(Credit:
OpenPandora)
Ars Technica is reporting that Pandora, a long-anticipated open-source gaming handheld designed to compete with Nintendo's DS, Sony's PlayStation Portable, and other mobile-gaming devices (and not to be confused with the popular Internet music service), will be released in 2009. No firm date has been released.
The project, however, still needs some work:
Judging by the video, there's still quite a bit of work to be done on the case itself. But the team has had working hardware for the innards for some time now, so some final fabrication, polish, and (quality assurance) work seem to be the only things that stand in the way of the release, which once seemed to be a mere fantasy.
And how. To me, the device looks a bit Soviet. While it certainly has an appeal to the hard-core open-source geek, as demonstrated by selling out its first 3,000-device run in September 2008, I wonder if it will manage to find much of a market beyond that crowd. It is mostly intended to run "home brew" games and older console games, which is fun but unlikely to draw in new gaming consumers.
Even so, it's an interesting experiment worth watching.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Bless Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for his optimism. Writing for Computerworld, Vaughan-Nichols suggests that we don't need to wait for the Year of the Linux Desktop, because we've already had it. Somehow, I missed that. Vaughan-Nichols points to HP shipping Linux, Dell shipping Linux, etc., but come on: a trickle of retail activity does not a "Year of the Linux Desktop" make.
Actually, as I've written several times before, we don't need a "Year of the Linux Desktop," largely because the applications that run on my Mac (and on your Windows PC) already are Linux. Google, Amazon, and a huge swath of the Web are written on to run remotely on Linux, then delivered to your Mac/Windows/Linux PC. This fetish with Linux desktops is outdated.
However, if you must persist in that fetish, I'd recommend Andrew Min's approach: gaming. As Apple demonstrated on the desktop, the way to beat Microsoft is not at its own game, but by changing the nature and, hence, the rules of the game. Min suggests that Linux gaming may be the key to beating Windows-plus-Office, in part because the demographics of gamers mesh well with the demographics of Linux users
Gamers are adventurous folks. That right there is a positive sign. Linux adopters often need to be adventurous in order to even install a new operating system. But even better, gamers often build their own computers, either from scratch, a barebones kit, or a stripped down retail box. And as I pointed out above, what is often in the top 3 most expensive items on many gaming computers is the Windows Vista retail CD, ranging from the $214 Home Premium to the $249 Ultimate Edition. Gamers, therefore, are a ripe target for the open source community.
He has a point. Perhaps the place to start, however, is with a Linux-based gaming system, one that also allows its games to be run on Linux desktops? This would let gamers start out on a dedicated gaming device, then migrate their gaming into their work machine.
I still think it's a Quixotic endeavor, this Linux desktop. But to the extent that people want it, a gaming strategy makes as much sense as any, if not more sense.
Video games have long struck me as a perfect platform for open-source development. Unfortunately, many gamers agreed, and the courts are littered with copyright lawsuits over the years when developers tried to extend their favorite games.
Now Come2Play has made building and extending games and open-source affair: safe, legal, and fun. No, Come2Play won't let developers hack the games of Electronic Arts, Activision, etc. But it will allow them to create fun multi-player games and easily distribute them on Facebook and across the web, as TechCrunch reports:
Released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, the [Come2Play] API currently supports two players and will be gradually ratcheted-up to include a theoretically unlimited number of players. Developers will be able to create multiplayer games using ActionScript 2/3 which they should feel more comfortable with than server side scripting languages such as .NET, Java, and PHP....
[The Come2Play platform is useful because:] First, game developers can focus on developing games, rather than developing and maintaining infrastructure. Second, they get to keep all in-game ad revenue. Third, the developers get instant game distribution through Come2Play's publisher network. Plus, all games can be automatically ported to Facebook and OpenSocial apps.
This is pretty cool, and perhaps stands a greater (short-term) chance of succeeding than enterprise software-focused "Platform as a Service" plays, because individual game developers may be more willing to build on others' platforms, given the experience with Facebook and other web applications.
But what is it missing? True open-source licensing that would enable games on its platform to be modified by unrelated third parties. Right now, Come2Play is only an open-source API that allows developers to work with its platform, but says nothing about developers being able to modify others' games. To me, that is the missing ingredient. Add that and Come2Play's platform may prove to be the ideal way to build, extend, and play games online.
I don't think there's much of a mainstream future for the Wiz, a new open-source gaming unit from GamePark Holdings, but that may be the point:
...[T]he question of whether or not the device can truly challenge the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable is liable to arise when discussing the advent of any mainstream open-source portable. While the Wiz may never be able to capture the mass market in a significant way, the attractive device could become a hit amongst savvy gamers: the flexibility of the device is extraordinary, and making use of homebrew doesn't require time-consuming firmware hacking that could irreversibly damage the device.
It's a capable device (ARM9 533MHz processor with a 3D accelerator, 64MB of RAM, 1GB of built-in NAND flash memory, etc.), with a capable community: unlike many open-source projects, the Wiz has a built-in developer audience that loves to play games and hence may turn its attention to creating games for the Wiz, as well as updating its Linux-based firmware to improve the Wiz.
Will it go mainstream? Almost certainly not. But perhaps the Wiz will point the way for Nintendo and other gaming manufacturers to improve the transparency and malleability of their own devices to make innovation more of a community effort. Probably not, but it's possible.
Yesterday I opened my Wall Street Journal and was struck by the advertisement staring back at me from the front page. Roughly two years ago the Journal started inserting one ad per day on its front page, talking it up as a prime advertising vehicle:
"The Wall Street Journal will provide the most valuable opportunity anywhere in any medium for advertisers who want to reach a large, affluent and influential audience," [said] L. Gordon Crovitz, the publisher of The Journal and executive vice president of Dow Jones & Company.
So who is this "large, affluent, and influential audience"? Gamers, as the inclusion of the $75,000 to $100,000+ advertisement suggests:
... Read more
Whatever the proprietary Neanderthals may think, it's becoming clearer by the day that open source is, or will become, the natural state of software. "Nature" exerted her will yet again with the announcement that Electronic Art's SimCity has been released as open source under the GPLv3 license. The game was written back in 1983 (actually, before then) and so much of the code is too old to be useful except for research purposes.
But there's a lot of value in that, as Bill Simser notes:
There's still a lot of craptastic code in there, but the heart of the software (the simulator) hasn't changed. I know there will be efforts underway to port it to a better platform, replace the age old graphics with new ones, rewrite the graphic routines with modern-day counterparts, etc. The modern challenge for game programming is to deconstruct games like SimCity into reusable components for making other games! The code hopefully serves as a good example of how to use SWIG to integrate C++ classes into Python and Cairo, in a portable cross platform way that works on Linux and Windows.
It's like starting over from a familiar core, rebuilding the game into entirely new possibilities. On days like this I wish that I could code....
Electronic Arts thinks the current gaming business is a quagmire of inefficiency. The solution, according to EA's head of international publishing? An open gaming platform.
...[I]ncompatible consoles made life harder for developers and consumers.
"We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible....We're platform agnostic and we definitely don't want to have one platform which is a walled garden."
Funny how different industries are increasingly coming up with the same answer to the inefficiencies that proprietary competition creates: openness. Open source. Open standards. Open competition.
With Microsoft's Halo 3 pulling in $170 million in its first day on sale, maybe we're all in the wrong business. Open-source video games. Heck, Electronic Arts is veering in that direction anyway. Red Hat Enterprise Games. RHEG. Has a nice ring to it. :-)
- prev
- 1
- next
