Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Open Game Console

Ever thought about a Unix Console like Wii, XBox, or PS would be cool?

So did others, and founded the Open Game Console Consortium, an independent, non-profit organization made up of various companies, individuals, game developers, publishers and hardware manufactures. It is dedicated to the development and maintanance of an open standard by which multiple hardware manufacturers can release their own videogame console that can all the same exact games without modifications.

The OGCC project is creating a console with usual PC components, what also makes it a PC somehow. Actually they don't build the console, but standardize the specifications, so anybody can build the console oneself. The underlying operating systems should be a special Linux distro, but at the moment this is very sketchy. The OGCC is not the first and only project aiming for a Linux videgame system, but what makes this project special is the complete openness.

There is also the OpenMoko project, creating a free smartphone platform using Linux and other free software components, which is also able for gaming.

And also another project called Gamix, is developing open specifications for a gaming console. Indeed, Gamix and OGCC have very similar goals, but somehow it seems a (liberal) company is behind Gamix, while OGCC is totally open for community development.

To make this complete, I refer to the previous GP2X article, the Linux handheld.

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