Plenty of electronics end up in the junk drawer or even landfill after their useful life ends, but in the modern world of planned obsolescence a lot more devices are thrown out simply because of lack of support. Sometimes it’s even worse than that as some products are designed to “phone home” and will lack critical functionality if the original producer of that product gets purchased by someone else, wants to sell its customers more products, or goes out of business. The latter is essentially what happened to the Ouya console, but if you still have one of these around you might be able to get it running again.
The Ouya was a commercial failure but an ambitious take on a new kind of gaming console. With little more processing power than a smart phone, the idea was to produce a console for the casual gamer that also could play retro games and other games available for Android. It had a low price point but eventually couldn’t sell enough units to stay in business. These devices needed to see a specific server to gain full functionality, and [Christian] has created essentially a spoofed server that allows users to sign in to their consoles and install games again. All that is needed is to modify a few config files on the Ouya to point to a different address and the Ouya boots up just like it’s 2012 again.
This project goes a long way to show that there are plenty of serviceable electronics out there that have just been needlessly borked, and with a little elbow grease it’s sometimes possible to get them working. The state of this machine is a little surprising given that the original machine promised to be hacker and developer friendly.
Thanks to [Josiah] for the tip!
Check out the original Kickstarter Campaign which raised $8.5 million.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console
Upon release in 2013 there was nothing like this available, the RPi was only on the first iteration and the second wouldn’t be available for another ~2 years. I bought one to run XBMC/Kodi as there wasn’t the proliferation of cheap Android TV boxes that we have now.
The controllers are pretty good. I use them for my Pi MAME machine.
do we know what sort of communication had to take place between OUYA and its server in order to see it running ?
Good stuff!
While their approach might’ve not been great i still think a cheap android console is a good idea, and i still use my OUYA, i just put a different ROM on it when the servers got shut down ^^ but this is a nice and much easier fix for those people that dont want to risk bricking it / want to stick with an official rom.
I still have my sitting around collecting dust. Can you share any info you have on what ROM you used and how you installed it?
This is what I am looking to do:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ouya/comments/8uczkd/reving_the_ouya_with_a_custom_rom/
It would be kind of interesting to install lineageOS on it and have it be a simple media box like a roku for my second tv…. that I could also use for steam link on android…..
If you have some experience with changing ROM’s on phones or other similar stuff you can likely get by with the below 2 steps:
Step1 – install this:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/bootloader-safeboot-ouya-bootmenu-mlq.2692836/
-OR- if that seems a bit much and your OUYA is still ‘stock’, try the below ‘1 click’ solution:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/recovery-ouya-cwm-recovery.2295645/
(you MUST do this, its so if anything goes wrong you dont brick your device, as there is NO way to get to bootloader/recovery by some button combination like on android phones)
Step2 – pick pretty much any rom from same xda subforum, and install as described, i went with this one:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/rom-aosp-5-0-for-ouya.2970753/
(Newer Android versions have both up and downsides, i decided on a fairly old version because it has low requirements and takes up less space, but is fine for my use)
—-
If you need ‘more serious hand holding’, try this guide, i’ve not used it but it seems to be very detailed/well put together and both comes in text and video format: https://www.s-config.com/cyanogen-mod-and-the-ouya/
Is it at least Android 5? Android 4 has seen abandonment by YouTube and several other online services. 5 will likely fall below the cutline soon.
I have an Orange Pi Plus 2E with an Allwinner H3 chip. Both OrangePI and H3Droid only have Android 4.x for it while there are other H3 based devices with Android 7. Dunno why nobody has bothered to get Android 5 or later on this OrangePi model.
Looks like Armbian has it covered still. Not sure how long they’ll be interested in ARM 32bit but it looks current. https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-plus-2e/
Time and time again an issue: hardware itself doesn’t produce the games. Gotta have a business plan that includes how developers can make money with it.
The way I remember it, their business plan involved attracting independent game developers. This was around the time a lot of indies were exploding in popularity, and getting games released on consoles was kind of difficult at the time, so maybe it wasn’t the worst plan.
Problem was, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo also took notice and started courting indie developers to their platforms, making it easier to get things released, reducing barriers and restrictions, that sort of thing. So by the time the Ouya was released, a lot of the talent that might have been best suited for it was focusing on other platforms instead using opportunities that weren’t available at the time it was Kickstarted, and many indies couldn’t afford to focus on a minor platform in addition to the more major ones.
So, definitely bad in hindsight, questionable at the time, maybe if it had come out 3-5 years earlier it would have had a better chance.
Another problem was the requirement to have a constant internet connection for everything. Nobody could do a game for Ouya that could be installed and work while disconnected. The initial reaction to the announcement of Xbox One with its always online requirement should have been a wake up call to the Ouya team.
That seems counter to reality. I have been playing the OUYA games installed in my device for the last few years and until this hack came around, the device was always offline but playable.
We’ve been using it for many years now. There’s some fun multiplayer games like BombSquad.
Thank you Christian for keeping Ouyas alive! :)
We need more ReplayTV’s in the world.
When they quit making devices, they kept the modem network and the guide servers up. When that started to be too much, they shut the modems down, but kept the servers up for guide information. When they were finally winding down, they had a several-month period in which any device that connected to the servers during that time would be authorized to operate forever without further authentication. If you subscribe to a commercial guide data service, and you have the necessary parts (e.g., digital-to-NTSC tuner converter), it is still possible to use an original ReplayTV with a modem-only connection to record shows.
“We’re shutting down, your devices are now unlocked, here’s the API, you’re on your own” at least gives these things a chance.
I fired up an Ezcap ATSC tuner USB stick last month and used supplied software, and surprise, got guide information, seems like way more than comes over the air, week or so in advance, actual episode descriptions. Have not figured out what service it’s using yet. As yoy say, Replay is gone, MS shut down their guide for MCE OSes a year or so back, and IDK what freebies are up still. Places to ask like TVFool have gone dormant.
Will have to look into it more closely sometime.
Threw mine in the dump just months ago after reading the nvidia key couldn’t pop up and make this essentially a brick. Dang.