Breakthrough in Nuon Homebrew scene

In the nineties there was a glut of companies trying to sneak a gaming platform into people’s homes as part of something else, under the guise of a “Multimedia Device”. The Philips CD-i, Commodore CDTV and Tandy Visual Entertainment System were computers disguised as CD players. None of them were huge successes – but that didn’t stop VM Labs from trying the same idea when the DVD player came along.

Codenamed “Project X”, the idea of VM Lab’s Nuon was that the Nuon technology that could be added to DVD players to allow them to play compatible games. Samsung, Toshiba, Motorola and RCA took the bait, and produced products featuring the technology.

A small number of games was produced for the system, including Tempest 3000 legendary coder, Jeff Minter, but the system didn’t take off – not helped by the fact that Sony’s PlayStation 2 also doubled as a DVD player.

In 2001 VM Labs released a homebrew SDK so people could write games for the system, and the product does have a small but enthusiastic homebrew scene. However, the SDK only supported the Samsung DVD-N501/DVDN504/DVDN505 and RCA DRC300N/DRC480N machines.

Until now.

Nuon fan, “ALTrN8”, has got a demo running on machines not supported by the VM Labs Home-brew SDK, thanks to work by coder, “EdgeConnector” which means more Nuon owners can play homebrew games.

This is not the only Nuon news – it looked like Songbird are working on a new Nuon controller, and work is also happening on Nuance, the Nuon emulator.