't make anything that powerful with any of these programmable tools
and you will need better hardware.

Since most game console hardware is either custom fabricated, or a standard off the shelf computer part you aren't going
to make anything "next gen" without manufacturer support for the fabrication. You can easily make a X-Box clone, sine the
X-Box was prety much a off the shelf computer with a custom OS. And a tinker toy console is definatly not out of reach
expecially with tools like xgamestation.

Quote:

Original post by kernel n bytes I'd like to make a console prototype for a new nintendo system that I wish to send to nintendo of japan

That's pretty unlikely to happen; most of the gear in modern consoles is custom-developed by large graphics chipset and CPU manufacturers.

However, you can easily build a simple 8-bit console to get started; I've seen some done with the PIC such as this device, and several done with FPGA (FPGA Games is very popular for this, apparently).

It's important to pace yourself; hardware development is very difficult.

Quote:

Original post by Ravuya Quote: Original post by kernel n bytes I'd like to make a console prototype for a new nintendo system that I wish to send to nintendo of japan That's pretty unlikely to happen; most of the gear in modern consoles is custom-developed by large graphics chipset and CPU manufacturers. However, you can easily build a simple 8-bit console to get started; I've seen some done with the PIC such as this device, and several done with FPGA (FPGA Games is very popular for this, apparently). It's important to pace yourself; hardware development is very difficult.

wow! the 16f84, i used this in high school. didnt think it was powerful enough for simple games

Well, if you're really interested, here's a few other homebrew game consoles from my bookmarks:
Acorn in FPGA
Pyrofer's accelerometer-controlled console

I'm sure there's more, but I can't find many right now. There's also the Hydra, which is LaMothe's new multicore console based around the Parallax Propeller.