Re: What do you think of a game console for the blind?
The difficulty/desirability/viability are all in a grand struggle, here.
The simplest way would probably involve a Raspberry Pie and... Linux or something.
So... to answer the question:
1. Yes, I want one.
2. But I don't expect it to work out very well without lots of effort and luck and good promotion. A good platform is tricky to build, but then you need to have games for it, and you need the price to be reasonable. For a simpler example, see Aprone's Se Munkey.
3. Don't ask me for what I want no one else will want it that way bwahahaha (Translation: I get along better with retro style limitations and optimization problems and ridiculous exploits that aren't the least bit human readable. Also I wanna a tactile display. I got my hands on a PS4 controller last week, and discovered it has a touch screen in the middle. And it's not a Senseg touch screen, so bleargh.)
Ok, so let's pretend we all know what we're doing for a minute and completely ignored my warning in my third list item, because now you have me thinking about Accessible Console Optimizations again.
There are multiple layers to think about. There's the surface-level i/o and performance details that make up the user experience; that's the end goal.
Let's ask these questions: what input/output techniques, channels, devices, etc should be supported? Would there be any graphics support at all? How about a WiFi or ethernet connection for online games? Are you going to use an existing audio system to handle the question of stereo/mono/surround sound (5.1? 7.1? Which manufacturer?)/headphones/microphones/etc?
How about controllers? Existing USB devices (where do you get the drivers?) or something unique to this console (seems more like your aim, and in a situation where I know it could be done, I'd say do that one, but reality is not gentle, as mistresses go)? Would you want to do anything unique
with their design? Maybe multiple designs, even, to accommodate other disabilities or play styles?
What about haptic feedback? Is there vibration? (Ahem: Immersion sounded cool for this at one point)? How about my idea of "The standard Playstation/XBox controller has two seemingly useless legs; can we put an actuator in both of them, and vibrate in stereo?" Can we put a touch screen in the middle like the PS4, but add Tixels or Bending Wave Actuators for tactile feedback? Can we stick a 4:2 Braille Display in the middle instead? Can we make it support the Novint Falcon?
(Psst: a homebrew device similar to Senseg's Tixels would probably be rather cheap, if lacking all the fine-tuning they've doubtless come up with in their years of development *cough*. Even easier if the touch area ca
n be opaque.)
Ok, enough optimism. Let's worry about the internals.
For something like this, you'll either need to build off an open source OS or something similar (*points to Android and Raspberry Pie*), or learn how to build and include everything you'll need in C/C++ (I'd say Purebasic sounds decent for this, but I know nothing about the licenses or OS-specific dependencies involved)
Audio Games can get away with a lot of corner-cutting in terms of detail. If you want to avoid supporting graphics (or at least, avoid supporting graphics better than those in Swamp), all you have to worry about efficiency-wise is your audio engine.
Custom hardware would be awesome, but impractical, seeing as the single most impressive thing you could do here is build an audio processor to rival modern 3D GPUs, at which point the console is just icing. (Resurrecting the dead 3D audio hardware would be spectacular enough a feat of techno-necromancy that you wo
uld immediately be revealed as a terrible wizard.)
Actually, the hardware design for the lowest level stuff here is actually kinda fun to think about. Mostly because there's probably a correct answer and I don't know it so get to compare what I know about today's devices to what I know about 20-30 year old devices.
Ok, ok, this post is a long mess, and I need to go pretend I know anything about the processor-level stuff. So let's focus on the middle level: the part where game developers work. If games need to be designed for the console specifically, that presents several issues, but opens up the option of a nice high-level API to simplify access to the hardware.
On the other hand, you could just write bindings to the major programming languages out there for any specific hardware, and let nature take its course.
I like the "all custom, all the time" idea, but it's ridiculously impractical.
The opposite end--just wrap an
open source OS like Android and throw in accessibility features--is kinda boring and pointless without the i/o being especially fun (see: the Braille2go for an example of something similar getting stuck in development hell).
OK, I'ma go try to rewrite all this and actually think it through more and hopefully come back with something more coherent.
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