> Raspberry Pi w/ RetroPi or Batocera.

The R-Pi is nowhere near the raw capabilities of the PS5. Can't do that amazing Unreal Engine demo, or VR. A difference in degree large enough to be considered a difference in kind in my opinion. (I do reckon the R-Pi is powerful enough to do serious stuff, up to and including being a blazing fast workstation if we wrote the software for it.)

Batocera is not a piece of hardware? Could act as a platform for sure, but an ISA (fully specified, which means CPU + GPU + most peripherals) would in my opinion be better than an API. Closer to reality. Of course, we'd need APIs on top.

Two interesting aspects of consoles are the fixed ISA, and the fixed performance characteristics. We could possibly lift the latter without much consequences, as long as the hardware provides a well defined set of performance floors, that would determine what can run at which speed.

> you won't be able to fund the QA and devs necessary to do the bullshit boring work that is essential to making certain that consoles are a polished experience; from the operating system through to every game you purchase.

I certainly wouln't. The best I can boast about is having raised $7000 from the OTF for a 7-day security audit.

That said, it seems to me the "polished experience" is composed of fairly separate, or at least separable, problems. At the bottom is the hardware. Or even ISA. We need a hardware company to make that stuff. Not just the CPU, but all the rest. (Repeating what Casey said, stuff like GPU are becoming stable and general enough that fixing an ISA wouldn't have a significant negative impact on their evolution.) To do that, we need a big player like Intel or Nvidia on board — good fucking luck with that, unfortunately.

The second problem is provide high-level services that run on the hardware. OS, middleware… A huge undertaking if we're to have any backwards compatibility (we'd at least have to port Linux, and recompile everything). Perhaps not so bad if we flip the table and go in a direction closer in spirit to the Oberon project (Niklaus Wirth), or STEPS (Alan Kay's Viewpoint Research Institute).

The third problem is writing one or several store fronts like Steam.

The fourth problem is writing the actual games (and other applications). In some ways the easiest problem to solve, and in other ways the hardest. Easiest because game devs will go wherever they could sell their games, providing the ISA/API isn't too horrible (sometimes even when it is). The hardest because (i) that's where most of the effort will go, and (ii) the incentives of making the platform easy to work with may not be commensurate with that effort.

The zeroth problem is separating the above. The current world is set up for vertical integration. Apple and console vendors are the most extreme examples, but even Windows tends to be sold with the PC, in such a way that removing it is often not even cheaper. I have the feeling that we should think about a legal structure that would make it happen. This would include thinking about what corporations are supposed to enable. (This is where I start to question the entire economic system, so let's just note that pushed far enough, pretty much any subject has political implications.)

> Sony has done this twice. [PS3]. Consumers didn't care enough for Sony to bother with it again.

Wait a minute, if the first iterations of the PS3 could run Linux, how hard could have it been to port that ability to the new versions? I suspect they ended it for other reasons. If for instance the console did not by itself generated enough profit, and they compensated with online services, they'd have an incentive to limit sales to actual gamers, and run from the compute-cluster market.

> IIRC, Xbox One indie developer licenses are still basically almost free.

It's not just a matter of price. Can we make and sell porn games on the XBox One? I've heard that platforms like iOS disallow porn. And I don't see console vendors taking the heat for being "that platform with porn on it".

If regulation forced hardware vendors to open up their platforms, you could access questionable content on them, and nobody would take the flak. You'd still have "safe for work" store fronts, and porn hubs, and whatever controversial stuff huge corporation wouldn't feel like supporting.

> Your idea is still locked down, though; you cannot run arbitrary code because you cannot cross the signed/unsigned boundaries.

Locked down, yes, but the idea was to not lock people out of the system entirely. The main idea is that signed mode would give one additional ability: to prove that a given program, and the data it produces, traces back to a certificate chain that goes up to a given trusted certificate authority. (Sony gives Blizzard a certificate, Blizzard uses it to sign Starcraft 3, which then produces Blizzard authenticated network packets to stop cheats).

Unsigned programs should not be locked out of the platform at all. They'd just not be explicitly approved of, and maybe we'd display some warning before installation that this program is not endorsed, and may contain or do stuff that is "Not Good For You".

We probably won't see a competitive erotic wrestling game any time soon (no signatures to help cheat prevention), but at least we don't sacrifice some capabilities just so we can have other capabilities.