Really? You expect someone to invest thousands of hours of personal development time to give YOU a free platform to tinker on? And in 90's form factor of 2D?
Open source has its place, but you're asking for someone to selflessly give their entire life so you can "play" in a sandbox - and in 2D instead of 3D, as if that's viable anymore. Give me a break. If it's so easy, do it yourself.
Hey bud, I dunno who pissed in your cornflakes, but there are plenty of these kinds of projects out there already .. and they're not all so dire as you proclaim. This is something that has been happening, incidentally, for over 20 years and multiple independent variations, so .. its neither 'a waste of time' nor is it fantasy in any way. These machines are out there, and they work very well.
The Open Pandora is a great little games machine, has decent 3D capabilities, and its successor - the Dragonbox Pyra - is going to be even more superb. Calm down a little, and take a look:
It's not that. Read my parent comment. They lament the fact that someone hasn't freely handed out an open source handheld gaming device... for 2D games. Not only would 2D gaming be outdated and a waste of a modern gaming device, but they wish some company or individual would hand them a hardware device and software platform, all for "tinkering".
They're asking for a million dollars or more to be invested by someone else, simply to be able to fool around with it. The very concept screams not understanding how much time and money it takes to produce such hardware and matching software. We're not talking about $5,000 and one month of development time from some indie developer; we're talking about more than $1 million and 2-3 years of development time from a serious shop... all for free and as open source? Not going to happen.
>all for free and as open source? Not going to happen.
Has happened: GP32, GP2X, GPH WIZ, CAANNOO, Open Pandora .. Pyra .. PocketCHIP.
There is a lot for you to catch up on. These are open machines, made by people who are quite content with contributing a great deal to the Open Source ethos you seem to think has no place in this market ..
What's wrong with 2D? What's wrong with an open OS?
> They're asking for a million dollars or more to be invested by someone else, simply to be able to fool around with it.
And they're presumably willing to pay some amount of money for the opportunity to do so. The groups that have successfully designed, built, and sold open gaming handhelds in the past (and present, actually) seem like good proof that a product like that is something that a lot of people want and are willing to pay for.
> all for free and as open source? Not going to happen.
"Free" as in "gratis"? Maybe for the software, especially if it's built as a hardware-specific SDK, on top of already-available open libraries, like SDL. I'd expect to pay for the hardware, and pay more than something that's subsidized by the subsequent game purchases (like Sony or Nintendo hardware).
well, I did (see my other bitbox project comment).
I can accept a million dollars but I did it for free (in fact for a cost. Of course you can say it's bad, or not a really "modern" in the sense of "powerful" but in the sense of "available with somewhat current plugs" and I was happy to see the GP comment, as in : there are other interested people, fine !
As I'm not the only one, I don't understand your angry comment.
Open source has its place, but you're asking for someone to selflessly give their entire life so you can "play" in a sandbox - and in 2D instead of 3D, as if that's viable anymore. Give me a break. If it's so easy, do it yourself.