Re: What do you think of a game console for the blind?
(Ah, missed where you said you were building on Debian. Well, and I was working on my previous post when post 3 came in. Anyway, hopefully some of this makes sense? I think I'm jumping the gun by a lot.)
OK, take 2, with headings:
Haptics
What I want is a super awesome haptic feedback controller that manages to retain the basic controller shape that's been around since PC and PS1 took the SNES controller and made it twice as thick. Or possibly an alternate scheme with a touch output device and a controller that can function one-handed. Or, even more insane, a tactile display on top of something like a braille keyboard (as in, most of the buttons ina row for easy switching between viewing and input). These are horribly impractical and I think I might be a minority or a minority in this regard.
I don't know if stereo vibration is practical in a non-clunky controller. I'd like to see it attempted, if it hasn't been already. It h
as the advantage of being pretty straightforward and intuitive compared to the other haptics techniques no one has managed to commercialize that I want to play with. But practicality, man.
I don't know what experience you have with this sort of thing, but I get the impression that jumping into something innovative on the haptics end would be crazy enough to derail the whole thing, so practically speaking, it should probably stay minimal for now. If this happens and you can stick with it, though, I'd at least suggest setting it up so that the possibility of supporting arbitrary haptic devices is available in case of future products.
I could summarize the i/o methods that I know about, if desired, but I don't want to get too far off topic.
Audio/video
Would this be intended as a TV-based device? Handheld? Other?
There are loads of audio output devices: traditional line-out headphones, USB headphones, random speakers, surround sound systems,
televisions, anything intermediate to a television (I have no idea how these work anymore; I haven't had to hook up a console that way on anything newer than a VCR). All of these can have any number of channels. Heck, you might even find a use for supporting MIDI devices (disclaimer: is probably joking about that one. Probably.)
So, how many ports does it have? USB, line-in/line-out (microphone support?), HDMI? ... Dare I say, RF?
How about video support? If you can have at least enough graphics support to be interesting to the sighted, it might be more popular. I don't mean in the sense that sighted gamers would be especially into it; just being able to play with sighted friends and family would make it more attractive to more players.
(under-the-hood possibility: if there are any libraries for game developers to use, and there is graphics support, some defaults that draw basic shapes appropriate to the library would be better than nothing.)
(Might y
ou include some sort of MIDI driver, with support for higher quality sound fonts? VST? RAM and disk space are cheaper now than they were 20 years ago, but if you're building physical products on the budget you can get from Kickstarter and hoping to get them built and distributed, you'll find that everyone likes to pay less. Might be irrelevant if said features wind up taking up more resources than recorded music, without resorting to lower quality synths.)
(Ooh, on that note, synthesizers. Because everyone likes to play with synthesizers! ... Hardware Synthesizers? Hmm.)
I'm imagining the ideal setup being similar to mainstream consoles, maybe with better headphone support. So the most interesting details in this regard are more under-the-hood.
Overall Concerns
I pause here, to reiterate the market problem. This would be cool in theory, but in order for it to work, there need to be plenty of games, and plenty of people to play them, otherwise
you built a cool toy that will spend most of its time sitting on a shelf as a monument to your ability to build cool junk.
Kickstarter is awesome because it is a clever commitment device: "I want to support this project, but only if it succeeds, so instead of giving you my money, I promise to give you my money only if enough people likewise promise that the project is at least fully funded."
Game Consoles need to overcome the same problem: they need developers to create games for the console, but the developers need there to be an audience. The latest Playstation / XBox / Nintendo console are guaranteed enough of an audience that game publishers can start playing market politics by picking which platform they like most. A console designed for blind people by an individual, or even a couple people, doesn't get that luxury. So, for this project to become reality, you need to line up loads of incentives: backers need to know that you will develop, produce, and
distribute the console, and that there will be enough games for it to keep it active; developers need to know that it will get made and distributed, and that there will be enough gamers to warrant the effort; and you need backers, gamers, and developers to support you (and for your hardware efforts to succeed, preferably quickly).
That requires lots of things to go right. I'd still like to see it happen, but the hard part isn't likely to be building a prototype.
Back to the hardware...
It seems best to arrange the processors and their components based on operations that need to be done quickly and in parallel.
A possibility would be to dedicate a core (or in certain cases, a dedicated processor) to a specific category: one for each audio, video, controller i/o, and other game-related processing. In especially complex cases, multithreading for AI mightn't hurt.
This seems like overkill. Are we going to need a high-end GPU? Probably not, but
does that mean it should be avoided? Eh...
If you're making a blind people console, though, it seems like a given that the audio system needs to be impressive. To that end, dedicating a core/processor to audio seems like an obvious step.
The complexity needed for processing controllers depends entirely on how the controllers are made. Let's assume we're going with something modern, and that we want to keep track of what's going on with minimal latency. I don't see this taking up a whole core by a longshot, but I'd still feel better giving it as little interference as possible. If touch screens, or complex haptics are involved, they might require more complicated on-the-fly calculations, so I'd lump all those into one. But if you want to stop with a generic controller, probably leave it easy to offload game-specific processes into that one.
So that just leaves the processor for game instructions.
Ok, that's great and all , but then comes the part of going from a game (loaded from... disk? USB? Does this thing come with a hard drive? SSD? SD Card? Internet connection?) to instructions for the processor(s). ... Hm, good luck with that.
Summary
If you're not just attaching some fun periferals to a Raspberry Pie, things get kinda crazy.
- Making something like this for a community, rather than just yourself, involves loads of coordination problems. Devs, gamers, financial backers, and your own abilities to make the hardware happen all need to know the others are going to do their part, in order for it to happen.
- I think video support is a good idea, even if it isn't "OMG COD12 looks so real I'm going to shoot my friends every day until the next COD comes out!"-quality.
- Audio output is complicated. Don't try to build it from scratch, if you can avoid doing so.
- I want more haptics than you! [1][2][3][4]
- I have no idea what the interface for devs would look like, but I like a mix of ridiculously low level with ridiculously high level.
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