Thats why you guys portablise stuff... noone wants to give you want you want in the consumer electronics market place... or atleast without reinventing the wheel and charging you 18 times over to rebuy all your favourite games. (but I digress). Where to start? Well I posted this earlier...
....and it could be done, but its a bit stupid. I have through recent research found VIA's range of embedded boards, already cut down smaller than 12cm by 12cm size, and built to be portable they also have better arranged ports and smarter ram positioning to save on vertical height.I would love to make one myself... but i like smaller better...
Nano ITX standard board... 12cm by 12cm with a height due to ports of about 3.5 cms... (aprox 4.7 inches square, and 1.4 inches high). Not sure i can do much about the height, maybe i could desolder the ports and rearrange them (probably completely mess up the board).
NANO ITX specs, 1 - 1.4ghz eden processor, indubuilt IGP graphics with a C3 chip, equivilant to 8x AGP MMX 2d and 3d. Meant to deliver FALWLESS dvd and mpeg2 play back, and capable of playing diablo 2 (not so bad really). can have up to a gig of ddr 400 ram. Mini PCI (kinda gonna ignore that), network port, 2 usb 2.0 ports, vga, tv out, and built in stereo (can't remember if its 2.1 or what).
I figure with a hacked PS-one screen or high quality 5 - 7" LCD screen, and a 100gig laptop hard drive, with as tiny an inbuilt keyboard as i can find, and an external mouse, this would be the cutest nano laptop one could build.
I'd have to go back and check power consumption to see if it is really viable. I was considering to day, if it had an external battery pack that i could wear as belt clip, with a cable running to the unit, i could add some sort of nub mouse controller and mayber even make it a wearable PC.. Oh to dream.
TOTAL COST, whole bunch of money... real satisfaction in having something very small. Plus I am an old school gamer, maybe with a suite of arcade and console emulators and a personally customized usb game pad then this could be one of the sweetest toyes in the universe.
Its actually very viable, VIA has started production of embedded CHEAP ultra portable 12" laptops for linspire, its just a slightly modded mine ITX board apparently.
Why would you do it? Now I have been into PDA's, and portable video devices, tablet pc's and mp3 players for a while. And nothing does everything together as small as I want, without making you pay the earth for it. Now I find that there ARE embedded (portably designed), incredibly low power consumption boards around that that can take true ddr ram, playback amazing DVD quality video, and have the power to run high end computer games from 4 years ago, so why wouldn't i be excited.
So if you want to spend the time, wireing one together, with either a 6" or 7" lcd (touch screen or not your choice) plus a high quality game pad, and a very large harddrive and a dvd drive emulator you could efectively build the OQO equivilant from 3/4 to 1/2 the price... and to me, coupled with the feeling of accomplishment, that would be all i could ever want...
this is KANDYMAN, slightly hyper ventalating, signing off... for now!
So I say to everyone that says buy a laptop... just bite my butt
PS... everyone must visit these links... and consider the posibilities!
http://www.viaembedded.com/designwin/pr ... ompany=149
http://store.earthlcd.com/


