What was Project X?

I was looking through my old magazines when I found the cover of an old (pre 2000) magazine that had a picture of a white DVD player that said "Project X" "is it real?". So what was it and could it possibly be a prototype Xbox?

 

I duno, but could you possibly post a scan of the page, it might help someone with more knowledge figure it out
(That, and Im curios as to what it looks like)

 

Without seeing a pic my best guess given the time period is:

The NUON was named Project X before the came up w/ the final name NUON. Which was made by VM Labs which consisted of quite a few Ex-Atari people.

Look at this:

http://www.nuon-dome.com/wordpress/?p=25

 

Yes that was it thanks.

 

....and also a great NYC hardcore band!

 

and i thought i was the only one who would post that :lol:

dance floor justice!

 

You thought everyone on this board was N.D.? The 2nd meaning ;-)

One of my record mad mates has got an original copy and the corresponding copy of schism!

 

Also a great side scrolling shooter on the dear old Amiga, back when just about every Team 17 game was a classic and not just rehashes of Worms

 

didn´t they even port it to the PSX?

 

i remember being excited about this - like, it was going to be awesome. read about it in an EGM for feb 98.

 

System X was the Atari 5200

 

Project X

 

System X was first !!!!

 

Some warez group on the Xbox One and PS2

also a game on the Amiga

 

wasn't Project X a Jakie Chan movie :110:

yakumo

 

Sounds like something out of Austin Powers

 

it's a porn movie

 

Yeah that was Next Generation, issue 44 - August 1998:

It had nothing whatsoever to do with Xbox.

Project X, also known as 'Merlin', from a startup company called VM Labs (with ex-Atari people) was the codename for their NUON system/chip, which was eventually used in DVD players.

The first information on Project X surfaced in 1997.





________________________________________________
NUON product logo



The image of the X with the hat and blood obviously is meant to show Project X would be a Mario/Nintendo 64 killer. It wasn't in the end, but that's what VM Labs wanted the world to think in 1997-1998.

Project X / Merlin / NUON was a chip/chipset that had high MIPs performance, much more than PS1 or N64, but no dedicated 3D hardware. Everything would be programmed through software.

It was hoped that Project X /NUON would be a major advance in realtime graphics because of the huge programmable pipeline instead of the fixed pipelines that Sony, Nintendo and Sega had. VM Labs claimed it would far outperform Katana /Dreamcast, which was absolutely not going to happen. The results were not great compared to highend PCs and Dreamcast of the late 1990s.

But before NUON launched it was an exciting new technology that was featured in magazines as far back as 1997. Next Generation magazine had articles on it, saying it had a higher spec than the 3DO/Matsushita M2, which had just been killed off at the time as a console. Post-M2-death, Project X was then the newest & most powerful upcoming home video game technology along with Sega's in-development Black Belt / Dural and Katana/Dreamcast. So for awhile it generated some interest.

NUON was not a console, but released in the form DVD players with NUON chip/chipset, and there were some games released, and a bunch of unreleased games but I really don't know alot about the games that came out.

Thus, Project X did *not* go unreleased, it did come out as did Apple's Pippin. Even though they both bombed.

So Project X was indeed released unlike Atari's Project Midsummer/Jaguar 2, Matsushita M2 (console version anyway), CagEnt (3DO Systems) Samsung's MX, Apple's Pippin 2.0 and other systems of the late 90s, early 2000s.

The Project X / NUON chip technology has a long lineage/ heritage, tracing back through several unreleased & released computer game/ console technologies starting with the unreleased 'Loki' computer chip project by Sinclair Research which became Flare Technology's 'Flare One' computer.

Those chips then were upgraded into the Slipstream ASIC for the unreleased Konix Multi System which then I think was upgraded into the Panther chip for the unreleased Atari Panther. Then on to Flare Technology's 'Flare Two' computer that was developed into the released Atari Jaguar. The last effort by these people was Project X which became the NUON's chip.

 

Absolutely right.
Project-X is what later became "NUON".

Isn't it interesting that Microsofts very first X-Box prototype bears a very large resembelance to the early Project-X logo and that the Virtual Light Machine (the visual background whilst audio titles are being played) is also being used on the X-Box 360 and no other as Jeff Minter himself was the person who did that.
It was him also who reworked "Tempest" to Tempest-3000 for the NUON, one of the best games on the planet (imo), and was also one of the brains behind the NUON in general.

I have owned pretty much every games-system and played with them. but in my humble opinion the NUON system beats every single one.
Why ?
Because the games are absolutely fun to play and from a collectors point-of-view a complete NUON-collection doesn't take up that much room.
There were only 7 games that got released:
- Tempest 3000
- Freefall 3050 AD
- Merlin Racing
- Space invaders XXl
- Ballistic
- Iron Soldier 3 (got recalled directly after release, due to a bug)
If you count-in a rare Korean game, you have 8. But I'm still searching quietly for that one....

You also had 4 (!) NUON-enhanced DVDs that got released:
- Dr. Dolittle
- Planet of the Apes
- Bedazzled
- The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai

And obviously you have the Players from Toshiba and Samsung. Latter being the overall better NUON-console with a more powerful VLM-machine which makes Tempest 3000 an awesome visual experience.

And every once in a while very rare NUON merchandise products also appear.

All in all a very underestimated system with a big fun-factor.
;-)

 

Actually i think Project X was the Xbox. Look at the covers:



It's the same console mockup. In the 2nd cover, it calls it X-Box with a commom Microsoft Sidewinder PC gamepad.

Pics found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveynin/sets/72157600284339915/