When folk at Origin PCs realized that their company was about to celebrate its 10th anniversary of making custom (gaming) PCs, they knew that they had to do something special. Since one thing they did when the company launched in 2009 was to integrate an XBox 360 into a gaming PC, they figured that they might as well refresh and one-up that project. Thus 2019’s Project ‘Big O’ was born.
Naturally still featuring a high-end gaming PC at its core, the show piece of the system is that they also added an XBox One X, Playstation 4 Pro and Nintendo Switch console into the same full-tower GENESIS chassis. For this they had to strip the first two consoles out of their enclosures and insert them into the case each along with their own (appropriately colored) watercooling loop. Unfortunately the optical drives got ditched, presumably because this made things look cleaner.
The Switch was not modded or even cracked open. Instead a Switch dock was installed in the front of the case, allowing one to dock the Switch in the front of the case, and still use it in a mobile fashion after undocking it. Meanwhile an Ethernet and HDMI switch simplify the interfaces to this gaming system a lot, requiring one to only plug in a single HDMI and Ethernet cable to plug in all capable platforms. The result is a pretty sleek-looking system, definitely an eye-catcher.
Since Origin will never, ever, sell the Big O to customers as it’s just a promotional item, it does tickle the imagination. Case-modding and combining multiple computers (often an ATX and mini-ITX) system into a single case is nothing new, but aspects such as having a dockable Switch feature, this clean aesthetic and overall functionality makes one wonder what an enterprising hobbyist could accomplish here.
Feel free to post your favorite related mods in the comments and take a look at the video below of the unboxing and putting through its paces by the folk at Unbox Therapy.
It’s funny that they put multiple consoles in one box because they are practically the same hardware. Honestly, a modern PC could run unmodified games for both if they just had the correct software.
Surprisingly, Microsoft has actually done a lot to bring most of the Xbox One game library to Windows 10 as well. It’s more or less a compiler flag, and the small list of games not on both are due to the devs choosing that route and going out of their way to ensure the game can’t.
Strange times we live in, eh? I would have bet money Steam, or anyone but MS, would have first made that type of leap, yet here we are.
But you are completely correct, consoles for a TV are no longer anything special, and the consoles that are different enough tend to only be so in gimmicky ways – think the 3DS screen, etc.
Well their dream of the console dominating the living room didn’t pan out so now it’s plan B.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/691087-playstation-4/77850336
“It’s more or less a compiler flag” that isn’t true at all – a LOT of work goes into these ports. While it is true that this generation’s hardware is very close to hardware common in general purpose machines (AMD GCN for PS4 and XB, and nvidia’s tablet stuff for switch), there are some important differences. The biggest one is because consoles have a fixed hardware profile, a lot more of the low level capabilities of the GPU are exposed and documented for the devs to make use of to optimize their rendering much further than is possible on PC.
The process of porting a console game to PC means having to maintain more rendering backends for the non-console specific rendering API, and stripping out optimizations from shaders that make use of platform specific intrinsics that are not standardized on PC, and finding suitable replacements for PC.
The process of porting a PC game to a console means having to take the time to rework the rendering backend, hyper optimize shaders, and it also means having to creatively adapt all of the game content to fit better within the system’s limitations without sacrificing fidelity or gameplay.
And this is to say nothing of other differences. For example, the Xbox One and the Xbox One S have a very interesting memory model where you have the larger and slower DRAM but also a small amount of fast ESRAM to do with as you please, and makes a ton of different optimizations possible that have no equivalent on PC.
If a game is exclusive to a system, it isn’t because the devs are “lazy” as is a bewilderingly popular belief of the uninformed, or that they didn’t “just” click the magic button that magically automates a ridiculous amount of custom work. Please think a little harder.
Most of the cross platform library uses existing game engines, all of which run the same code and it is the engine that is optimized.
The xbox live sdk does let you simply tick checkboxes to get different executable.
It’s the “xbox live” app on windows that has the hardware requirements, and provides the same common denominator of hardware that the consoles used to.
Those who start at the low level coding like you describe are under 5% of the games published on the platform.
Using Unreal Engine for example, yes, it is the devs/publisher being greedy. Not lazy, since you have to go in and turn off all the default-on options to not get a windows executable, it’s more work than letting it make one. But it is done for the sake of making money, not because porting your unreal engine code to unreal engine is hard (or even a task to do)
Only a handful of huge studios are even allowed to publish to xbox only without a playanywhere release.
Boring corporate advertising with another jerksticulating dude.
+1
I’ve heard of a guy who integrated an oven, a washing mashine, a dish washer and a PC into the same flat…
Amazing, right ?
It’s the daily Buy a Hack.
I think you a word.
Meanwhile an Ethernet and HDMI switch simply the interfaces to this gaming system a lot, requiring one to only plug in a single HDMI and Ethernet cable to plug in all capable platforms.
anyone else notice that the xbox and playstation are actually on the same loop? it looks as if the pc is on a separate loop but the two consoles are definitely on the same loop just with different colored tubes
This is kind of pointless monolith case mod that is going EOL as soon as the next gen consoles or new PC comes along.
You can’t have your console in the living room with the PC part in the study.
I couldn’t afford a XBOX one, so I had to Console myself 😁
anyone remember yoshi boxes from techtv?