Indrema Entertainment Systems was a consumer electronics company famous for the Indrema L600 Entertainment System, a game console intended for independent game developers. Founded in 1999 by

John Gildred John Taylor Gildred (born August 23, 1970) is an American entrepreneur and business executive known for his work in consumer electronics and online media technology. Gildred originally established his reputation in 1994 at OpenSoft, an Internet c ...

, Indrema's goal was to create a

video game console A video game console is an electronic device that Input/output, outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home video game console, home consoles, which are generally placed i ...

based on common PC hardware and the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

operating system. The console would have been the only

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

console on the market, as well as the only modern console to allow

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

to be written for it. The console was expected to be released by the holiday season of 2000. An early developer unit was featured running Quake in the Indrema booth at LinuxWorld earlier in 2000. Those subscribed to Indrema's mailing list received a "top ten" list in the style of

David Letterman David Michael Letterman (born April 12, 1947) is an American television host, comedian, writer and producer. He hosted late night television talk shows for 33 years, beginning with the February 1, 1982 debut of ''Late Night with David Letterman' ...

in anticipation of the launch announcement. After being unable to raise enough capital to mass-produce the console, Indrema shut down on April 6, 2001. In his last Indrema chat session, Gildred revealed that the company needed more than $10,000,000 in capital in order to continue and gave the following advice to the next video game startup: "finish product before talking about it."

L600

The L600 was to be a Linux-based game console/

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

and was in the process of being developed by Indrema until they ceased operations in April 2001. Besides game play, it was also to be a

CD player A CD player is an electronic device that plays audio compact discs, which are a digital optical disc data storage format. CD players were first sold to consumers in 1982. CDs typically contain recordings of audio material such as music or aud ...

DVD player A DVD player is a device that plays DVDs produced under both the DVD-Video and DVD-Audio technical standards, two different and incompatible standards. Some DVD players will also play audio CDs. DVD players are connected to a television to wa ...

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

, and

TiVo TiVo ( ) is a digital video recorder (DVR) developed and marketed by Xperi (previously by TiVo Corporation and TiVo Inc.) and introduced in 1999. TiVo provides an on-screen guide of scheduled broadcast programming television programs, whose fea ...

-like video recorder. It also would have been an

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

storage device. Had the console been released, it would have cost US$299 and would have had 30 games available at launch. It would have had 64MB of system RAM and 96MB of total memory. Its storage medium would have been 10GB discs. It would have had

HDTV High-definition television (HD or HDTV) describes a television system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since 1936; in more recent times, it refers to the g ...

support at resolutions up to 1080i. Indrema would have let regular end-users develop their games via their development kit. Most companies charge more than $10,000 USD for their kits. It would have had a GPU slide bay (it would allow the user to slide out the graphics processor when a better one was available), an

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

-based microprocessor running at 600 MHz, and it would have been able to process 120-180 million polygons per second. There was little hope for the L600, however, as its speculated release date of Summer 2001 or later was after the launch of Sega's

Dreamcast The is a home video game console released by Sega on November 27, 1998, in Japan; September 9, 1999, in North America; and October 14, 1999, in Europe. It was the first sixth-generation video game console, preceding Sony's PlayStation 2, N ...

and Sony's

PlayStation 2 The PlayStation 2 (PS2) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on 4 March 2000, in North America on 26 October 2000, in Europe on 24 November 2000, and in Australia on 3 ...

, and very near or after the release of Microsoft's

Xbox Xbox is a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft. The brand consists of five video game consoles, as well as applications (games), streaming services, an online service by the name of Xbox network, and the development arm by the na ...

and Nintendo's

GameCube The is a home video game console developed and released by Nintendo in Japan on September 14, 2001, in North America on November 18, 2001, and in PAL territories in 2002. It is the successor to the Nintendo 64 (1996), and predecessor of the Wii ...

. The Dreamcast and GameCube had launched at considerably lower prices, and PlayStation 2 and Xbox at the same speculated US$299 despite having bigger budgets and less advanced hardware than the L600 was supposed to have, leading to doubts. It was just one of many independently developed systems that would be unable to take consumer attention and spending from more established, previously mentioned companies already in the market.

External links

Indrema Informer
- includes technical specifications and a list of links to Indrema-related news articles. *

Next Generation (magazine) ''Next Generation'' was a video game magazine that was published by Imagine Media (now Future US). It was affiliated to and shared editorial with the UK's ''Edge'' magazine. ''Next Generation'' ran from January 1995 until January 2002. It was ...

Lifecycle 2 Vol 3 #4

References

{{Sixth generation game consoles Defunct video game companies of the United States Electronics companies established in 2000 Companies disestablished in 2001 Vaporware game consoles x86-based game consoles Linux companies Linux-based video game consoles

L600

See also

External links

References