Book on Console Hardware designs

I've worked from atari 'woody', Apple II,C64,AMIGA,ST,NES,SNES,Master System,Game Gear and upto the new stuff. I would imagine an overview, tricks tactics and oddnesses of a machine would be of great interest to a lot of people here, but it wouldn't be worth printing. If I wrote it as a PDF and sold it it at, ohhh, $5 would that seem reasonable?

Of course, I would pick out some of y'all for additional material so we could maybe get enough stuff to be worth making it a paperback (say 5000 copies).

Am I crazy... Well, yws. Is this idea plain dumb or just badly concieved?

Seanray:

 

It wouldn't be a bad idea at all, I've always been interested in console designs and I know many people who is too. All you would need is letting people know about it, maybe posting in some other forums and a small website/blog can be helpful.

About the price, $5 sounds reasonable for it in my opinion, I would get it for that price

 

I'd love it- if its accurate, features good pictures and interesting commentary then it'd be a must.

 

It would be cool to see in paperback form.

 

I'd definitely buy it, although I'd much rather see it published.

 

It's something I'd certainly like to read and be willing to buy - preferably in dead-tree form, but I'll take what I can get.

Having said that, friends of mine have written technical books and they all say the same thing: it's much harder than it sounds. Not that I'm trying to discourage you.

 

Well, as I said to you before, I think it's a good idea. Your thoughts are certainly going quite far from what I'm doing and I don't see me finishing for quite some time. Like I told ya, if you want to do something like this, go right ahead! I would be very interested to see the final result - in print, hopefully!

I think you've chosen a topic that would be both niche enough to not be overwhelmed and have to be selective, but not so niche that there's no market for it or it'd be too short. Covering tech aspects of every (or many) consoles would certainly be an interesting prospect!

 

do you plan also on interviewing interesting peoples ? would be cool to read peoples memories on the stuff that happend when the consoles where developed ? ( Dean Takahashi xbox 360 had a very interesting insight for me)

 

It'll be an enormous project, if you think you can maintain your interest for close to a year (just guessing) then go for it. Barc0de, kammedo, and I can provide some details on the N64.

 

Give a basic ebook away and get a small run of quality printed copies to sell. Ebooks hit the torrents quicker than you'd think, and (perhaps unfortunately) a lot of people tend to attach more worth to a book if it's printed.

 

A book would be a lot more preferable. A lot of the appeal is in presentation, also.

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Retro...bs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230473971&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230474014&sr=1-1

Two examples of books I love..

 

I hope you go through with this. I think it's a great idea and would glady plot down some cash for a PDF, let alone a hard copy.

 

I would buy, pdf or not !

 

I guess it would be a 12 month job. There are things that I found obvious that I never heard of others using (but I HOPE they did). Example - Megadrive had 64K of RAM at FF0000-FFFFFF but, remember, the top 8 address lines were not connected. Therfore if you sacrificed an address register, then all variables can be short-word addressed. Just point say, A6 at FF7FFF and you have a signed 16-bit offset for everything. Just one example.
Problem is going to be having to clean-room all the technical stuff. I cannot quote from any official manuals, I have to either find my old (I mean like 20 year old!) source-code for some platforms.
Should be fun, though.
Another issue is contributors. I would HOPE that other people found very cute tricks for consoles that they would like to make public.
I guess if it were paper then I would need to take orders (and a small reservation fee) and have the 100-200 copies printed and sent out.

At least with such a small run, the book itself would become collectable.

 

If it isn't academic work, do you really need to quote sources? I have an old tech manual (not officially sanctioned) for the BBC Micro/6502 asm, and it doesn't quote anything. I would've thought you'd only start getting into trouble if you reprinted copyright code (the NES lockout handshake code, as an example), technical details about registers and so forth shouldn't be an issue.

Not a lawyer, etc - genuinely interested to hear about this issue, though, as it directly impacts what I'm doing myself. Sourcing/quoting console hardware details for academic work is a nightmare.

 

Not to discourage you or anything (actually I would love to read something like this) but from what I've gathered in your previous posts you have worked on these platforms professionally? Wouldn't this imply that you've signed tons of NDAs hindering you from doing something like this?

 

I would buy something like this in any format

 

This is really interesting

I'm a source of info on Mega Drive / Genesis, mainly its Z80 part (the part you're supposed to do sound with).

 

I wrote a sound-driver on the Megadrive. I used an elegant method (though I say so myself). I got a Master-System emulator cartridge and mapped the sound-chip into Z80 RAM by adding an AND to the address-line so it appeared at $4000. Then I wrote the player. The code had a develop/finished flag so the sound-chip appeared in the appropriate place for in-game use.

 

You should get your interviews in now while some of the oldest in the industry are still around, for example Ralph Baer. He's got to be in his 80's by now.