my final decision.............hope its worth it

[mr. mister]

i've been on this boards for a short while looking for the perfect idea for a project, but haven't been able to find a suitable one thus far

i want to do sometime electronically oriented, commercially viable and of low complexity (i'm on a product design course)

here is my latest idea and hopefully my final decision.

I've seen some projects on the internet of students making videogame consoles interfaced with sega megadrive controllers, with game complexity being very simple and really basic. An idea jumped into my head while looking through these.

i'm used to playing internet games made with macromedia's flash and actionscript, so i decided;

A console which reads media cards (smart/SD/etc) capable of playing flash games and having two basic controllers (played via TV) or also the possibility of it being a handheld unit with a single screen (e.g. like the gameboy)

before i dive deeper into this, is this a reasonable project?

 

[evandude]

I really don't think there's any way you could feasibly make an embedded system that could play flash games, at least not for a relatively simple project. Flash runs under windows, so you would basically have to create a windows environment in your device.
You COULD, however, do it if you used an actual computer as the basis for your project. not sure if that was your original plan.
but then it should be somewhat easy, you would just want to build a small computer and the main challenge would be interfacing controllers with the flash game. if you made your own flash games, perhaps you'd have be able to do that. Or perhaps you might want to use some other game format besides flash.

building a small computer these days isn't that hard. if you look up the line of EPIA mainboards made by VIA, they are about 7 inches square with built-in processor, video, sound, etc. and accept standard RAM, hard drive, etc. and you can use a very small power supply with them.

I am currently building a small system like this to go in my car, and the computer case is smaller than a sheet of paper, and about 2" thick (drives are mounted externally)

so that would make a reasonable game console... however it would cost around $500-600 for all the parts you would need I think (motherboard, RAM, controllers, small LCD display, drives, etc)

anyway, just some food for thought.

 

[mr. mister]

I really don't think there's any way you could feasibly make an embedded system that could play flash games, at least not for a relatively simple project. Flash runs under windows, so you would basically have to create a windows environment in your device.
You COULD, however, do it if you used an actual computer as the basis for your project. not sure if that was your original plan.
but then it should be somewhat easy, you would just want to build a small computer and the main challenge would be interfacing controllers with the flash game. if you made your own flash games, perhaps you'd have be able to do that. Or perhaps you might want to use some other game format besides flash.

building a small computer these days isn't that hard. if you look up the line of EPIA mainboards made by VIA, they are about 7 inches square with built-in processor, video, sound, etc. and accept standard RAM, hard drive, etc. and you can use a very small power supply with them.

I am currently building a small system like this to go in my car, and the computer case is smaller than a sheet of paper, and about 2" thick (drives are mounted externally)

so that would make a reasonable game console... however it would cost around $500-600 for all the parts you would need I think (motherboard, RAM, controllers, small LCD display, drives, etc)

anyway, just some food for thought.

i hardly know much about computer building

would books on computer building teach me how to interface optical drives or card readers???

is there anyway i can modify the OS to have a special GUI e.g. like on the x-box

how about attaching a screen to make it hand held?

thanks in advance