Has anyone heard of Gamix?

[drewz21]

I bought some Amiga games off Ebay and got a brochure about this company.  Has anyone ever heard of them or this concept?  Sounds kinda interesting and reminds me of one of the reasons I bought my first Amiga 500.

http://www.gamix.org/index.htm

[James]

I must admit I never heard of that. Makes me think of two things...one good, and one bad. I'll start with bad one.

Back when I was in the videogame industry, we got literally spammed by this company (can't remember its name right now) that was producing the next big thing in gaming: The Phantom. They harassed us (even on personal emails ffs!) day and night be develop for their "platform". Turns out the idea wasn't bad at all, but the ppl behind it were complete tards. The idea was to have a not-so-bad-but-far-from-excitingly-specced PC in a set-top box. It would be connected to their website through standard dsl/cable and you downloaded games from there for low prices. Everybody could develop with no publishing cost and make a share of the profits when your content was downloaded. Thing is.. the console never appeared. Being an old amigahead, I found this rather amusing really. It eventually disappeared and now nobody remembers.

But the thing that this Gamix specs remind me of the most, and I so wholly support something of the genre, is the MSX computer. MSX was basically a set of specifications on which to build a computer. They were very popular in Japan with many companies releasing their MSX versions. Long story short, this technology eventually morphed into out beloved Nintendo Entertainment System.

Let's hope this works. It would be great to once again have a non-branded platform for games.

[edit]
although with a little more reading on the site.. this looks like.. well.. a pc. really.
[/edit]

[bobamu]

msx morphed into nes?

no, waaaay different things man

never heard of gamix before, sounds like a "We've made something great! and it means free money" style dotbomb with no actual products

bet they burnt a lot of vc, they must have been desparate to get folks onboard if they were spamming you like that and no doubt many others, just to demonstrate all of the "hot industry interest" and all that

edit: ok, I just googled gamix, all I can say is "O_O"
two screenshots of opensource games I recognise, dunno what that thing is underneath, I don't have the urge to investigate this concept, for some reason

[TheMagicM]

basically a PC running linux & open source games.

[bobamu]

but with the benefit of you giving them money for it

[drewz21]

Ok, it looks like I didn't really stumble upon anything.  /sigh

[James]

bobamu wrote:
msx morphed into nes?

no, waaaay different things man

Oh yes yes, they are very different no questions there. What I meant is, the NES (well.. Famicom) was directly inspired by the success of the MSX platform and share many points in common. Many NES classics originate from the MSX as porting was easy enough between the machine. One that comes to mind is Metal Gear (which is much much much better on MSX btw).

[KThunder]

this is a really interesting idea however it has at least one flaw:
most people have computers that can boot off the cd and can get the same hardware outlined on the site.

if you want to homebrew self booting cds to freinds and run little games on them thats cool and it would be cool to have a console to do it but the bussiness plan doesnt look too good.
in other words there is a reason people are paying hundreds of dollars for new consoles and quite a bit for games as well. you can call it a stranglehold on the market or you can call it well developed games running on proprietary standards hardware

[XDelusion]

I feel the Efika hardware would be a better platform to use as a Open Game Machine of sorts. Granted it can't do heavy duty 3D game, but then again, quite a lot can be done on those low specs if the code is done correctly. Just look at Genetic Species, DSV4, and Payback as some good examples, all of those were even doable on the GBA which doesn't have near the horse power of the Efika, not even near!
 And of course if you use an enhanced DOOM source port with out all the bells and wistles, just 3d and sloped floor suppport and maybe some sort of scripting language, you could make HUGE maps with plenty to do to no end and not come near using up all the Efika's resources. Infact with a good video card, you could even add all the bells and wistles and the card would take the load off the CPU! Infact I don't see why something such as GzDOOM would not be possible, granted some features would have to be cut to compensate for the slower CPU, but if AROS, or MorphOS (if only we had OS 4 for it) had propper drivers for a semi-recent video card in 3d at least...

...they sky would be the limit!

http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&um=1&hl=en&client=opera&rls=en&q=gzdoom&btnG=Search+Images

http://img293.imageshack.us/my.php?image=d72admin01za9.jpg


http://forum.drdteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=232&sid=86b2b33c23378c9fb662025456cbe228

http://forum.drdteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=232&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=45&sid=b33b3b70ba6e7234b3a9a96323268030

 Of course the days of 2D I feel are FAR from Over, infact I feel like they never had there day if you want to be blunt about it. Take Castlevania for example, SOTN ran on the P.O.S. Paystation 1 and was beautiful, with a beautiful sound track, and game play that still to this day NEVER gets old because of all the power ups, and items, and exploration one could do. It was the world's first GTA as far as I'm concerned, only it had a plot with some meat to it, as opposed to picking up hoes, and selling drugs and what not.

 Imagine a Platformer set up in that vein...

 Beautiful hand drawn backgrounds, characters, and levels...

...or rather not levels, but HUGE worlds in which you could spend months and months exploring. And there is always room for alternate outcomes and endings and what not, to keep everything re-playable.


 Apparently OS4 is NEVER going to come to affordable hardware because "somebody" has no Love for us Die hard old school Amiga junkies! So I say why waste money on yet another PC game machine, and rather instead make some good use of this Efika and it's very intersting hardware, with video playback built in none the less. Now that could be put to some good use in story telling vide games as well.

 Remember Lunar 1 and 2 for the Sega CD? Valis, Popful mail? Games like that were trying to push 2D into a new realm, then the PSX came out and rained on the parade. And just as story telling began and gameplay and long enjoyment of the games began to take front seat...

...well you know the rest of the story. With abundant resources, people loose focuse of making the most of what they have, and focus more on fireworks. :/


P.S. what is this!?!??!

http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2006/05/amiga-reunification-project_14.html

[adolescent]

James wrote:
They were very popular in Japan with many companies releasing their MSX versions. Long story short, this technology eventually morphed into out beloved Nintendo Entertainment System.

Nonsense.  The Famicom (or NES) has almost nothing in common with the MSX, aside from being Japanese.

James wrote:
Oh yes yes, they are very different no questions there. What I meant is, the NES (well.. Famicom) was directly inspired by the success of the MSX platform and share many points in common. Many NES classics originate from the MSX as porting was easy enough between the machine. One that comes to mind is Metal Gear (which is much much much better on MSX btw).

How could that be when the Famicom was released BEFORE the MSX?  I don't dispute the fact that games originated on the MSX like Metal Gear, Parodius, etc. but the hardware was not influenced by it.

[XDelusion]

Yes, MSX came first!

[James]

There are many generations of MSX. And the first generation was released almost a year before the Famicom. The most well known MSX generation is the MSX2, which was indeed released in 86, a full three years after the Famicom, but the first one dates back to 83, some 10 months prior to the Famicom (also released in 83). It didn't get much attention outside of Japan, but it did inspire Nintendo to come up with a similar system. The famicom took a good year and a half to lift off and people often think it was released in 85, but that is the NES's release date.

The hardware between the machines is completely different, the MSX running on a good old Z80 cpu while the Famicom was a 6802.

Anyways.. not like *I* was there to see it first hand. This is stuff taken from the net. And many sources seem to contradict each other.. so.. well.. my final word: meh, whatever, I still want an MSX.

[adolescent]

The MSX standard was announced in June 1983 , but hardware wasn't released until later that year (according to msx websites).  The Famicom was released on July 15, 1983.  So, how again could Nintendo have been "inspired" to come up with a similar system?  

[James]

Look, its not like I'm gonna research this like it was of the utmost importance. You seem to have missed my last words... it's stuff I read from the net. If it was wrong, then I'm wrong too, end of story

[bobamu]

heh, don't believe everything you see on the net

tho the wikipedia entry on the nes looks quite decent and it was a 6502, and porting between the two machines is a significant job, maybe porting between the msx and the coleco and the earlier sega consoles wouldn't have been too severe for small games what with the only major differences being the sound chip and the very small amount of ram in the coleco.

but anyway, back to the thread, gamix still looks like a dotbomb to me

 :crazy: