• kadu@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    It’s totally possible if they subsidize hardware costs and sell a PC with a fancy frontend and small form factor.

    It’s completely impossible if they’re looking for custom hardware.

    • reflectedodds@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This is what I was thinking. For a first iteration to get out the door immediately it could just be windows with a “game browser” that launches full screen when you turn it on 😂

      • kadu@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I mean, that’s what all Steam Deck competitors really are. They’re Windows 11 with atrocious launchers on top, some of which acceptable and some very buggy, plus a literal standard AMD APU that AMD is selling by the bucket, and half of them share board designs sold by Chinese suppliers pretty much ready made.

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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        7 months ago

        It wouldn’t be Windows, it’d probably be a variant of Astra Linux.

        The year of Linux may finally be among us.

      • kautau@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        It would have to run steamos or something the complexity of all the always-online launchers that modern triple a games has is something that steam handles well, and likely a huge trip up point on any frontend slapped on a windows pc

          • meathorse@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            That is literally what the first Xbox was. It’s internals was a custom mboard running a Celeron 700 and 3.5" HDD (can’t remember what the graphics was based on, maybe a GeForce MX?) with a customised Win2k OS.

            All approx. It’s early and I can’t be bothered confirming those specs are 100% accurate :p

    • bigkahuna1986@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      There’s a guy on youtube called CNCDan who did exactly that. SFF pc in a very nice 3d printed case with custom PCBs for the controller boards. If you’re at all interested in that sort of thing I think he has a 9 part series on how he built it.

    • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Just get one of those all in one 4"x4" PCs, slap a logo and a custom Linux distro on it and you have a console.

    • LiveLM@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      It’s totally gonna be a bunch of pirated games and a copy of Launchbox/Playnite lol

    • NaoPb@eviltoast.org
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      7 months ago

      I am also half expecting them to adopt/steal hardware from other companies.

  • Gork@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    I look forward to the release of the Blyatbox “October Revolution” edition console.

    • BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one
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      7 months ago

      He is the Russian equivalent of a baby boomer mandating with the implied threat of death that his own government pay a single shitty local satellite set-top box distributor (let’s be real, it’s likely just cheap chinese hardware) to develop and spread Russian culture through video game media in less than three months (which is probably already developed and was waiting for more money to market and enter production).

      Sounds like he is very in touch, because that is one of the ways how U.S. culture is spreading throughout the world currently.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        7 months ago

        Sounds like he is very in touch, because that is one of the ways how U.S. culture is spreading throughout the world currently.

        With the absolutely stonking caveat that the US government didn’t mandate that, it just happened naturally over time. Over decades and decades. Particularly helped by the US speaking English. In a lot of parts of the world English is a good second language.

        But the only people who speak Russian is Russia. No one has Russian is their second language outside of a few Baltic states and even then often it’s a tertiary language, not a true second language. This is a huge limiter on their ability to spread culture.

      • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        … with software and hardware development. Literally what the article talks about.

  • stardust@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    Gaming is of upmost importance to the health of a nation. Future wars will be done through esports.

      • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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        7 months ago

        Sorry guys, we’re under dictator rule now. We should be getting some food coupons next week, otherwise we’ll starve. If only xxx_Epicl33tGamer69_xxx didn’t let us down in the big game last night. Oh well, such is life.

      • msage@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        League of Legends is so bland and uninteresting.

        Just play Dota. It’s the original, far more complex (you can eat trees!), and actually mess with the enemies way more than just dealing chip damage.

        • PraiseTheSoup@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          I played DotA for 14 years and while I agree it’s better than LoL in every single way I still wouldn’t recommend that anyone actually play it.

        • Noodle07@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I’m not talking about gameplay, the league of legend in its lore is there to prevent real world war

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Future Russian parlement: We will crush, nuke and bury whatever will be left. In Quake.

  • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    On one hand even the Nintendo Switch is just a modified Nvidia shield so this task would be a simple one for most states. On the other hand: Sanctions and insane corruption. I‘d be surprised if they manage to release anything that could keep up with Consoles from 2 generations ago.

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        Exactly. Nobody would expect Japan to land a man on the moon in 3 months just because they’ve been dominating video games forever.

  • kromem@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I love how he’s modernizing the punch lines to all the old Soviet jokes.

  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    7 months ago

    At one point in time Russia actually had their own computer system back in the '80s. So I guess just dust that off?

    It died because it had non-square pixels, because that’s not stupid, and so was a pain to develop any games for.

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de
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        7 months ago

        Guess what other obscure old system used rectangular pixels? The IBM PC.

        CGA and EGA used resolution modes that were multiples of 320x200 (PAR 6:5). VGA’s 16-color hi-res mode was the first to support square pixels at 640x480, and it would become a standard for years to come because TempleOS and Windows used it (you can even force Windows 7 to run in this mode!)

        The NES and SNES had PAR 16:15 8:7 (oops) (which is often ignored in emulation), and so did the most common NTSC DVD-Video mode (none of the commonly used ones had square pixels but you only really notice it with subtitles - you cannot correctly display them at native resolution on an LCD).

        And that’s just the successful systems I know off the top of my head.

        Soviet personal computers failed for other, obvious reasons. They struggled to copy the latest chips, and the economic incentive was minuscule despite the government’s investment - very few people could afford a computer in the Eastern Bloc, and they could not be exported due to patent infringement and being years behind. The economy collapsed after USSR broke up and nobody wanted to invest to rebuild the industry.

        That being said, people in the Eastern Bloc were very resourceful with what they had (mostly clones of Atari’s 8-bit home computers and IBM PCs). A blind person from Czechoslovakia made a speech synthesis sound card for an IBM-compatible PC, which functioned well enough to allow him to be employed as a full-time programmer. At least one of the three exemplars works to this day.

        • DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 months ago

          I love how you threw TempleOS in there. And I get the reference, 640x480 is the resolution God intended or something to that effect.

    • el_bhm@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      The story is way more interesting. Cannot dig the article, but dropping soviet originated hardware had to do also with programming languages. Western entities started with heavy lobbing, often dressed as grass root movement, for languages that for western based systems. Not sure how well supported this thesis was, but it was interesting that preferences of engineers got used for market absorption.
      Not a new thing by today’s standards.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        7 months ago

        I’m pretty sure there is an English language compiler for it now, but I don’t know when that became available.

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Russia has own computers on own processors produced on Micron(not to be confused with Micron Technology). But they are expensive as cast iron bridge and hard to get.

      • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        “Expensive as a cast iron bridge” is a great saying. Is that something I’ve just never heard before, or did you coin the phrase?

        • uis@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          This is well known phrase in russian. “Стоит как чугунный мост” literally means “costs like cast iron bridge”.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      Didn’t the NES produce non-square pixels? Like pure data wise the screen was square but at some point in making it NTSC it gets stretched horizontally to 4:3?

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de
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        7 months ago

        pure data wise

        Data-wise, the screen is 32x30 tiles, which is 256x240 pixels, or 280x240 including the border. (The height is set by the modified NTSC standard at 240p60, and the width of 256 was chosen to simplify 8-bit arithmetic, plus 24 pixels for a border.) With square pixels, the aspect ratio would be 16:15, or 7:6 including border. The video timing was chosen so that this fills the entire TV screen, which is 4:3. As a result, the pixels have an aspect ratio of (4:3)/(7:6)=8:7 (varies a little between TVs). However, the NES could only flip sprites and not rotate them 90°, so this could be taken into account when creating the rotated versions.

        Another successful system with non-square pixels was the IBM PC, whose CGA and EGA cards had a 320x200 resolution (or multiples thereof in other modes), which resulted in PAR (4:3)/(8:5)=6:5. Square pixels first became available with VGA’s hi-res mode (16 colors at 640x480), adopted by systems such as Windows 3.1 and TempleOS.

  • Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    Just give him an NES with Battletoads, file off any print, and tell him you made it.

    • bigkahuna1986@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      Hey when the KGB is standing in the corner looking serious, you bet those engineers will have the “stats” to prove it’s competitive.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        7 months ago

        Well it will be competitive. Because all its competition aren’t entering Russia anyway because of sanctions.