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Games Entertainment

The PC, Xbox, PS2, GameCube and 2600, Together at Last 145

Posted by chrisd from the joystick-elbow-makes-my-arm-twinge dept.
The Screen Savers have a story on their website about the building of a single box 2600/PS2/GameCube/Xbox/PC/ NES player. But this is not a mame ? box. The builder, Yoshi, dismantled, cut,chopped and belt-sanded the consoles to make them all fit in the same Lian-76 case. I can only imagine how hot this case might get. There is a photo album here. It looks like you'd still need a video switcher to take advantage of this completely. A cool mod for this would be to pack in a wintv card for each console or something.
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The PC, Xbox, PS2, GameCube and 2600, Together at Last More

The PC, Xbox, PS2, GameCube and 2600, Together at Last

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  • Throw a Mac in there... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    and then we'd be talking.

  • The Point? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ajiva ( 156759 ) on Friday April 19, 2002 @10:32PM (#3377485)
    So what's the point of this contraption? Yes its cool, but isn't the whole point of having multiple consoles is that you can use them seperatly? Not sure about you, but having multiple TVs and multiple consoles sure does keep all my friends happy when they visit

    • Re:The Point? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by magicslax ( 532351 ) <frank_salim.yahoo@com> on Friday April 19, 2002 @10:36PM (#3377505)
      If you have to ask why, don't.

      This is the sort of "because we CAN" geek project that needs no practical justification. You don't see the inate brilliance of cutting things out of their boxes and putting them in other boxes? Tough.

      • Re:The Point? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Omerna ( 241397 )
        The "point" is because that's just incredibly cool. I mean seriously, go look at the pictures. That's an example of synergy (whole is greater then the sum of the parts) plus it would look SO nice sitting on my living room floor.

      • Re:The Point? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by doorbot.com ( 184378 )
        If you have to ask why, don't.

        I agree. Every time there is an article along these lines (one of those things where most people say "Cool!"), there's always those few people who say "What's the point? They could be spending their energy hurling asteroids at the sun or calculating the exact value of Pi."

        My question is, are these the same people every time? If so, why are they continually posting to the same kind of stories? Are they trolls? Do they have difficulty not clicking the link if they don't think it's interesting?

        If you have to continually post the same responses over and over, I have to ask... what's the point?
      • PC + NES + X-Box + PS2 + NGC + old Atari thing = a lot of boxes cluttering things up & a mess of double adaptors, powercables, powersupply briquettes & video cables.

        Sticking it all in one box & working out some sort of switching setup so all devices can share the same power imput & video output queues clutter effect.

    • Re:The Point? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19, 2002 @10:41PM (#3377531)
      having multiple TVs and multiple consoles sure does keep all my friends happy when they visit
      I guess it's for those of us who like to be in the same room with out friends when they visit.

    • Re:The Point? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DarkZero ( 516460 ) on Friday April 19, 2002 @11:49PM (#3377736)
      Well, then, you must live in a pretty odd place with pretty odd friends. In my experience, people only use one console at a time when they're home. And when they're with friends, they traditionally all play the same multiplayer game on the same console. The point of this mod, beyond the "Because we CAN!" niftiness, is that it conserves a lot of space. Instead of having a PC, a PS2, a GameCube, an X-Box, an NES, a 2600, and all of the required wires and video switchers between them taking up an entire entertainment center and leaving little room for other important entertainment center appliances like stereos, VCRs, and a television, this box keeps them all together, keeps all of the wires in a small space, and cuts out their ridiculous form factors which rarely go well together. Hell, just between the main three consoles, you've got a huge rectangle, a thin black monolith, and a cube. Those shapes don't exactly go well together within an entertainment center that's divided into rather small square and rectangular spaces.
    • "What's the point? I can do the same thing if I just do more work." -- that's what I hear when people question things like this.

  • Now what we really need is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Giga ( 541641 ) on Friday April 19, 2002 @10:35PM (#3377499)
    this guy [classicgaming.com] to make it portable.

  • DVDA (Score:5, Funny)

    by Professor Oompa ( 258687 ) on Friday April 19, 2002 @10:35PM (#3377500)
    Wow... so many things shoved in one box. Sounds like something you'd see on skinimax
    • haha! moderators, mod this up! everytime i see the DVD-A acronmym I always think of something else... an obscure reference from Orgamzo...

    • um, hate to get technical, but only the first part of DVDA would be too many things shoved in a box. :)

  • Dreamcast? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Frohike66 ( 182338 ) on Friday April 19, 2002 @10:38PM (#3377513)
    I'm wondering where the DreamCast is located? Surely it wouldn't have been left out.
    • Colecovision?

    • I know. As a Dreamcast-or-die kind of fellow, it feels like someone's physically slapped my face.

      An update for the U.S.-only gaming folk: SNK's King of Fighters 2000 and Treasure's Ikaruga, two of the hottest 2-D arcade games in recent history among the gamerati, are coming out for SEGA DREAMCAST. The thing refuses to die, and damn if I'll let anyone snub its memory as Sega's pinnacle console gaming achievement. It's thinking.

      ...Aw, geez. Friday night, and I'm at home posting in defense of a video game console. I used the words "gamerati" and "It's thinking," for Heaven's sake. Truly a new low.

      < tofuhead >

      • (Warning: I do not own a Dreamcast. I'm just a gaming addict.)

        Dude, that's a pretty pathetic defense of the Dreamcast. "Oh, look, it has a 2D shooter and a port of a fighting game from a decade-old console!" Even from someone that likes the Neo Geo, that registers a big honkin' "whatever" in my book. How about bringing up the fact that the Dreamcast is going so strong in Japan that one of its new RPG (Sakura Taisen 4) bent the shiny remake of Resident Evil for the GameCube over its knee and spanked it in the sales charts? It beat the RE remake by a 3-to-1 margin, and whereas the RE remake has practically fallen off the charts, Sakura Taisen 4 is still going strong?

        That, or you could just bring up the simple point that the Dreamcast is much more alive than the X-Box, which is dead last on the console charts in the US and stillborn in every other country.

        • Oh, bite your tongue. =P Any shmup fan wil tell you that Ikaruga alone is enough reason to place the DC on the alive and kicking end of the scale. Treasure's shooters have a history of doing this: Radiant Silvergun for Sega Saturn, Sin and Punishment for N64 (okay, rail shooter), and now Ikaruga for DC are just recent examples.

          KoF2K is likewise a BFD for me. It means that SNK/Playmore, a 3rd party, feel they can profit from porting/enhancing games for the supposedly dead system. Although Sakura Taisen's numbers are impressive, Sega released it themselves, so the fanboys alone will buy it just for the melancholy Sega kitsch value, while many will see KoF2K as YA-2-D fighter (and thus more of a risk). Add to that the fact that I don't particularly care for the series...frankly, the closest I've come to enjoying Sakura Taisen is watching the first few of the OAVs and playing a friend's copy of Sakura Taisen Hanagumi Columns for Saturn. ;)

          And now, a late warning from me: You may not own a Dreamcast, but I (a non-retailer and fellow gaming addict) own 14, all new and unopened. This doesn't count the two I use regularly as my own, and is down from the 16 I had last week -- and I'm now up $200 because of the difference. I'm talking about unmodified, non-bundle, made in China, Samsung-driven, U.S. systems with Indonesian controllers. Not ideal by anyone's measurement, but still well worth buying for anyone who doesn't have a Dreamcast yet.

          < tofuhead >

  • If you got over 3,000 bucks you may get one. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Typingsux ( 65623 ) on Friday April 19, 2002 @10:40PM (#3377524)
    Here [sharperimage.com]

    It won't do XBOX or PS2 natively, but you have every other emulator that you can think of.

  • Video switcher is built in (Score:5, Informative)

    by __aaaaxm1522 ( 121860 ) on Friday April 19, 2002 @10:42PM (#3377534)
    Saw a demo of this on The Screen Savers tonight. The video switcher is built in - it's a knob on the front panel - twist it, and it switches from one feed to another.
    • The video switcher is built in - it's a knob on the front panel - twist it, and it switches from one feed to another.

      With all that technology and ingenuity, i'm so surprized he didn't incorporate an electronic switcher with remote control.
  • How exactly would one keep track of all the wires for controllers coming out of this? I have enough problems with four controllers coming out of a Gamecube and another four coming out of a PS2.

    Unfortunately, you don't get great pictures of the final product, just pics of it during production. O well.

    This is pretty cool though, and I assume if you could do all of this that you could add a Super NES, an N64 and other gaming platforms. Too bad I don't have the time to do this.

    Also, doesn't this fit under Hardware [slashdot.org] rather than Games [slashdot.org]?
    • I just realized that there are pictures of the final system, but that they don't seem to show the controller ports for all the systems. I only count two sets of ports on the front (there is one side that I don't see).
      • I happened to view this when they aired at 7pm. The consoles are pretty much matched up to the front of the case. The Xbox and the Atari are the only that have the connectors in the front with a jumper to the unit. Anyway, if you look at the front, the bottom left corner is the PS2, the 5.25" Drive bays on top are the Gamecube, the Xbox and Atari controllers are in the front below the switches for power and reset and the nintendo is off to the top right. It was pretty impressive.
  • And that really doesn't describe it.

    Curious ... is there a list around of the Top 10 case mods?

    This guy should definately be entered.

    BTW, you could even run MAME on it, it has a 2100+ AMD with a 40G hd ...

  • is if it comes with a modification to allow all those consoles to be viewed via a computer monitor or even better if you could fit a flexATX or one of those micro mainboards and put in a card with a video in line so you can play multiple games in a window via an overlay.

  • Money? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by RealisticWeb.com ( 557454 )

    My main problem with these kind of mods are the potential for loss. If I had and 8 bit nintendo, and an atari 2600 that still worked, I would be too worried about breaking them to hack them into bits. Not to mention spending several hundred dollars on the modern consoles to squeeze in too.

    Besides, If you have hacked your xbox like that you wouldn't get any more official M$ tech support (tee hee)

    • no guts no glory
    • Check out his PC component list:
      Epox 8K3A+ mobo
      AMD XP 2100+ CPU
      ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500DV video card
      Kingston PC2700 333MHz DDR RAM 512MB
      Intel Pro/100 NIC
      6-position 9-pin switch box
      14 various toggle switches
      TDK 16/10/40 CD-RW drive
      Seagate 40GB HD

      I don't think he was too worried about shelling out some cash.

    • Knock-off NES clones are very true to the original, come in unique shapes (Playstation-shaped, GameBoy size, etc.), and can be had for next to nothing. The electronics that go into one are really cheap.

      Or, you could have the PC emulate almost any vintage system of this era with impressive accuracy, to the point where you wouldn't need to hack any hardware at all (unless you wanted to use the system's actual game cartridges and not ROM files).

      < tofuhead >

    • Old consoles are cheap (Score:4, Interesting)

      by freeweed ( 309734 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @12:06AM (#3377784)
      I currently own 8 NES units, and 6 2600's, all picked up for basically nothing (got them at garage sales as a bundle with some games for the most part). They all work. In fact, I have yet to find a completely dead console unit (we won't talk about the controllers, mind you).

      Just for fun I took out the mainboard from one of each, and hung them on the wall. Also from my spare Sega Master System and Intellivision. Kinda keeps me humble to remember the roots of the whole thing, ya know? It's actually scary just how well the old units are built. Other than the power switch etc, all solid state. Pretty damn hard to break one. Post-PSX... the cd drives are typically the first things to go on a modern console, and I can't imagine what you'd do if the hard drive fails and it's some proprietary standard.

      Of course, hacking apart a new $300 unit is something else entirely...

      • If you take a controller apart and scrape the metal clean under the pads it will work again. The 2600's controller switches are a bit different, though
  • They've had tutorials [techtv.com] on how to build your own Teddy Borg [mit.edu], among other things. I do wish they'd give credit to the originators of the design on the show and the website, instead of just the site, though.
  • video games hit their peak on the SNES.....FF3, chrono trigger, lufia...............the list goes on............super mario world was great, and ontop of that, you had mario all stars, come on, 8 bit action with enhanced graphics and we all know we can play them on any number of SNES emulators on PC, so.....why not stick something useful in the board, like a brand new athlon xp a half gig of ram, and any rom you can find...............just make sure you own the game before downloading the rom ;)
    • just convert a snes controller for the computer, and your set with the best gaming setup possible
      (if it's just for snes roms you don't need half a gig of ram your main concern is space considering the power the snes had)

      • I still think that 8-bit is the highest that I'll emulate. For SNES, I prefer the actual console. I remember playing the original Final Fantasy VI for the first time under emulation, and hearing the wind sound effects under the lackluster audio emulator of whatever emu I was using at the time (snes9x or zsnes) really had me wishing I was playing on my actual SNES. (BTW, playing it on Playstation has me feeling the same way, since the SNES midi synth sounded much better than whatever was used to make the PSX tracks...which don't even loop seamlessly -- very disconcerting!)

        < tofuhead >

    • you should check out this [nuklearpower.com] if you liked the old FF games. FF3 imo is the best in the series.

  • 2600 receiving mainstream press (Score:4, Funny)

    by I Want GNU! ( 556631 ) on Friday April 19, 2002 @11:03PM (#3377622) Homepage
    I'm glad that they are bundling the newest issues of 2600 [2600.com] into this mad leet new blue box! Free Kevin [kevinmitnick.com]!!!!!!
  • If Yoshi can fit all of this into "Yoshi's box", think of what he could fit into an island!

  • This guy sounds like a sadist. Hopefully he grafted a ctrl-alt-delete key on the joysticks.

    Oh, and the next guy to even THINK about mentioning a beowulf cluster of these things should die a slow, painful death.
  • ...couldn't figure out a logical reason for why the hell you would do such a thing.

  • Heat concerns? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Self-Important ( 460103 ) on Friday April 19, 2002 @11:45PM (#3377728)
    Even though that Lian Li case is aluminum, I imagine that we're talking about an insane amount of heat that must be dissipated in that cramped little space. How long will this thing last before one of the components dies?
    • You are stupid. With a fan or two, this would be no problem. None of these systems get extremely hot.

    • Dude! Didn't you see the red lights on the front fans? Easily can push through 5x airflow with those puppies at 1/2 the dB level!
    • Actually, there shouldn't be any heat problem at all. The apparent purpose of the device (besides just being a great hack) is to have all the devices in one easy-to-place case and use one at a time. Since there would only be one unit on at any given time, no more heat would be generated/collected than would be the case in the original case. In fact, each system could probably run much cooler than original *because* you could put a PC fan in with little trouble.

      -Aaron

  • ...Xbox, PS2, GameCube and 2600...

    One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just dosn't belong.

  • Built by afrotech [afrotechmods.com]. Take a look here [afrotechmods.com]

    Maybe he can help too. ;o)

  • I have an XBox and I'll be buying a GC to but there's no way I'm gonna risk voiding my warranty so I can have a little fun with the boxes. I can't afford it. I don't like Nintendo's graphics, but they do have some good games.
  • It would be great if there was also an amiga toaster in there too. i'd rather have that in their than an X-BOX. or better yet, a BeBox or one of the cube macs. yes, i know they lack games, but you can still play pong or GLpong on them. =)
  • no conglomerate piece of electronics is complete without a clock radio!
  • doesnt this kid read /. - that case should be black & with neon lights and a window so I can see all the innards
  • Whats the fucking point of all this? does this create a console that is hacked enough to play any game format inserted into it? if not, who gives a shit how people can rearrange thier wasted money. What would really be worth a try would be modding a console to read other console's CDs. Something like lindows for the gaming world.
  • Anyone else a little annoyed at the shameless and meaningless plug for Rob M's own "game console" that obvously shows he has more time and money on his hands than the rest of us do?

    Granted, this is a somewhat interesting story, with the SlashDot staff promotion omitted. But, is't this something any /.'er half a brian and some PC assembly under our belt could have done as good or better with a nice rackmount case, the hardware, some wire, and some time?

  • All your consoles are belong to us.

  • Wow, what a great way to wreck many great consoles at once.

    I doubt that monstrosity will last long without breaking somehow.

  • TechTV is losing money cuz their building crap like this instead of figuring out how to turn a profit.
  • There is no doubt there was a great deal of good engineering going on here.. but in the end, it's just taking a bunch of off the shelf components and putting it into a box.

    This would be much, much cooler if the guy had figured out how to use the onboard computer to A: do the video switching, and B: taking one controller, and re-directing the wires to the proper consol unit from one single controller. Then we'd have something to write home about.
  • What the hell is wrong with just normal links?

    Do these javascript-whores think that by removing the address-bar (or by "capturing" right mouse clicks, which is another matter) they can somehow stop people from saving pictures on their harddrive...
    • Usability, most users do not want to go to individual pages one at a time to view large pics not to mention then trying to navigate back to the story.

      Apparently you're an exception.

      It has nothing to do with trying to prevent image theft that's ridiculous.

  • Well the title is pretty much all I wanted to say. Really. Stop reading this! What the hell is wrong with you? There's nothing else here! 3:39am.. signing off.. bleah
  • Did anyone else notice the blatant Star Wars ad displayed with every image window popup?

    Is this a new form of advertising? Spend $1,000 on some game consoles, do something funky with'em, and sell advertising rights on the resultant slashdotted site?

    LOL... well, I'll give it an 'A' for creativity.

  • But, but, but.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by FortranDragon ( 98478 )

    -=:Begin magic /. incantation:=-

    I'll probably be modded down for this...

    -=:End magic /. incantation:=-

    ;-)

    Am I the only one that thinks this mod is just butt-ugly because of the PC case? I mean, if this was in an old, unworking arcade console it would be snazzy and something you would want in your living room. How many of us living in places other than a dorm room would really want a PC case next to their TV?

    Utility is useful, no doubt about that, but let's have some more style please.

    • My boss at the Minnesota Supercomputer Center had a solution to this. There was a second level observation deck for the machine room and visitors passed through often. So, he insisted that external panels on all new supercomputers be painted black. It made them look quite ominous.

      So, that's the solution. Just paint the box black.

  • I still think the best idea is to make a 3rd party emulator on the X-Box. Heck, the thing is basically a PC, so anything around a Ps2 or lower shouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility. A Saturn/PS1/PS2 player, and if you can secure rights to the archives of older games and make them into ROMs, (most already have been anyway) N64, SNES, Genesis, NES and MAME games.

    Of course, Sony and Sega might have a fit, but hey....
  • IMO, it really ruins the aesthetics, having that big NES cart shaped hole in the side.

    It would have been more interesting, IMO, if he had it all be insertable into the front. Cannibalizing cartridge slots off of another NES and 2600, mounting those to the front of the case and connecting those to the slots on the motherboard...would that work? Also, he should have used the second, smaller (snes-like) NES.
  • Heh, just like PVP [pvponline.com]

    -G

  • Aesthetic my ass! Sure it looks fine at the moment but what about when you have 600 cords hanging out the front!?
  • I admit this box is devilishly cool, but something tells me putting 1600$ worth of gear in a box is asking for trouble. What happens when that stupid Enermax power supply goes *POOF* and sends the whole cramped contraption to a fiery death ? It would bring any geek to tears!
  • Why put in an Atari 2600? I don't recall any compelling games on that console. I mean come on nostalgia isn't that important. I'd rather invest the space with a Dreamcast or something at least NES age and up. If you really want 2600 there are the emulators. The games are tiny (200k) so it isn't going to take significant HD space.

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