Pandora's Rival: Acer


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icurafu

The Hallucinogenic Elf
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http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2008/03/acer_pla..._console-2.html

http://www.gamestar.de/news/hardware/vermi...78487/acer.html

QUOTE
"Well, according to our German pals at GameStar, James Wong was said to take issue with the fact that the current state of the console market relies solely upon closed and proprietary systems. He sees this as an opportunity for Acer to get in on some gaming fun, and they plan to do this by creating a console utilizing PC technology, which will be, wait for it, a completely open platform. Such a preposterous claim must be taken with a large, Everest sized mountain of salt, but it is interesting nonetheless. For now, we know nothing more, but watch this space for more information. --Engadget"


Can anyone translate the Gamestar article?
 
Niiiiiiceeeee !!!!!! haha, More Competition for the others, That must suck, I wonder when it gets released if it does?
 
Meh...

IMO one of Pandora's main appeals is the dev team - they're as much hobbyists and gamers as their audience. I think that means a lot in terms of doing things right.

I don't know if Acer (or any typical notebook company) would have the proper perspective to do things right.

But in the end, competition is always good for the end users. So welcome Acer, assuming they actually go beyond words.
 
It doesn't sound like a handheld so it probably shouldn't be considered a rival , they can easily co-exist. I think it's awesome people are at least trying to breakaway from the closed-commercial point of view and do more open stuff like this.
 
I think it goes something like this:

Acer plans to enter the games console market.
They talk about current consoles being closed and proprietary systems.
Acer aims for open standards instead.
This could mean that game developers don't pay for the publication of there games.

More or less. Basically.

:D
 
My last acer notebook had native USB hosts burned after I played it outside when winter was (my fault)

But with their hardware experience, their console will rule over the open-source-console-market
 
"Der taiwanesische Notebookhersteller Acer plant, in den Spielekonsolen-Markt einzusteigen. Dies gab der Senior Vice President, James T. Wong, auf einer Pressekonferenz bekannt. Die meisten aktuellen Konsolen seien geschlossene und proprietäre Systeme, die auf PC-Technik basiernde "game machine" von Acer soll dagegen auf offene Standards setzen. Dies könnte bedeuten, dass Spieleentwickler keine Linzenzgebühren für die Veröffentlichung von Spielen auf diesem System zahlen müssten."

"The taiwanese notebook producer Acer plans to enter the games console market. This was made public by the Senior Vice President James T.Wong at a press conference. Unlike most of the current consoles that are closed and proprietary systems, Acer's "game maschine" will be based on PC technology and support open standards. This could mean that game developpers don't need to pay licence fees to publish games on for that system."

This should be about it. Squidge's got the important things anyway. I guess it's important to remark that Wong did not mention a handheld console explicitly, but consoles in general.
 
Ah, so it's not a handheld...

Sounds like this is just gonna be a cheap PC stuffed inside a console-looking case. Not sure how successful that would be, since any PC can already do what it's going to do.
 
Prophet said:
Meh...

IMO one of Pandora's main appeals is the dev team - they're as much hobbyists and gamers as their audience. I think that means a lot in terms of doing things right.

I don't know if Acer (or any typical notebook company) would have the proper perspective to do things right.

But in the end, competition is always good for the end users. So welcome Acer, assuming they actually go beyond words.
Click to expand...
Going by the GP2X, the dev team and openness won't come into it - it'll just depend on what it can emulate :(
 
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I wonder, where ACER had the Idea for this. Spys in our Community? :D
I hope they don't build a Open-Source Handheld. Better they keep the Idea just for big Consoles. ^^" So Nintendo, MS and Sony have to deal with the new "rival"
 
Would it even matter if it was a handheld? From what I've read in this forum, the ARM9 processor seems to be the way to go for the next couple of years for handhelds in pandoras range (excluding those UMPCs that cost easily more than 1000$). So software built for the "game machine" should be relatively easy to port, right?
 
Judging by their amount of experience in the game console arena I'm not going to get my hopes up real high and expect the typical, "every problem looks like a nail", effect meaning it'll be just another pc and not a real great one at that. An open pc, real groundbreaking there.
 
onisac said:
Would it even matter if it was a handheld? From what I've read in this forum, the ARM9 processor seems to be the way to go for the next couple of years for handhelds in pandoras range (excluding those UMPCs that cost easily more than 1000$). So software built for the "game machine" should be relatively easy to port, right?
Click to expand...
Well, the Pandora doesn't use an ARM9, so what makes you think that rivals will?
 
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I would welcome it with open arms... If it had the right specs and such. I think an open console would compliment the Pandora quite nicely.

I seem to remember around the 2000 time frame, the Indrema(Sp?) console was going to rock our socks.. I believe it was Linux based and based on PC hardware. It never came out due to the amount of $$$ it cost to produce. It would be nice to see a brand name like Acer build it since they have the manufacturing capabilities to make it happen.
 
Acer Germany has corrected the story, at least the company DON'T plan a Video Game Console. The report from the source "Betanews.com" was incorrect.

So I think this Theme is over. :D
 
Ah well, the new Asus Desktop PC and Asus TV/LCD running Linux are still worth watching. Would be nice to have a full multimedia centre built into a TV/LCD instead of using an old Xbox.
 
fusion_power said:
I wonder, where ACER had the Idea for this. Spys in our Community? :D
I hope they don't build a Open-Source Handheld. Better they keep the Idea just for big Consoles. ^^" So Nintendo, MS and Sony have to deal with the new "rival"
Click to expand...
Well open source handheld isn't new and doesn't take a genius to think of doing it. You don't need to spy on anything.

It's good more people and more things are being released, i remember a few years ago we had nothing, and now look? Everybody's getting into it, I wouldn't be suprised if MS and Sony don't do one down the track.

If a company not many people know about can sell over 35,000 units, Just imagine if done right how many an actual company could sell? As long as they keep it open source, use good ads, that would be bloody awesome as their technology is wild, they could Easily put a 30GB hard drive into it W/ SD room "like the ipods"

Theres a system out now called an Eee PC - http://youtube.com/results?search_query=Ac...mp;search_type=

It's like a Linux based Laptop type thing, that's powerful enough and obviously runs all the emulators the PC can handle, it's awesome, so you can play DS on it and stuff.

Things like this, i love technology even though i don't know a lot about it, i cant wait until mid this year when other companies hopefully show off their new handhelds if there is any
 
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Josheh said:
Theres a system out now called an Eee PC - http://youtube.com/results?search_query=Ac...mp;search_type=

It's like a Linux based Laptop type thing, that's powerful enough and obviously runs all the emulators the PC can handle, it's awesome, so you can play DS on it and stuff.


I own an EeePC, and it's certainly not powerful enough to emulate the DS (that said, why anyone would want to do this on any sort of home computer or laptop, considering the rather large differences in portability and overall user experience when doing so, I don't know - I think I'll stick with my real DS ;) ). It's got enough bottlenecks that "even" PSX emulation is quite choppy unless you recompile the kernel (which for some unfathomable reason only supports 1GB of RAM out of the box) and/or overclock the machine, for example. That said, it wasn't really intended for gaming purposes, so that's a bit of a moot point, admittedly.

That said, what I would find interesting is an open home-console that isn't just an x86 box in a console-like shell, doesn't use a big hard drive or whatever, and has some sort of limits deliberately imposed on it. I say this because it's often appeared that a degree of limits seems to foster a degree of creativity with how the hardware is worked with, or so it seems. I'm just thinking back to the sorts of tricks you used to see with the C64 and its brethren (and even the NES, such as how some of Codemasters' games for that system used undocumented hardware behaviour) and so on, here, really. :p
Click to expand...
 
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