International console gaming systems

[Lark.Landon]

Forgive my post, my shift key is busted and it works on/off.

Are there any consoles on the market that aren't xbox, ps3, nintendo, atari etc?
I'm just curious if there are companies out there that develop gaming systems other than the main companies? Like small or large companies in Asia/Europe that are little known/lesser known to Westerners

 

[-SD-]

The was a Korean company, GamePark Holdings, that made a range of 'open source' portable consoles: GP32, GP2X, Wiz and Caanoo. These handhelds did see an absolutely tiny amount of native software, but they were mainly used for teh romz....

Back in 1995 a Taiwanese company called Funtech released the Super A'can console. There's less than 20 games and they're really quite hard to find.

Amstrad had a go in the early '90s with the GX4000, but that's so terrible that even talking about it makes Jesus cry.

 

[gkarris]

There's the OUYA, an Android based console, but they're out of SoCal:

http://www.ouya.tv

I think their stuff is really cool - can't wait to get one...

 

[Miharu]

I remember there being a cheap console in Brazil that downloaded games through 3g connection, the games were of cell phone quality (kind of like the Ouya) and it even had games like Resident Evil 4.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeebo

 

[blesscheese]

Back in the 90's there were some smaller gaming companies...in fact, come to think of it, they are re-releasing the NeoGeo

Just like with many other industries, the bigger fish have gobbled up the smaller ones, and are trying to re-direct the profits their way. The Ouya will be interesting to watch...

 

[0098386]

In Europe we had microcomputers. I grew up among them and more of my friends had Commodores, Amigas, Acorns, Spectrums (and the like) than they did traditional consoles. I don't think they were as big in the US as they were in Europe.

I think it depends what you define as a console. An iPhone hooked up to a TV could be a console, a 20p emulation device with a HDMI port from China could be a console.

 

[Miharu]

Here in Finland, just about every family owned a Commodore 64 back in the 80's, but MSX was sort of popular as well. They marketed the C64 as the People's Computer, some sort of messiah, though I'm quite sure 90% of users only ever used it to play video games!