Cheapest Dev Hardware?

So, I'm new to this site and development hardware as a whole, and I want to try getting into it. I have a problem though: I'm a broke college student.

Basically, what's the cheapest place to start with this stuff? Preferably anything below triple digits, and something that I can actually use/play.

I'd appreciate any help or info someone could offer.

 

You have a PC?

You have a Dev Kit for something

 

None of the hardware is cheap. I think the cheapest thing now is a Xbox (original) debug kit for around $140-ish. Someone in the marketplace was also selling some Xbox betas that will only work on these kits for a few bucks.

 

Gamecube's are dirt cheap, fairly powerful, and easy to run homebrew on.

It's not dev hardware but afaik, GC-Linux makes way for a fairly decent open-source development setup. The Wii/GCN homebrew dev community is a friendly team of people as well.

 

Dev hardware, to use/play.. you mean retail games? Well, I never!

If you meant use for "development" (there are many facets...) the obvious choice would be a recent PC. With one you can learn to program, and then learn to program games. If you don't endup gamemaking, at least you won't have a paperweight, plus truth be told those emulator things are more effective at game development than actual development hardware. If you make it to a working game engine then perhaps its time to start thinking about console hardware, if you still think targeting an obsolete piece of hardware is worthwhile.

 

Yep, PC is probably the first thing you'd want to try for... As you state you're broke, it might not be worth getting any devkit yet.
I recently got an XDK , even though it was for collection purposes - it's cool to see some default code run

If your heart is REALLY set on a console, XBOX is cheapest I believe - but there isn't any 'cheap' kits.

 

You can start out how I did. Create flash games, host them online, then go to the .swf's URL on a retail wii.

 

I guess I made that pretty vague.

I'm not looking to use dev hardware for coding or game production, or anything like that. This is solely from a (broke) collector's standpoint.

 

oh... you can get a xbox1 raptor card for $20. It is legit dev hardware for cheap. If you want something that is standalone (aka a devkit console) those are $150 or more, for any system.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/XDK-DVD-Rap...965?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4abc8cdc5d

 

I guess I'll start with an original Xbox devkit then. Thanks for the info!

 

As cheap as that is, it's still too steep for me right now. When I say broke, I mean BROKE.

 

Well, I'm a collector, not a developer.

But that's pretty cool. Thanks for showing me.

 

yeah man if 400 is too much your better off using pc hehe... not for nothing but i think 400 for mass amounts of sidecar units is probably the best thing/cheapest amount to ever hit this forum