Here’s a bit of real gaming on an Nvidia Shield prototype at Mobile World Congress 2013. This is Nvidia entering the console games market with actual console hardware showcasing their new Tegra4 quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor with their 72-core GPU! Availability is Q2 2013, they haven’t yet announced the pricing.
Category: Gaming
Archos Gamepad, $169 available in the USA starting in February
Phil Geldard of Archos shows and talks about the release of the Archos Gamepad on the US market, scheduled to happen in February 2013 at the price of $169 MSRP. Archos has been trying to ramp up mass manufacturing to be able to deliver to supply the huge demand worldwide that there is for this really cool product. When Archos started selling the device in Europe before Christmas, they sold out of all of their European stock in 4 hours after making it available on their website. Archos hasn’t experienced such strong demand for a product since they launched their Gen8 Donut/Eclair/Froyo Cortex-A8 Android tablets in 2010. I know I’ll be playing all my favorite N64 games on this device in the months to come, as well as any really cool new Android games that I may find.
Nvidia Tegra4, Shield, Grid and Cars at CES 2013
Nvidia launches the new Tegra4, the cloud computing gaming grid and shows how Tegra is used in a couple of cars.
Nvidia Shield Portable Console launched (press conference)
Posted by – January 7, 2013
Nvidia is launching their own portable games console based on their new Nvidia Tegra4. (check back in the days to come for the full extended test and interviews of the Nvidia Shield at the Nvidia booth)
Nvidia Grid launched (press conference)
Posted by – January 7, 2013
Nvidia launches the Nvidia Grid, serving all games to any device from the cloud. (check back for proper product interviews and demos to be filmed at Nvidia’s booth in the days to come)
Sphero by Orbotix at LeWeb 2012
Posted by – December 9, 2012
Check out this awesome remote controlled sphero ball. It’s now being sold for $129, but with mass manufacturing, the price can come down.
Archos Gamepad $149/149€ being released now in Europe
This is the coolest Android tablet for gaming, Archos releases it imminently in Europe for 149€, US availability to be confirmed. Here I’m demonstrating some of the latest advanced Android games called Dead Trigger, Rip Tide and a couple other.
OGACO iKazoo Bluetooth flute/game controller concept, it’s got sensors
Canadian startup OGACO (which stands for Optical Game Controllers), releases their new prototype presentation video for their new concept for a Bluetooth flute instrument, that can be used as a game controller, that includes sensors, accelerometer, that can have other functions such as step counting when you run and more. Check out their video:
Read more: http://ogacogadgets.com
Related articles
- Ogaco iKazoo offers up plenty of functionality in a cute, fun package (pocketables.com)
- Ogaco iKazoo, the Strangely Fascinating Gadget, Motion Controller & Flute (tmcnet.com)
Angry Birds Bluetooth catapult with ARM Cortex-M3 and sensors
Posted by – November 2, 2012
ARM has created this real life catapult to remotely control a game of Angry Birds using Bluetooth and an ARM Cortex-M3 board with sensors.
$70 7″ 1024×600 Rockchip RK3066, $46 7″ 800×480 VIA 8850 by Guobangxingye
Posted by – October 27, 2012
Category: Tablets, Laptops, HDMI Sticks, Gaming, Exclusive videos, Members Content, Allwinner, Rockchip, AmLogic, Telechips, China Sourcing Fair, Android
Guobangxingye shows their latest ARM Powered Tablets and Laptops, $70 7″ 1024×600 Rockchip RK3066, $46 7″ 800×480 VIA 8850, $67 10.1″ Laptop on VIA 8850, $42 7″ 800×480 A13, $27 Telechips and Allwinner A10 HDMI sticks and more. I’m sorry that I didn’t reply to her emails, I promise I will the next time that she sends me news I should reblog.
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Become a $20/year Member of ARMdevices.net
Posted by – October 21, 2012
Category: Tablets, Laptops, Smartphones, E-readers, Set-top-boxes, HDMI Sticks, Projectors, Displays, Cameras, Wearables, Factory Tours, Gaming, Robots, Exclusive videos, Android, Chrome OS, Google TV, Ubuntu
You can now become a Member of ARMdevices.net for $20/year.
For that you get:
1. Pictures/scans of business cards to all the companies that I video interview at trade shows around the world.
2. Buy some of the best value ARM Powered devices that I find, when I can get the manufacturer to agree to sell them at a good price directly to members. Consider those sample sales, but you can buy many also, and contact the manufacturer directly if you’d like to import a larger quantity. I expect to be able to provide members with some of the worlds most interesting ARM Powered tablets, laptops, HDMI Sticks, Set-top-boxes, E-readers, game players, development boards, robots, and more. Check for a status on available devices in the Members Store.
Thanks for supporting my work.
Read more about why you should become a Member of ARMdevices.net here.
Archos Gamepad N64 emulation
Posted by – October 16, 2012
The Nintendo games are the best in the world. That is why I’m most excited about playing those on the Archos Gamepad and it’s awesome that most games seem smooth. Although I think the N64 game emulation on Android is still a work in progress. Here I show a bit of Super Mario 64, Wave Race, Wipeout 64, Diddy Kong Racing and also showing that Archos’s button mapping works fine for Angry Birds.
Archos Gamepad, gameplay demo including the N64/NES emulator
Posted by – October 14, 2012
Playing videogames is the top activity that consumers do on tablets. So Archos is releasing this awesome thin, light and very well prices $149 Archos Gamepad. It’s got a 7″ 1024×600 capacitive touch screen but more importantly for gaming, it’s got game controller buttons on each side of the screen. This device runs on the Rockchip RK3066 dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with the quad-core Mali-400MP4 GPU. Thus gameplay support is quite decent, especially considering the $149 retail price of this device. Archos software engineers implement a very innovative mapping software layer solution on top of Android, to map the hardware controls to touch-screen input. Thus a large portion of existing touch-screen optimized games are thus very well playable like this. As a transition until all Android games become fully optimized for normal gamepad input. Not only as portable Android gameplayers come with buttons, but for the Android home consoles, HDMI sticks, Set-top-boxes, Google TV and more, all suggesting that Android is about to become by far the biggest video games platform in the world. In this video, I showcase one N64 emulator that I could find on the Google Play Store, though N64 and Dreamcast emulation is still a work in progress, as many more consumers start getting access to these types of Android gaming devices, hopefully it’ll encourage more game developers to improve emulators and new games support on the platform. There isn’t specifically need for game developers to specifically target the RK3066 and this device, since as I understand a lot of the hardware acceleration happens through standards based Open GL ES 2.0, but for sure as more gamers and developers start using these devices, the optimization level of gaming can reach perfection, or at least a very satisfactory and impressive level at that price.
Jncota Game players at the HKTDC Electronics Fair
Posted by – October 13, 2012
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Toshiba 4K Video-gaming!
Posted by – August 30, 2012
To experience the most insane video-gamging ever, get a 4K Quad-FHD screen from Toshiba and connect a powerful PC with a 4K-capable latest/fastest GPU such as ATI 7970 and Nvidia 680, you can then play many of the latest big high-end games that thus render the full 3840×2160 of the game at 30fps, it looks awesome.
DMP GPU, Digital Media Professionals Inc at Computex 2012
Posted by – June 11, 2012
They are the GPU used in for example the ARM Powered Nintendo 3DS.
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Yinlips shows 7″, 5″ and 4.3″ Android game players
Posted by – April 21, 2012
Yinlips is showing their new portable Android game consoles using the Boxchip A10 which has the Mali-400 GPU which seems to playback all console game emulators smoothly up to N64, maybe even newer. They are showing 4.3″ resistive, 5″ resistive and capacitive and 7″ capacitive portable game players.
Android challenges Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft in gaming
Android Game Changer
The new Dual-core and Quad-core ARM Processors that are coming out in the newest ARM Powered Smartphones, Tablets and Set-top-boxes in the coming months can display more than 200 million triangles per second! The 5-year old PS3 does 250 million triangles a second. XboX 360 does 500 million triangles a second. So in terms of performance, the graphics improvements on ARM Powered devices are absolutely amazing. Graphics performance on ARM processors seems to be more than doubling each year. Consider that the ARM Powered device probably uses 100x less power than the PS3 or XboX 360! One theory why Sony disables HDMI output on PSVita may be because the $249 Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 Powered PSVita may actually be more powerful for gaming than the 5-year-old $299 Cell Processor based PS3!
Here are some of the angles that may make of Android the near futures biggest home and portable console platform:
1. Openness
– Any small game developer can easily release their games to a global audience without asking anyone. Gamers can also install whichever game they want (legally or ilegally) just by downloading the .apk downloaded from any website.
2. Choice
– All manufacturers can make the Android gaming devices, not just Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.
3. Lower prices
– More manufacturers competing means lower prices and better features. Also, Google can start a global gaming all-access pass, something like $10/month for hard core gamers to gain access to all the games as much as they want. Who would want to pay $50/game through retailers anymore?
4. Remove intermediaries
– Games in the age of the internet are meant to be downloaded from the Internet. No more need to distribute physical disks at retail stores. Even for big games that take up several gigabytes, the games can be downloaded through p2p with no central distribution cost.
5. Emulation of all previous consoles
– New Dual-core and Quad-core Android devices can probably emulate all the previous Nintendo, Sony consoles, I expect even N64, Dreamcast and PS2 games to get emulated smoothly. This means tens of thousands of games are thus (legally or ilegally) available to all Android gamers. Even the oldest Nintendo NES console games released 25 years ago are as cool as Angry Birds, and SNES games released nearly 20 years ago have about the same quality level of graphics as Angry Birds. This means through (legal or illegal) emulation, from day 1, Android devices can have about 1000 blockbuster games as good as Angry Birds.
Nintendo is awesome.
Yet I feel they try too hard to hold onto old business models that consist of centrally distributing the games on disks through retailers. And they may believe too strongly that only themselves must control the gaming hardware, that they would not legally allow other hardware makers to play their games.
Nintendo needs to forget about retailers and they need to embrace everyone elses hardware. Nintendo needs to distribute all their games as downloads, provide legal access to all their games on Android for that sub-$10/month global gaming subscription plan. This would instantly provide Nintendo with Billions of dollars of pure new profit. They can still release new consoles, they can even release reference designs and certification branding “Certified by Nintendo” for how they think Android devices should be designed to provide the best gaming user interfaces and performance.
The Nintendo Wii U announced this week at E3, seems to be an upgraded HD capable Wii with a new controller that basically seems to be an ARM Powered 6.2″ capacitive tablet, with perhaps not much local processing going on with most of the 3D game processing happening on the IBM Power PC powered Wii U console, thus the new Wii Controller may act most as some kind of remote input and display device designed to have minimal latency.
Wii U is going to be awesome and all. And I want a Quad-Core PSVita for $249 this Christmas, I just think both are kind of sad in their closed philosophy. Those are basically awesome ARM Powered hardwares which just aren’t designed to take full advantage of their potential, they have features blocked or removed in them because Nintendo and Sony believe only in their previous-century business models, sad.
But who knows, Nintendo and Sony still have time to adjust their plans. They still both may take full advantage of Android opportunity and feel they need to open up towards it instead of ignoring it.
Related articles
- Live Blog: Nintendo Unveils New Console at E3 (blogs.wsj.com)
- Nintendo’s task: The Wii, again, more, better (sfgate.com)
JXD M1000 $40 PS One video games TV console emulator
Posted by – April 17, 2011
JXD provides this affordable games console based on the Actions G1000 processor for games emulation of several consoles up to Playstation One.
Nintendo Wii2 to be be ARM Powered?
Image via Wikipedia
There are some rumors and speculation that Nintendo might unveil Wii2 at E3 in June. Here’s what I think Nintendo should do:
1. Sell it for $99 as an ARM Powered set-top-box
2. Use ARM Cortex-A9 Dual-core or Quad-core with future proof 1080p graphics, even support 1080p 3D output.
3. Little integrated storage, but include SD card slot(s) and support USB Host for external hard drive storage.
4. It’s a Blu-ray player, but all the games should be downloadable and stored on SD cards or USB hard drives.
5. Nintendo should start unlimited games subscription packages, games are downloaded from the Internet, eventually even use BitTorrent, synchronize also unlimited games onto the Nintendo 3DS and using new official Game Cart for previous Nintendo portable and home consoles. The main problem with this is the disruption of retail stores and the ways they promote the sale of video games. But it’s a change Nintendo has to make. $10-$20 per month in a subscription should give unlimited access to all past and future Nintendo games for home and portable consoles.
6. Wii2 should run Google TV software in my opinion, so it also doubles as the best HDTV VOD Set-top-box, so it disrupts regular TV programming, Nintendo can turn everything to on-demand entertainment in the living room.
7. All previous Nintendo games can be updated online, and can receive new online gaming modes.
8. Built-in HD video conferencing, might require additional HD usb webcam.
9. The Wii2 creates a WiFi hotspot to interact automatically with the 3DS/DSi/DS, and includes Bluetooth also for remote controls, including also a bluetooth keyboard and a bluetooth headset.
10. New innovative virtual reality gaming mechanisms, might add Kinect-style 3D cameras, but more likely, new Wii game controllers, new gloves and even detectors on feet for a full virtual reality experience. Maybe they integrate sensors like the Freescale MMA9550L in their new remotes and compact body sensors. Some type of glasses with two IR emitters perhaps as well using this trick.
11. The size should be barely larger than a dual CD case. With Blu-ray player in there, HDMI output (possibly HDMI input/throughput also for full Google TV like features and easy setup), Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0 host ports, new TV sensor ports.
Which ARM chip provider could get that deal with Nintendo to be mass produced into Wii2? Could it be Nvidia’s Kal-El, OMAP4440, i.MX6, Marvell’s Tri-Core, Qualcomm’s Quad-core? What do you think Nintendo should do for the Wii2? Write in the comments..
Related articles
- Nintendo Wii 2 at E3 hints EA boss (slashgear.com)
- EA dubs Nintendo Wii a ‘legacy platform’ (go.theregister.com)
- Wii reaches 35 million sales, earns new record (Wii) (gamesradar.com)
- ‘Wii’s Time Has Passed’ – Strategy Analytics (businessinsider.com)
- High Voltage details their hopes for a Wii successor, Wii looking a bit ‘haggard’ (gonintendo.com)
