The Hydra Consome Game Developer’s Kit is getting quite a bit of play on various blogs. It’s a little game console based upon the Propeller chip created by Parallax (more here) which is an interesting little gadget. It has eight relatively simple cores sitting on a single chip, and is relatively cheap and fast. You can dedicate individual cores to implementing virtual peripherals like NTSC output or monitoring I/O devices, and still have plenty of other computational resources to use for other purposes.

The only real problem with this system is its rather steep price: $200 is more than a DS, more than a PSP, more than a GameCube, and very close to a Wii. You could rightfully say that “yeah, but those don’t have developer kits and information”, and you’d be right. But I still think that a market opportunity is being missed for a simple game machines that perhaps non-programmers would buy, but that amateur programmers might actually create content for. I’d think that something at half the price would be worthy of lots more attention.

ThinkGeek :: Hydra Console Game Dev. Kit

[tags]Games Programming[/tags]