It is a crowd-sourced console designed with the intention of getting more indie games out there. It runs a custom skin of Android, and contains a NVIDIA Tegra 3 SOC. The system connects to the provided controller with Bluetooth. Network connectivity is provided through either 2.4G wireless or a 10/100 port. Display output is HDMI only, and there is one USB 2.0 port for things like KB, Mice, and USB thumb drives. The board also has a micro-USB port on it but that is only for putting the device into slave mode and attaching it to a host PC.
Tegra 3
The heart and soul of the OUYA. Here are its specs straight from Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TegraThe Tegra 3 (codenamed "Kal-El")[19] is functionally a SoC with a Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU, but includes a fifth "companion" core. While all cores are Cortex-A9s, the companion core is manufactured with a special low power silicon process that uses less power at low clock rate but does not scale well to high clock rates; hence it is limited to 500 MHz. There is also special logic to allow running state to be quickly and transparently transferred between the companion core and one of the normal cores. The goal is for a mobile phone or tablet to be able to power down all the normal cores and run on only the companion core, using comparatively little power, during standby mode or when otherwise underutilizing the CPU. According to Nvidia, this includes playing music or even video content.[20] Compared to Tegra 2, the ARM Cortex-A9s in Tegra 3 now supports ARM's SIMD extension, NEON. The GPU in Tegra 3 is an evolution of the Tegra 2 GPU, with three times the number of pixel shader units (12 compared to 4) and higher clock frequency. It can also output video up to 2560×1600 resolution and supports 1080p MPEG-4 AVC/h.264 40 Mbit/s High-Profile, VC1-AP, and DivX 5/6 video decode.[21] The Tegra 3 was released on November 9, 2011.[22]
Features:
Semiconductor technology: 40 nm LPG by TSMC
CPU cache: L1: 32 kB instruction + 32 kB data, L2: 1 MB
The number of active cores can be reduced at runtime to save power and possibly even enter single-core mode[23]
The Design
- ouya3low.jpg (592.5 KiB) Viewed 5506 times
- ouya1low.jpg (460.93 KiB) Viewed 5506 times
Android
OUYA runs a custom version of Android 4.1. There in lies one of my biggest complaints with the system. I'm not a big Android fan, and it doesn't feel suited to the needs of this device. When you fire up XBMC half of the 1GB ram is already gone before you have done anything. Sometimes you have to reboot the machine to resolve issues (I will get into such issues later) which points to memory management / background process issues with the OS. These are issues that will need to be resolved. If I had to guess the OS isn't killing games when you close them but rather dropping them into an idle state.
The skin is very minimalist. Many complain about it but I like it. Other than the settings menu where some of the cell phone options haven't been taken out yet. There were several complaints about how fast images loaded in the store (called "Discover") on many forums. I didn't see this unless I loaded a bunch of apps without rebooting (again with the poor resource management.) There is no indication as to what the app costs when you download it (because the initial download always has to be free,) however it would be nice to know what the final cost is before you even waste your time trying something out. A minor complaint but valid.
I'm hoping someone will hack Linux onto this thing at some point.
The Controller
Early on there were major controller issues. Many people reported massive dead spots on the analogue sticks, some not even working at all, and buttons getting stuck under the metal face plates. Controller lag is still an on-going issue, I have had few cases of it but it did happen for a moment today, however, turning the system off and then back on resolved it. Again, there should be something in the OS keeping priority on input response. Other than that all games have played well.
The ergonomics of the controller are actually pretty good and it feels solid. It doesn't look cheap or feel poorly made with only one exception... The digital D-pad. I find that you have to push this thing down too far to get response. Its just clunky, there won't be any way to make a good quality fighting game until that has been fixed. I was really pissed when it took them 2.5 months to deliver my unit but after reading about the issues people had with the first run of controllers I'm glad I received one that works. It isn't perfect, but it is defiantly useable. In terms of the feel of it in your hands it feels good has a good weight and is comfortable. The analogue sticks are decent not the best or worst I've used but they lean more on the good side then the bad. There is a small touch pad in the top center, not much uses it but at the same time it is way too sensitive for most uses the cursor just flys across the screen and it isn't very accurate. The buttons are pretty good but not quite up to par with a Sony, MS, or Nintendo product, but also not as bad as third party controllers for those same consoles.
Games
I have downloaded several games and surprisingly most have been good. I downloaded Beast Boxing Turbo, Saturday Morning RPG, Bard's Tale, No Brakes Valet, and a handful of others I can't recall. I have spent most of that time playing Saturday Morning RPG and just got to the point where I need to pay to continue. Which brings me to the point that all games on the OUYA are required to have some form of Free form. Many of them are just Free, with no catches like No Brakes Valet. But most let you sample the game then ask you to pay to continue $3 to $6 USD seems to be the norm but some like Final Fantasy 3 cost $15. Others are free but charge for items like Beast Boxing Turbo but can be completed without paying anything. The graphics on most game are crude by today's standards most of this due to the piss poor GPU contained within the Tegra 3. For a ARM SOC the Tegra 3 is a beast on the CPU side but definitely lacks GPU power. It was a slouch when it came out so this is no surprise. Some games will make you cringe at the sight of massive primitives. Where the system seems to shine is old school 2D graphics.
Emulation will be covered on its own.
NVIDIA GRID
NIVIDIA GRID is a setup where if your host PC contains a modern NVIDIA GPU you can stream PC games to another device with a Tegra SOC over a local network. Initially this was designed to only work with NVIDIA's own project Shield, but at E3 at NVIDIA's booth it was shown working on an OUYA. That is a feature I am interested in. It would be nice to play PC games on my TV set, because now that I have a 2 year old it is becoming harder and harder to have the actual time to sit down in my study for proper PC gamming. Some games will never be playable this way due to latency, however I fully expect quite a few games to work just fine although I will miss the detail of my 1440p PC monitor.
Emulation
So far the emulation front is good. I have downloaded several emulators from the official store and all have worked flawlessly. There are many people grumbling about not being able to find USB drives to load the roms on the various OUYA forums on the web. I had no issue, but the drive is buried a bit by default and navigating the directories is not as intuitive as it should be. People with even a small bit of Linux knowledge should have no issue finding their thumb drive mounted in the /mnt/ directory. My issue was figuring out how to traverse the directory structure with the d-pad. It turns out that left on the d-pad brings you closer to ./ and the O button confirms you to enter whatever directory is highlighted. I obviously haven't tried every rom or system out there but Atari 2600 and SNES work like a charm.
There is no PS1 emulator on the official store but I would really like to play my copy of Castlevania SOTN again so I'm going to open up OUYA's browser tonight and see what I can make happen similar to how XBMC is loaded.
XBMC
One of the reasons I bought this device is because I wanted a better media center device. Unfortunately, there is a reason that XBMC is still not in the official OUYA store. There are many issues with it I downloaded it and installed it through OUYA's built in web browser. Not ready for prime time yet. Lots of audio issues. 1080p video jerks a lot, even content that plays fine on my R Pi. At this point all these SOCs have good enough video decode blocks that there should be no issues with video so something else is at play here. OUYA is investing a good chunk of money into XBMC so I imagine we will see a solution sooner rather than later.
What do I think
If you like indie or retro games and don't mind putting down $100 I think this console is a worthy investment. There are issues still and I expect them to continue for a good 3 months or so, but with $15M in cash to blow I'm willing to bet that they will work most of them out? I think it would make a nice Linux PC if someone ever gets down to hacking it, I would assume that this would happen at some point (I also have a Apple TV3 and assumed it would get a jail-break by now so don't put too much value in my words.)
