Hi!
The folks at xbox-linux.sourceforge.net hacked the microsoft xbox and made a linux installer for it. I thought it could be a nice box for running pd in installations and performances since it is small, cheap (250EUR), reasonable performance (733MHz PIII, 64MB ram), and a basic but usefull set of interfaces (4xUSB, 100baseTX ethernet, stereo sound output, composite video output) and storage (10GB HD, dvd-rom). I went ahead and bought an xbox, and installed a modchip. Installation went smooth, and pd seems to run fine "out-of-the-box", but I haven't stressed or used it a lot so far.
The downsides (for installation and performance applications):
- the usb-ports are not of any standard shape (but with some tooling and
glueing I replaced the connectors with regular USB ones).
- the 3d/opengl acceleration of the geforce3-mutant inside is not
available (not good for GEM)
- no sound input (solvable via an usb-audio device)
- fan noise (more than my desktop PC)
- it does not read CDR's (I had immediate success with a CDRW), but
the mutated dvd-reader can be replaced with some extra modifications.
So far it looks perfectly usable, but not as your main patch development machine.
j#|@