Because I needed things to google, I did a bit of looking at the Pie's specs
for the feasibility of running windows as a miniature gaming platform.
Its got 1gb ram, which means you're outright using xp or earlier. Xp will
run happily enough on 1gb - though its happier with 2. Expect some lifetime
reduction in whatever card you choose for your OS drive.
This outlaws all of VG Storm's titles, unless they manage to get their games
running on xp, but other than that, I can't think of anything that won't run
on these specs.
The CPU looks ok - 1.2ghz, but its running four cores which will help offset
some of the speed issues. Fine for xp and games, as long as you don't expect
it to move the world.
Storage will depend on the micro SD card you pick. A brief amazon search
shows me a 64gb sandisk for $20, and a 32gb for $10. If you want more,
there's a 128gb for $42, which means there's no real cost per gb gain for
any of the capacities (a 16gb kingston is also available for $5.25, but
that's pushing the lower limit of what would run xp, and audiogames aren't
exactly small).
The latest Pie (released in February of this year) has built-in wireless, so
you'll be able to play games like swamp or run muds if you want to do that.
However, I see a couple relatively major problems:
Firstly, you're doing one of the major noNos in computing - running an
operating system off something like an sd card. Xp was not designed to do
this. The card was not designed to do this, and the middling amount of ram
you have means that once you start gaming you're going to be abusing the
card even further. The larger the card you get the longer it'll last - so
that 128gb suddenly looks a lot more appealing if you don't want to have to
replace your storage device.
Secondly, is the fact that you have to run windows Xp. I'm not going to
start on the unsupported thing - it doesn't matter for our purposes, because
you're not going to be doing anything secure on the pie - if its on the
internet, you're probably only connecting to game servers. What I will say
though is that you can't buy Xp anymore. This may be the death null for any
project that wants to sell these as fully decked out audiogaming machines.
The last thing you want is Microsoft kicking down your door with a lawsuit
over those 250 pirated copies of Xp you sold.
I think its a really cool idea, but when you get into setting it up, its
probably not going to work out as well as you'd hope, unless you somehow
manage to configure a linux distro via wine to run all the games you want to
include (linux will run fine on those specs but since all of our audiogames
are compiled for windows you'd have to script an amazing amount of prep
work).
Best,
John
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Paul Lemm" <paul.lem...@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2016 12:52
To: "'Gamers Discussion list'" <gamers@audyssey.org>
Subject: [Audyssey] creating an audio game console - was RE: memory
Hi Travis,
I don't know a huge amount about it, but wouldn't something like the
Raspberry PI be perfect for something like this? There cheap at less than
£40 for a brand new latest PI model, and I know you can get free text to
speech for the PI , as I have one myself which I use as a kind of media
server for streaming movies and sport so it had spoken menus. I did
however brought a PI for my brother as a present and turned it into a retro
gaming console (sorry before anyone gets excited, this was a retro gaming
console for sighted people so completely inaccessible( that played
everything from the ZX spectrum through to the Nintendo N64, because it
already had built in WIFI and USB ports it was easy to hook up to the
internet wirelessly and we plugged an Xbox controller straight into the
PI so it was fairly straight forward. I believe you can get a windows OS
for the PI, I'm just not sure if audio games would run on that or not, if
they did it would be a simple case of installing the windows OS, setting up
the text to speech, loading it up with audio games then once done just
copying the SD card , you could then either sell an SD card with the
preformatted image on the card, or set up a download to the SD card image
that people could download and then put on an SD card themselves, you could
either sell the PI yourself or leave it for people to buy the PI themselves
as they would just need to insert the preformatted SD card and it would be
good to go with no setting up required.
Again like I said I don't know a huge amount about the PI and the different
operating systems and whether this would work, but now I think about it I
vaguely remember someone on this list saying they had set up a PI to play
audio games on, I could be wrong on this, but I'm sure someone did, I just
can't remember who it was.
Sorry for the long message by the way
People would just need to insert the SD card into a PI and it would be all
set up and ready to go
-----Original Message-----
From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Travis Siegel
Sent: 21 October 2016 16:38
To: Gamers Discussion list
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] memory
No it wouldn't cost much at all. I've already tried to fly this
concept, and got turned down flat by most developers I approached.
They['re just not interested. <sigh>
Using a raspberry pi as the heart, it would be a trivial matter to build
a menuing system, pack the sd card full of every kind of game
imaginable, and sell the thing for a hundred bucks or so, and still make
a bit of a proffit (admittedly, not much, but still ...) The problem is
tht you'll need games for the thing, and since it uses an arm processor
(the same line as the iPhones) folks just don't want to port their
windows apps to the arm processor, even though, in some cases it's as
simple as recompiling with a different mainstream compiler. I thought
about going ahead and making an sd card with all the stuff I could find
and port on my own, then just sell the sd card for a few bucks more to
cover costs than anything else, and I may still do that, but without
ports of things like rsgames game client, and a bit more sound variety,
folks aren't going to be much interested in it.
(Just for reference)
This is my second attempt to float the idea of a gaming console for the
blind, the first attempt was several years ago using a small credit card
sized computer from parallax, and although initially folks said they
were interested, once the capabilities of the chip were discussed, they
all gave it up as a bad idea, because it wasn't on par with modern
windows systems. (well duh), that's the whole point of a gaming
console. But anyway, that's it in a nutshell.
On 10/20/2016 6:38 PM, The Life of Z wrote:
Thanks Dark that' is some incouragement. Maybe I'll be able to play it
aafter allWWWell, that was an intresting post. I think the reason why
developers don't make any game additions for the sighted is because of X
box 1 and playstatttion 4. I had an idea for a console for the blind but
I don't know how to get it off the ground. It would be like a game console
like and x--box or playstation except it could handle games for the blind.
I'd even have a li'l button tthat you could press to have a visual display
just incase you had sighted family or friends that wanted to play with
you.
Of courrse, if I got some developers to help me bbbuild the thing, it
would
probably cost a bunch like everything made fffor us blind people.
Somtimesss I hate that.
On Oct 20, 2016 11:43 AM, "Travis Siegel" <tsie...@nfbcal.org> wrote:
You're likely to get a lot of responses to these questions, but I'll
chime
in anyway.
To answer the first question.
No, it doesn't take as much room for a game for the visually impaired as
it does for a sighted gamer. The reason being, although sounds can be
large, (especially high-quality ones), you don't have to deal with
graphics, which can eat considerably more space. My son is always buying
the newest games, and these days, they're almost always several gigabytes
in size. I have yet to see an audio game that packs that big of a punch,
though I'm not exactly an expert on audio games for the blind,
considering
I'm not a fan of windows, and only recently got another windows machine
which I have done without for more than 10 years. On the other hand, I'm
quite a bit puzzled why absolutely no attempt is made by folks who make
blind games to make them sighted friendly. Admittedly,it would take extra
work, and in some cases, it might be more work than it's worth, but in
general, when a game is made for the blind community, nothing is done to
the game to make it be playable by sighted gamers.
Sometimes, the effort is so minimal, it is laughable, and yet, developers
of blind games do the very thing they accuse the sighted world of doing
to
us. <shrug> I have never released a product that wasn't usable by both
sighted and blind users alike, though again, I haven't been doing
anything
at all in the windows world for more than 10 years, and most of the
freelance work I do has nothing to do with blind folks at all, but that's
beside the point. I find it frustrating sometimes when I download a
shiny
new game to play, only to find that my wife and children can't enjoy the
game with me, because there is no attempt made to give the sighted world
any interface at all. Case in point, rs games. Except for the sounds,
there's absolutely no reason whatsoever why the client can't have the
text
written on the screen right along with the spoken text. Instead, the
sighted folks have to use the web interface wich is so plain, they don't
even want to bother with it.
I've been a web developer for roughly 20 years, and honestly, it's not
hard to make web sites presentable to the sighted as well as the blind if
it's done correctly. Yes, you'll need a sighted person to look at the
thing, and say things like, move the graphic to the other side of the
text,
or why does that link not have a picture, but it's not a difficult
process.
As for the rest of your questions, I'll leave those for others, as I've
gotten badly off topic with this post, and while I could rant for several
pages, it's not helpful to do so, so I'll stop here, with the expectation
that I'll get blasted 3 ways from sunday for daring to speak such
blastphemy, and discussions of how hard and time consuming it would be to
make things usable by the sighted. I don't mean full out graphics with
full
motion video and such, but just a little effort put into maybe having a
few
pictures, (or as pointed about rsgames client,) just adding text instead
of
having speech only. It's not hard, and it allows friends and family to
play along, even if it's not the best experience in the world for them.
On 10/19/2016 12:53 PM, The Life of Z wrote:
I have a question for you guys. Does it take a lot more memory for games
for the blind to be created or is it about the same as a game for the
sighted world? My second question is does it take up a lot of space for
all
you gamers out their who have PC computers? My third and final question
is
this: is their a gamers page on youtube for the blind gamer like myself?
Thanks list.
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