Slightly Mad announces Mad Box, the most powerful console ever created --standalone, VR-supportive

Most concepts are impractical and only tend to convey ideas.
That's why they're called concepts.

Spoilers in home electronics make little sense and are IMO ugly, but they do tend to appear on some "gaming" PC cases. And the older Mac Pro.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Impossible to clean dust magnet... Would look great on a sci fi movie set where everything's white, but not in real house with real people.
Click to expand...

No company would be stupid enough to release such a console...

arekkz-zeigt-euch-ps4-pro-500-million-limited-edition-unboxing-video-235088.jpeg
 
xz321zx said:
Foveated displays are different, because peripherial refresh can be decoupled (point 5):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold
Click to expand...

You would still need refresh rate of panels be high and selectively upgrade some pixels less often. Or you could try something like what varjo is doing but that will not hit console price points any time soon.

If you don't have that high refresh rate panel and black between refreshes things will look like shit when user moves head.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Just the comment, "For too long have subtle iterations been accepted," shows he's utterly out of touch.

The reason there's an 'oligopoly' is the industry can't sustain more than 3 players with the way it works. The only way you could have more players is less research, less risk, and more generic hardware and nothing to differentiate them, or worse, unique features that go unused because cross-plat won't target them and exclusives are financial suicide.

How does a start-up fund a more powerful console than any of the big three, who in the past have been willing to take a loss on the hardware as they gain back in the long term? The costs of establishing a machine with the infrastructure we want is huge. This is a dumb idea, quite possibly another 'crowd funding scam.'
Click to expand...
you are saying it all, oligopoly is worse than monopoly. At least with a monopoly you have no option but to abide by the rules of a company, with an oligopoly you think you have freedom but you don't.

In addition, you mention research and risk. You loved Larrabee, iirc, and that could have make for a very interesting console. So just imagine you start building Shifty Geezer's favourite console ,with a Larrabee like processor philosophy in mind, and you offer a product that everyone likes not because of the innards but because it is special. The developers would stop being lazy and work on that hardware as if it was their favourite hardware.

Taking into account the current era, a Xbox One X, with little tweaking, could perfectly emulate PS4 and PS4 Pro, imho. And the companies creating videogames are way too agreeable to each other, save for a few tantrums here and there, which tells a lot about the current state of things.

You are right in the infrastructure thing. Ideally it is going to be just a PC like the Subor Z (discovered it in @DieH@rd 's video, never knew about if before, and it's not half bad. nVidia could make something similar with Slightly Mad studios, but I guess they would ask for a name change, to say the least. Mad Box is so unimaginative and plain....
 
a co
Tkumpathenurpahl said:
Haha, is it that bad?

I thought the performance had improved, but that might be more related to Vulkan than SteamOS.

Conceptually, I like SteamOS: a free, gaming focused OS, which can play a part in loosening MS's near-monopoly.

My dream scenario is that MS would counter that with a free, gaming focused OS of their own, which turns any PC into an XBox.

"That's what Windows does" I hear you say. Maybe so, but MS want to spread Windows across as many devices as possible, and making full fat Windows free can't be an easy sell to executives and shareholders.

But, if they develop a version of the OS which is limited to the functionality of the XBoxOne, and release it for free, you can count on a sizeable percentage subscribing to XBox Live and Gamepass. Over a couple of years, that'll generate more money than a single purchase of Windows 10.
Click to expand...
that could be a very interesting idea, a dual boot machine with a core W10 OS console without all the bells and whistles of a full-fledged OS, which means very little resources used, and a full fledged OS for everything else -you could even game on that of course using Steam-.

Given the fact that W10 is proprietary, MS could make a console like that, but I think they would send them to court.
 
ToTTenTranz said:
There's nothing inherently wrong with SteamOS IMO. The problem is having a high performance gaming PC without a Windows installation.


60FPS when paired with the latest reprojection techniques (up to 120Hz) is perfectly fine. Oculus even downgraded their minimum requirements to 45FPS when they enabled asynchronous timewarp.
Dual render windows at 60FPS each is pretty great IMO. I can't really notice any difference between native 90 FPS and 60 FPS + reprojection.


Yet all Steam Machines cost way more than the sum of their components if purchased separately, with some models even getting a worse cost/performance than an identical version sold with windows by the same manufacturer. (e.g. Alienware Steam Machine vs. Alienware Alpha R2 at launch, or comparing both versions of the Syber Elite even today).
Valve does make a lot of money with software distribution and sales, so people expected that a machine with Valve's platform/store pre-installed (and without any real alternative to Steam in Linux) would be somewhat subsidized, plus the fact that they weren't paying for a Windows license would also reflect in the final price. The end result was pretty much the opposite.



I don't know who was elected the Gatekeeper of the "Console" term, but there's a bunch of respected hardware & gaming sites calling the Subor Z a console, or at least a Console/PC hybrid.
Is a gamepad-centered shell for windows all that's needed to call it a console? There's no reason to assume this Mad Box isn't bundling one, just like the Subor Z is expected to be shipping at the moment.

Maybe Microsoft themselves are planning a Xbox dashboard mode for Windows 10.
Click to expand...
a dashboard mode sounds even better than a dual boot. But I am going to be a bit skeptical like Shifty and say that the idea is to use as little memory as possible. Games need a lot of processing power. Still, it is curious that many games run so well, yet there ar pages on the internet which don't show a lot and are slow as hell, but that's off-topic..
 
The lg/google prototype has non-fixed fovea region, with high native resolution it's a question of interface (and tracking) and it's not like high resolution isn't in demand - usually at the expense of refresh rate . It's an another question whether mass production optics can support it.
 
btw Switch is pretty much using the standard tegra right? and its doing well. so the hardware itself probably wont be a problem even if they didnt do much custom design.
 
Slightly Mad has shown what is going to be the final design of the Mad Box. It looks like a sports car to me.

1366_2000.jpg


1366_2000.jpg


1366_2000.jpg


1366_2000.jpg
 
As we said earlier, it's a horrible dust magnet that is not suitable for the real world.
 
It's plagued by the same design philosophy that hurts a lot of gaming PC cases: they try to make them look "futuristic." And it dates them immediately.

It looks like it belongs in one of the alien ships from Independence Day. Tacky.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top