New Indrema L600 Design
March 19th, 2001 by CrusaderLooks like the Indrema news drought is ending, as William Kendrick e-mailed in the following:
The April 2001 issue ofNext Generation magazine(shipped to subscribers, due on store shelves soon) has an eight page specialon the Indrema Linux-based game console,titled “Field of Indrema: If they build this console, will develoeprs come?”Games specifically mentioned in the article (along with screenshots)included:
Slingshot’s Soul Ride 2,
Three Axis’ port of Pangea Software’s Nanosaur,
Hyperion Entertainment’s port of Monolith’s Shogo: Mobile Armor Division,
and Sunspire Studios’ Tux Racer.There’s also a blurb about the possibilities of running MAME on it.
The article includes a photo of a very tasty looking new L600 design(which as of this writing hasn’t been put up on Indrema’s own site) – thedull grey has changed to an eye-catching chrome; discs are now insertedinto a slot, rather than a tray; the cool blue power light remains; and wefinally have a picture of the controller (it’s quite similar to analogPlayStation pads).
Bill also sent in a link to scanshe’s taken of the Next-Gen issue in question, so you can check out the Linux-based console’s (final?) designfor yourself.
Furthermore, Gamespy’s John Keefer let us know that they’veposted their own look at the L600; the editorialalso examines how the independent Linux game development community may affect the genesis of the system.
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
i think they will win very few people over with the selection of titles mentioned in the article and i’m sure even fewer people would buy a console just to have a cool looking, expensive dvd player.
i’m also rather doubtful about the ‘indies’ strategy. granted, the developers would have to pay very little to get started on programming the indrema, but i really don’t see why they would want to do that in the first place. the console market is swamped and highly competitive already; most people buy just one console and they buy whichever console has the coolest games. if you were a developer, would you target a console that you know will have a large user base such as the xbox (even if that means paying licenses) or a console who’s user base _may_ increase with the popularity of your own titles?
either way, does the article mention console hardware details like cpu, graphics card, etc?
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
Have they mentioned a price yet?
Alot depends on that I would think.
What about including cool commercial games already ported to Linux like Quake 3, UT, SoF, and Tribes 2?
–Dweebs
:^)
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
I don’t think the Indrema thing is really serious since they haven’t got the support of Loki. They only have one cool game, and it’s very far to be enough.
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
Sounds like a failure to me. It doesn’t have the hype engine of ps2 or xbox and as such won’t have enough developer support to make it worth buying. Can you say atari jaguar?
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
It really is a piss poor collection of titles. I hate to sound so negative about this, but look at all the quality games on release these days and compare it to Indrema’s flagship titles. Come on, MSG2 or Halo versus Tux Racer? (no insult to the TuxRacer guys, its a great game, but my nephew would hit me with hard sharp things if I got it for him for christmas). The whole thing reeks of “Oh crap we better do a press release”. Like those essay’s you used to write for class about 6 minutes before its due; “Norway is best know for its high quality production of…uh…snow, well respected cheese, and some other high quality products…”
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
Game Boy Ultra is going to be released in a week or so and it have much better opening Titles. I love Linux and I was all routing for Indrema… but it looks like it will end up as useful as a DIVX player.
I hope that I am wrong… but if they are going to ship it then do it soon before all the developers give up on it.
I am sure the “Angel Investors” are wondering where their money has gone.
If PS2 flop was partially do to low stock and crappy opening titles… then how will Indrema do with “incredibly crappy titles” and supper delayed shipping date.
Shogo… common. I am a Shogo fan and I got the game but why would I want to play a 2 year old game. Tux racer is awesome… but I would expect that to be built into the Bios. These aren’t titles that are going to catch anyone eyes.
Maybe I am just upset because I find this insulting to the Linux community. It looks like a joke…
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
Indrema says this will be a 600mhz x86-based CPU. I’m
assuming that it is either an Athlon or P3. Hopefully they
will get a faster CPU by the time they ship it though. They also
say they will use a “nVidia Next Generation GPU”, so what
is that…the geforce-3 probably. Then it says it will be shipping
with 64MB RAM; since RAM is so cheap currently hopefully that will be 128MB.
Anyway, this is a fairly standard desktop system. In order
for an app. to work on the Indrema it needs to be
certified, which costs money. This would probably have to be
paid for by the original publisher (Activision, etc…) not
Loki. Or at least it needs the approval of the original publisher.
If we say that the publisher doesn’t care and someone pays for
the certification and doesn’t care that Indrema will collect
royalties, then nothing stops Loki from putting the games they ported
on the Indrema. Perhaps nothing is being said because Loki
and the publishers are hashing things out and dont/cant say
until everything is finalised. Or perhaps everyone is waiting
until Indrema is close to production of their machine.
At any rate, anything Loki has ported should run on the Indrema
without too much extra effort. I would assume that all
that would need to happen is that SDL would need to be
“ported” on to the Indrema(to take advantage of all of its
hardware acceleration).
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
Too quiet. The NextGen article is out. People are still actively posting (flaming? off-topicing? whatever they do this week) on Indrema’s mailing lists… but the folks [u]from[/u] Indrema (John Gildred, Karen and Keri) have been eerily quiet lately.[br]
Maybe I’m smoking something, but why do I get the feeling this is a good thing? ;)