Lunchtime Discussion: Outside The Box

I’ve talked in the past about how modern consoles are an all-in-one solution. A modern console not only plays games, but lets you play, stream and download movies, TV shows and music, can access the internet, lets you access your favourite social networks; the list goes on and on. The thing is whilst it’s cool that our consoles can all these extra things, console’s are designed with these new features in mind.

Today I want to talk about all the cool things that weren’t on the original specification when the console was being built.

Take the PS3 for example. Sure, the OtherOS option was there from the begining, but I bet that Sony didn’t think that the US Air Force and Universities would be buying up huge quantities of the console to use as networked super computers. Even Folding@Home, announced a few months before the machine’s launch, probably wasn’t what Sony had in mind for their Cell powered processing giant throughout most of the design process.

The PS3′s processing capacity to price ratio is what makes it so attractive a supercomputing platform, but it’s not just modern consoles that get to have all the fun. Of course the Xbox was heavily modded with Xbox Media Center turning it into what was a very low cost media center at the time. However going even further back it’s time to take a look at chiptune.

For those of you who don’t know about chiptune I suggest you give this documentary over at Penny Arcade a watch, but what it boils down to is using the sound chip from old consoles (largely the original Game Boy) as an improvised synthesizer and sequencer. The distinctive 8-bit sound of the retro consoles used by chiptune artists seems to call out to something in the core of a lot of video game geeks, bringing up memories of a bygone age and pressing the nostalgia button.

How do you feel about consoles being used for these kind of unintended uses? Would you love to have a media PC inside a SNES shell? Are you endlessly going to chiptune gigs? Or do you just want to play games on your consoles and ignore the world of alternative possibilities?