Quote:Original post by Oluseyi
Maybe that's the real solution: build your "console" around an emulator, which solves the problems of hardware variance by emulating a consistent environment. Or, if you prefer, you can call it a Hardware Abstraction Layer. [smile]

You know, I've actually got a project like that kicking around in my head, I wrote a simulator for a NES/SNES/GENESIS inspired GPU for a job application. All it'd need is an equally retro CPU simulator and a few other bits... Problem is, I got the job, so my time is limited ;)

I built myself a "DOS console" a while back. 100MHz Pentium 1, 32MB RAM, some Crystal 100% SB16 compatible sound card, 32X CDROM drive and floppy drive.
I formatted a floppy disk under DOS 6.22 with the /s option, added a bunch of system drivers (CD ROM extensions, mouse driver) and used RAMDRIVE.SYS to create a 20MB RAM drive.
I knocked together a simple DOS application in QB that would try and open a file to write on the CDROM drive. If that failed (no disk) it would loop around until it broke out with a different error code (to the extent that the disk was read-only). At this point it went through a list of files referenced in a text file on the floppy, seeing if they existed on the CD (a crude way to work out which game you'd put in). It would then, if found, look up which file to run on the CD in the same text file and shell it. When the game was quit it would eject the CDROM and prompt (if any had been created) to zip up the contents of the RAM drive and copy to a floppy (there's my nifty memory card system!) Before running the game it would let you unzip files from your "memory-card" floppy to the RAM drive too.
Unfortunately, there was a lot of disk swapping between the system disk and the memory disk, booting off a floppy was horribly slow and it wasn't very elegant to have to sit through an installer/config for some games. It ran DOOM, DOOM2, Blood, Quake and Tomb Raider fine, though!
Not entirely related, but that's my experience. [smile]

IDE compact flash addapters would also work. They'd probably be a fair bit cheaper than thouse specialized IDE flash disks.

Is there a problem booting from a CD? Discs would/could be customized to include a small OS, and it wouldn't add too greatly to the size, ~50MB at most. Have the OS create a ram disk and load itself there... you could probaly even use an image of the OS which would be faster to load and compressable to save disc space.

If you do go through all the trouble of having a flash disk, you may as well use a hard drive and have the unit double as a media player (possibly with PVR capabilities.)

If you're going to be hackish, you might as well go all the way: Why not use a decent compression algorithm (like PAQ) and compress as much as possible (including video drivers, etc, so only the bare essentials of the OS are uncompressed). Sure, it'll take a few minutes to load up, but you could then probably skip the CD drive and run off a $10 flash drive.

my idea is to either run a small os on it(only a couple of commands;eject,run game/program/whatever, and other neccesities(leave the actual commands to the programs)). My other idea is put the os'es on a live CD with HD write capabilities.