Putting Every Game Console In The Palm Of Your Hand

SNES

Casemodders extraordinaire [Downing] and [Hailrazer] are known for their fabulous builds that put just about every gaming console into a portable hand-held format. Everything from a Game Cube to N64s and a Sega Genesis have been conquered by the two, and for the last year they’ve been putting their heads together to make the best solution to portabalizing console gaming forever. It’s called the Cross Plane, and puts just about everything with an HDMI connection in the palm of your hand.

The build began as one of [Downing]’s more ambitious projects. He imagined a system that could play nearly every retro game on a small handheld device. After finishing this build, he set up a Kickstarter and called up his friend [Hailrazer] to get some feedback. Just hours before the Kickstarter launched, [Hailrazer] suggested making a device for modern consoles. [Downing]’s pride and joy was scrapped, but out of its ashes arose the Cross Plane.

Inside the Cross Plane is a wireless HDMI receiver and a 7″ 720p display. This, along with a few buttons and analog controls, allow the Cross Plane to serve as a remote display and controller for an XBox 360, Playstation 3, and even a PC, for all that retro emulator goodness.

It’s a really, really cool project, and since the dream of an open Wii U controller seem to have died, we’re thinking this could be a great controller for an FPV quadcopter or other remotely operated vehicle.

22 thoughts on “Putting Every Game Console In The Palm Of Your Hand

  1. Really clever idea to “outsource” the processing of your portable gaming like that. Different service, but it would be interesting if bandwidth ever got to the point where you could just VPN into a remote console and “rent” it. Maybe that already exists.

    1. It does, it’s awful, and it never works as described. It’s one of those novel but totally impractical ideas. Even if you reach viable throughput (which we have) on a single link, the network itself as a packet-distributed deal isn’t reliable to make it a good idea. If you could get an actual closed circuit connection sure, but that’s not what IP does.

      Also there’s already the commercial product from NVIDIA that’s already out that does exactly this except it does i over WiFi directly from your graphics card, which is probably a better, more practical way of doing it.

      1. The Shield is a great product, we had fun playing with one while we were putting the Cross Plane together. The only issue is the fact you need have Nvidia’s latest graphics card to do this and unless you have a dual band Wireless N router, the system can bottle neck and slow down to a crawl (from what I’ve been told).

        With the proper hardware it works, but it takes one hell of a machine to do it correctly. This is just an option that sends both the HDMI and controls to separate dedicated devices which doesn’t clog up your network.

        It’s worked pretty well so far in our tests and we can forget the fact that this will also Play Xbox 360, PS3,OUYA, Blu-Ray movies and anything else with an HDMI Output.

        1. shield streams screen buffer using nvidias onboard h264 encoder on gpu, its barely 10mbit so any wifi will do.

          you use of the shelf WHDMI adapter, expensive ($150 adapter + $50-70 screen + ~$20 second channel/joy/case + $150 profit)

    2. ” if bandwidth ever got to the point where you could just VPN into a remote console and “rent” it. ”

      Thats essentially things like OnLive.
      If you got a 8MB/s internet it works “ok”, fine for things that arnt, say, a multiplayer FPS.
      RTS/TBS’s are doable though.

  2. Well not consoles, but PC gaming can be done through the service/app ‘Onlive’, which works surprisingly well –pending you have enough bandwidth on your end and nothing is saturated inbetween you and the Onlive Server. It’s hard to tell that the game isn’t running locally when everything is good, but my older DSL line requires that be the only thing running basically.

  3. I love how the FAQ answer for latency is “Latency has not been an issue” rather than numbers.

    GIVE ME NUMBERS. Without numbers we won’t know if “non-issue” is 50 ms or 500. Is it “ok” in terms of wireless displays or “ok” in terms of casual computing?

    1. It’s a cool idea, you could market it as cloud tech. Problem is they ignore some technical and legal things..

      I don’t know why other may hate it. The controller protocols are the actual hard part of this project, and they have legality issues..

  4. Thought about it more. I’d like this if there was a wired version. Wireless is useless for me. My bed is only 15 feet from my PC and I’d much rather it be tethered so there’s no risk of signal loss and batteries running down.

    1. At 15′ you see voltage drop in USB and most other cables..

      It’s pointless to criticize this project. Unless they market and manufacture in Asia, they will potentially see legal issues, if they even manage to do the controller protocols. Nobody here are discussing technicalities, just marketing, so I think I’ll now pretend this project doesn’t exist..

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