Over on the Open Pandora forums is some talk revolving around a new games console made by a little known company called ‘Envizions’. Whilst they have apparently had a foray into the Open Source console gaming scene a few years ago, I have to admit I’d never heard of them until today. It appears that they are an American firm who’s aim is a release an Android based gaming system that plugs into your television (ie not a handheld). The founder and CEO of the company, Derrick Samuels, asks us for monetary support in the following video. Now, I don’t know about you but if I was CEO of the company I’d certainly try a little harder to stop calling it a Gaybox. Lol.
Apparently they’re after $60,000 to finance case molds and finalise the main board. So, the burning questions, what are the hardware specs and what can it do? Well it seems the specs are well and truly under wraps for the time being. Literally the only thing they’ll tell us is that it has an Nvidia GPU of some sort. And they want me to send them money? I think not.
Frustratingly, there doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason to buy this thing even after reading what it will apparently be capable of:
1. GameBox utilizes its own custom APPs to power game apps and other productivity apps.
2. Play 3D and gesturing motion games.
3. GameBox can back-up all your PC game data and back-up music, documents, video in the GameBox cloud.
4. GameBox uses Voice Recognition for some games.
5. Use GameBox to pause, rewind and record live TV.
The device supports gesturing in a similar way to the XBOX apparently, but what kind of motion sensor it uses is anyone’s guess. The machine has a “small hard disk” inside it. When you sign in to your gamebox account you are able to stream movies and music directly into your TV. Netflix is on the list of possible launch software and the promise of a “Social experience” is mentioned a few times too. Facebook and Twitter then, great. The CEO has been posting a bit in this thread but he seems incapable of answering most the questions he is asked at the moment, for fear of someone copying them or stealing their ideas I suppose. That’s about all there is for now unfortunately. So what makes it better than simply plugging an Android tablet into your television and using a couple of bluetooth controllers? No idea, and it looks like we won’t find out unless they raise the cash to finish the thing off. They’ll cost $250 if they ever make it to market.
Perhaps the CEO should have kept the name of the thing secret as well, because if you take a look here you’ll find a recently released Chinese console of the same name. In all seriousness, it’s probably just a coincidence because I doubt they’ve even heard of Envizions or the EVO Gamebox over in China. So let’s have a look at this thing shall we?
Obviously modelled somewhat on the PS3, it’s rather a lot smaller and cheaper looking, and probably weighs less than a feather too. It promises to cater for all your MAME, CPS3 , CPS2, CPS1 (Capcom Play Systems 1, 2 and 3), PGM (another arcade emulator), SFC (Snes), MD (Megadrive) and PCECD (Turbogrfax 16 and PC Engine CD) roms. Although official specs are missing (why is this always the case! so annoying!) it looks as though it might be running the Ingenic JZ4755 which is an upgraded version of the CPU inside the Dingoo A320, sporting 2x 500Mhz cores. So homebrew and Dingux on this thing is not out of the question by any means, if rumours are true. The machine also seems to have a slot for GBA cartridges which is odd to say the least, 128MB of RAM, 2GB of internal storage as well as a microSD slot for expansion. Unfortunately the promise of 720p HD video is rendered a moot point due to the fact it seems to only have a Composite video output into the TV. The manufacturers of this thing are the same as the guys behind the well known P3GO USB dongle for the PS3. Check their website here and check below for some pages of the product manual, kindly sourced and posted by someone on the DX forums.
A fair few people have ordered these things, so I’ll post some more when the reviews start rolling in. Bye for now!
I bought one of these,and to be honest the item description is deceiving,the machine it self looks like its modeled after a brazilian system called zeebo,well let me explain more about this system’s features,it does come with 60 games built in, mostly neo geo games like metal slug and drift out and more. Also has arcade games, once again mostly neo geo games, there are 2 gameboy advance games and avatar the movie but its not the full movie just a bit of it, you can plug in a gameboy advance cart and it will play fine,most neo geo games work great but the arcade games have a bit of noise distortion, its not perfect but its still plays fine,the biggest disappointment is the fact that it does not allow you to connect the system to your pc to install new roms, the only roms that it will recognize are gba roms and it must be installed by using the micro sd card.The controller that comes with it is fine but the system wont allow you to use pc controllers so if you break it you have to buy from the makers of the gamebox. Now what i think of it,its got great games that if you dont have a neo geo you will have fun like i’m having playing metal slug,i dont know how much its selling for in other places but i payed about $60 at dealextream for this and in my opinion its too much for what it is.