Rack mounting and other space savings

[kendrick]

As soon as y'all are done arguing about piracy, I wanted to float some ideas about the placement of game consoles.

As a technology worker, I'm surrounded by equipment that has to be clean, easily accessible, easily serviced and as inobtrusive as possible. On and off I wish these kinds of standards were applied to games consoles. It's safe to say that almost no standards are applied to game consoles apart from removable media and power. As game consoles are intended to be solitary, shelf-based appliances, when nuts like us have ten or twelve of them all running at once we don't generally find OEM shelving options.

Server racks have, among other nice amenities, sliding rails, cable management, input device switches, and some overengineered cooling mechanisms. Anybody happen to know what the practical limit of a controller extension cable is? I've on and off thought about arranging all the disc-based consoles in a wall recess and running extensions for all the controller ports to a central location, like you would with a speaker wire plact. However, I understand that the Playstation has severe timing problems with controller extensions, and anything USB-based will have an eight foot hard limit. Any other restrictions to keep in mind?

I will bring up other related topics as they come, enthusiasm permitting. :)

-KKC, shopping for N-gage games for no discernible reason.

[Aidan]

The PS One and PS2 have issues with long cables as they use open collector outputs on some pins. Whilst a transistion from a high level to a low level is fast, as the open collector can yank the line down low, it relies on a pull-up resistor to bring the line back to a high level.

Obviously, with long cables this doens't work very well, due to the capacitance of the cable slowing the transition from low to high. Short of reworking the output stage to overcome this, there's not masses you can do about it. Theoretically, decreasing the resistance of the pull-up resistor can help, but only to a certain extent. If you extend the cable too much, you then have to deal with near end and far end reflections too.

I don't know what kind of I/O other devices have. You're only likely to run into issues when it's some form of serial I/O.

[viletim!]

serial data...long cables...that's exacltly what RS-232 was invented for. You can use a max232 or one of it's friends at each end of the line.

[atom]

All of my older game consoles have been converted into tiny little space saving innovations. They are only several kilobytes large!  But yeah, I know what you mean.

[Aidan]

serial data...long cables...that's exacltly what RS-232 was invented for. You can use a max232 or one of it's friends at each end of the line.

Not when you have a line that bidirectional you can't!