History of video games/Platforms/L600

History
"Your home will never be the same."

Development
The L600 was originally devised out of a desire to play Quake CTF on console.

Indrema was founded by John Gildred in January of 2000 with 50 employees. The L600 was announced in March of 2000.

Indrema was present at Linux World 2000 in San Jose.

By November of 2000 Indrema was in talks with third party peripheral manufacturers to make accessories for the console.

Indrema offered developer support through the Indrema Developer Network via the CollabNet.

The Indrema L600 was to cost $299, and would have included one bundled game along with one official controller. Indrema stated the system would be sold at a loss.

The platform technology was named the Indrema Entertainment System, or IES for Short, and the first and only console to use it was the L600.

Indrema had been planning to attend the August 2001 Linux World Expo, which was being held in San Francisco, California that year.

Legacy
"The revolution will continue without Indrema"

On April 6th of 2001 Indrema became defunct following the pull out of Venture Capital funding, laying off all employees. Unlike most canceled consoles, due to its comparatively open development process, the L600 offers a unique look at the gaming industry, at a time when console gaming industry practices were relatively opaque.

John Gildred later would work at Google as the director of project management on Android TV.

Compute
The L600 was to use an x86 AMD Duron CPU clocked at 600 (later 750 megahertz ).

The L600 would have had 64 megabytes of "Core" RAM, and 32 megabytes of "local" RAM.

The L600 would have had an upgradable NVIDIA GeForce 3 AGP GPU. This GPU was listed as being able to render between 120 million and 180 million polygons a second as configured in the L600. The system could output resolutions as high as 1080i.

Hardware
The L600 would have had a 7200RPM 10 gigabyte IDE ATA100 hard drive, as well as a 4x speed DVD drive. Hard drive storage capacities for up to 50 gigabytes were noted. The LSeries would have used DVD-9 discs for physical games, and even CD-Rs were considered.

The L600 would have had 10/100 megabit ethernet. The system optionally supported a 56k dial up modem.

A built in DVR function was planned to be released three months to a half year following launched in an updated higher end model.

The system would have had four front mounted USB ports for controllers.

The system was designed to look like high end home theater equipment, and its dimensions were 12.5 inches by 10.5 inches by 3 inches.

Official controllers would have had dual analog sticks, four face buttons, two triggers, a directional pad, and rumble feedback.

Software
The L600 would have ran the DV Linux operating system made in partnership with Red Hat. Proprietary applications would have been allowed.

The system software was optimized for running 3D titles, and OpenGL was supported as a graphics API. The system also used OpenAL and OpenStream. Applications were intended to always be full screen.

Games developed for the system were to be certified, with either a one time freeware fee being collected, or a one time plus per copy cut for commercial titles. DRM would have restricted what software could be run to certified titles only. All certified software would be cryptographically signed by Indrema as a result. Special consideration was given to open source games.

Game updates were supported, though discouraged as Indrema was worried about consumer reactions to developer overreliance on updates. System software was also updatable over the internet.

The console used the X11 window system, and Indrema partnered with MetroLink to ensure good support. Indrema had been developing a proprietary TV friendly UI API called Xtrema.

The system software featured the Mozilla internet browser and email client out of the box, and would have been among the first home consoles to do so.

External Resources

 * Video Game Console Library - L600 page.
 * IDN Developer Chat Archive