Indrema
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Indrema was an electronics company infamous for the vaporware Indrema L600 Entertainment System.
Founded in early 2000 by John Gildred, Indrema's goal was to create a video game console based on common PC hardware and the Linux operating system. The console would have been the only open source console on the market, as well as the only modern console to allow free software to be written for it.
The console was expected to be released by the holiday season of 2000, but rather than an official announcement, those subscribed to Indrema's mailing list received instead a "top ten" list in the style of David Letterman. By this time, people were beginning to suspect that the console was vaporware; Indrema had produced nothing but press releases so far.
Lack of a product and insufficient capital contributed to Indrema's demise. After being unable to raise enough capital to keep the company alive, 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."
[edit] L600
The L600 was a Linux-based game console/computer which was in the process of being developed by Indrema until Indrema ceased operations in April 2001. Besides game play, it was also to be a CD player, DVD player, web browser, and TiVo-like video recorder. It also would have been an MP3 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 RAM and 96MB total. Its storage medium would have been 10GB discs. It would have had HDTV support. 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 allowed you to slide out the graphics processor when a better one was available), an x86-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, for its speculated release date was during the peak of Microsoft's Xbox, Sony's PlayStation 2, and Nintendo's GameCube, and it was just one of the many independently developed systems that would never rise out of obscurity and gain much popularity, as the three aforementioned systems had already more than monopolized the home console gaming industry.
[edit] See also
- The Phantom, another video game console identified as vaporware.
- Pandora, another Linux based Console
[edit] External links
- Indrema Informer - includes technical specifications and a list of links to Indrema-related news articles.
