Okay, we all lived through a similar thread, but bear with me.
I've been ignoring this stuff for a long time; we all know Gamecube-would-be-great-for-our-scene-in-particular-if-only, where 'if only' is some combination of rewritable storage, network connectivity, documentation and 'license tax.' (Well, there's more to it than that, because those issues cut both ways -- nobody can press a GD-ROM without talking to Nintendo, and nothing can run OS4 for the usual gaggle of reasons.*) Meanwhile, it's seemed obvious that consoles were going to continue with enough crypto or erstwhile DRM to make repurposing them annoying and impractical for anyone beyond dedicated hobbyists.
What I didn't notice is that, perhaps, Nintendo have been the odd ducks for sticking by physical protections (and the patents on them) -- by using nonstandard media, they've been able to make 'attacks' on their licensing rules expensive enough without necessarily blockading things architecturally... not that it matters practically, but maybe it's kept them away from the mindset that everything just naturally needs to be signed. I'm not even sure about this, since the Gamecube is too impractical to think about for the physical mechanism, but call it a theory.
Whether that theory does or doesn't explain the following, I just noticed
this bit of 'news', on
BoingBoing, ironically enough:
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Nintendo promises a console that will run anyone's code?
Hidden in a fluffy press release for Nintendo's new Revolution console device is this notice:
Freedom of design: A dynamic development architecture equally accommodates both
big-budget, high-profile game "masterpieces" as well as indie games conceived by
individual developers equipped with only a big idea.
Not much detail, but if Nintendo makes good on that promise, they're poised to kick the competition's ass: a world of consoles that only ran signed code was a nice racket while it lasted, but at the end of the day, needing to get permission to run software on your own device sucks and devices that let anyone write software for them get more valuable as more people write more code for them. Link (Thanks, Tom!)
Maybe they're going to open it up all the way -- or maybe they're just going to shoot for an AInc.-like model that makes it 'affordable enough' to produce signed code in the first place. Either way, they're going to have standard networking features in the hardware, and we now live on a planet where NAS is cheap -- whether it lives in an appliance, or as a service (the way people are already using their PSPs and such, to access data over HTTP).
I'd say it just might be conceivable -- and potentially unavoidable -- to make a 'computer' out of this thing. I'd further guess that, as much as that could take a share of Nintendo's profits (every 'OS' disc sold is how much development-kit revenue lost to Nintendo?), they'd be stupid not to take ('allow') the risk at this point.
Or at least maybe, just maaaybe, they'll be open to being convinced of the fact, if they haven't been already.
This might be the first 'optimistic' news I've seen in a while. Have at it.
*Blah blah not being bitter about that (in particular, if Hyperion has to do the porting then *someone* has to arrange for Hyperion to get paid), just bemoaning the mess.
(Oh, hey, there a way to markup a
in a board post? I've gone stupid.)
Edit: ...and beyond the cosmetic tweaks, yeah, I did just change the subject to make it a bit less parroting and more to my point.
