> Dream a Little Dream

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Indrema
Indrema


Look out for these guys!

E3 is a candy colored, flickering cacophony of bright lights and rock music where silicon, pretense and promises overflow. It's enough to induce sensory shell-shock in all but the most hardened of arcade rats. The goal of each of the publishers, and particularly the big three of Sony, Sega and Nintendo seems to be to so over-stimulate visitors as to send them away dazed. The theory being that even if visitors don't exactly remember what went on at the booth, there's no way in acid flashback hell they'll recall what occurred at the other booths. Hopefully, if the flash was overpowering enough, when all is said and done and the numbness begins to leech away at home, what remains will be a slight but permanently branding impression that something impressive happened at the booth in question. Then there's the open bar parties that don't help in the recall department.

So, if we've forgotten or missed something special under the wash of glitz at E3, we're sorry. We've done the best we could, but, even so, after the feature had been written, we realized there were some noteworthy things we could remember that somehow hadn't made it into any categories, principal of which is Indrema, a small company with big dreams.

Lots of little companies spring up with the idea of challenging for a share of the game market, of seeing their little dream project on the shelves in Electronics Boutique with a big stamp of approval from Big Brother Sony or Sega or Nintendo or Microsoft... Not many dream up for themselves the vision of competing with Big Brother, and it's a rare dream indeed to envision challenging the way that Big Brother functions.

Enter Indrema, proposers of an open-source, Linux based home entertainment system, the potency equal of X-Box. Indrema is proposing to have available, this holiday season, a home entertainment system (note that like Sony and Microsoft, they envision their product as much more than a mere games machine) powered by a 600 MHz CPU (manufacturer not yet named), 64MB SDRAM and wielding nVidia's next-generation of video card (not yet released). The L600, as they're calling it, will sport an ATA-66 video optimized hard drive, Ethernet port, four USB ports, digital audio and be priced at $300 US. This IES (Indrema Entertainment System) will support HDTV, play DVDs, ship with the Mozilla web browser, stream audio and video, and even be able to upgrade its graphical processing unit. The technical challenges of putting together and having ready 500,000 units for Christmas is immense considering that Indrema had nothing to show at E3 in May. All of this is very bold, but it gets worse.

Indrema believes that the future of operating software is open source. They believe that open source speeds and improves development as well as reducing costs. Their entertainment system is open-source Linux based (all Indrema driver level code, API implementations and kernel code is open source) and they expect that the operating system will continue to evolve, yet still, Indrema is a closed console that the home user doesn't have to worry about anything other than plugging in and playing.

Then, besides the standard development license scheme of game creation, Indrema will also allow for freeware (as long as it passes certain security and other standards). Don't like the game you're playing? Want to make a better one but don't have the money to buy a $50,000 development kit from Sony nor the inclination to negotiate with Sony's licensing department. Indrema says go for it.

One of the challenges that Indrema faces is getting developers on board to make games. They are currently hard at work, with the help of practiced porter of games to Linux, Loki Entertainment porting over the thirty or so games that have been released for Linux, but these are mostly PC style games like Quake III, Civilization: Call to Power, Myth II, Heavy Gear II and Sim City, not really designed for console and gamepad gaming and no publishers have yet announced support for Indrema.

Indrema has identified their target audience, to start, as the hard-core Linux users opposed to all things tainted by the monopolizing touches of the computer and electronics world Big Brothers, and as those dedicated gamers who absolutely have to have the biggest and the fastest gaming system available. Indrema, of X-Box potency (significantly more muscular than the PlayStation 2), aims to be available this fall, a year before X-Box.

It's dreams that the gaming industry is founded on. Indrema's dreams are certainly worth mentioning, but they're not the only thing we nearly forgot to mention. Make sure you check out the others.

-Jules Grant

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