The interesting “thing” about posting “news” is the expectation that is inevitably incurred or assumed or created from the “news” post. In the past dealing with situations that require some sort of feedback, has always led to more situations requiring more intense and frequent feedback. You see this not only in smaller business such as Ds-X but in some of the largest corporations out there today. Many of the larger companies simply choose to ignore or stay silent, and in some ways I can see why, but is this the correct move ? In the recent days there has been some interesting debates in our internal structure with respect to what we should and should not say, especially in times of high anticipation and stress. Personally I am very much in two minds, every time we have said something either formally here or informally in our forums/support system, it has ended up in simply creating more anticipation and more situations. I guess the heart of the problem stems from not being able to give hard facts and figures, in the time frame expected by the general public. Why not ? Simple, we are all human, and in every aspect of a business we deal with multiple humans, people like you and me, all of which have their way of working and your own way of thinking.

Production Delays.

Since I have covered a lot of this in both our support system and forums, I will briefly highlight the situation here. In order to eliminate/reduce the plastic mold quality issue we experienced in a very small % of the initial units shipped, we made some changes to quality control in our supply chain. These changes we though would be actioned quickly and cost very little in terms of delays, as it turned out we were very wrong ! . The changes resulted in some major confusion with customs and the final assembly plant in China. Long story short, we ended up in a situation with 0 production for about 1 month. Yeah, for those of you who are in the industry and know what time of year and how recent our launch is .. that’s a very big OUCH. This panic month is now over and things are back on track.

Universal updater:

This is probably the most heated internal debate. The reason for delay: Perfectionism . The temporary win32 release posted below, was an internal compromise. Technically we could have released a universal updater that would have done the job for the 1.0.2 update. However it would have needed an update to do any further updates. Hence the debate. Release a half done incomplete universal updater, that would need to be updated the very next release, or delay. Now comes the interesting part of this post:

The Ds-Xtreme: What is it that makes this product so unique, and at the same time so complicated and difficult to fully grasp.

Well the answers lie in the same “Perfectionism” that was mentioned above. From concept we set some very tough to meet goals. The toughest of all was the integrated hardware design. From our very fist announcement we advertised a key feature that I think very few (if any) of our users have caught on to. I think the quote was “ Fully updatable hardware” to explain this I need to get into some technical insight of the DS-Xtreme design, so here goes.

What’s inside that tiny package. ?

The DS-Xtreme is made up of multiple levels of integrated systems. From a distant view it’s a piece of hardware running some software. Bring on the magnifying glass and it becomes a lot more. There are 3 main parts to the design each very much individually updatable and reconfigurable.

THE DS-Xtreme OS

The most obvious and the only part updated so far is our DS side operating system, this is by far the most complicated and advanced operating system put together for any such device to date. The heart of the OS is the skinning engine. No other device available can offer anything near what the DS-Xtreme OS offers currently. While we hopped this would be taken advantage of from day one, it seems we need to incentivise this avenue more in order to prove just what exactly can be done with this unique and highly advanced skinning engine. (more about this incentive later) While the OS is critical to the correct operation and seamless integration of the complete package, it is only part of the design.

THE onboard CPU

Running internally at 48Mhz , with exceptionally low power consumption there is a tiny CPU running our customized firmware. This little beast is currently in charge of USB and basic memory management.

THE FPGA

Field Programmable Gate Array. What is this ? Well this ingenious piece of hardware is the sole reason devices such as this as well as many other integrated electronics exist today. In a very basic nutshell this is a device that can be programmed to become almost any configuration of electronics or logic in hardware. It is extremely fast, and very flexible. Today you can have it to handle communication and encryption routines, tomorrow you can have it take care of memory management and complex audio decoding. Its limitations are very much based on the physical size of the internal fabric. An interesting side note: At time of launch we were only using a little over 50% of the available fabric, and that’s with very little optimization. We could have easily opted to go for half the cost of the FPGA and put a device half the size.

Now comes the original statement “ fully upgradeable “ .. One of the requirements was that we leave the door open to be able to completely reprogram each subsection, including the FPGA. Take a quick look at most designs out there, very few if any allow their FPGA to be updated, there are many reasons for this, most stemming from security of IP. We opted to go against the grain and take the route that best benefited our customers and not ourselves. The reason? Simple, we in this for the long haul, the Ds-Xtreme is still a baby, barely able to crawl, its has a lot yet to offer , and in the coming year or so, we hope to prove this. Yes right now its core features are amazing and ground breaking, but in six months when other devices hit the market, we want our customers who have paid good money for their device to feel that they have invested in us and our design , not just spent some hard earned cash on a disposable unit. Yes we will have multiple products, but NO we will not let our “older” designs die off in just a few months with lack of support or updates. We will strive to prove that contrary to today’s “norm” for consumer devices, there is still a way to roll out new hardware and keep old hardware updated and running with the latest features and benefits. We don’t believe it’s fair to doll up a device sell it as is, and then make a simple software change and bring out a new “updated” device. This obviously stands true for what is physically possible with the hardware present.

To wrap up the FPGA talk, picture this, the FPGA device sitting inside your DS Xtreme has enough “room” to fit a complete ARM9 core and can be clocked at over 300Mhz !. While we would never venture into such an extreme implementation ( simply cause there is no room left over for anything else J) it does go to show just how much power is locked inside that tiny package. Yes ! by simply plugging your DS-Xtreme into your PC and performing a complete update we could re-program your device into something completely different . With a click of a button its even possible to completely implement one of the most popular and state of the art cpu architectures out there today. (and run it at 10 times the speed your ds is running at ;-) ) So the doors are open. Our challenge is massive, but we believe in our concept and we will succeed to make each and every one of our customers proud to own our design and be part of our belief.

Together with our skilled and talented staff, and more importantly the skill and brilliant talent of the open source community, we all have a lot to look forward to. In an effort to spear head the development and support for the DS-Xtreme, we have allocated the first sample units to the many interested parties who have shown their talent in the development scene.

For the thousands of you who are currently having fun with the DS-Xtreme, how about some experimentation with the skinning engine? Yes I know a lot has to do with us dragging our feet in releasing the skin preview app. (again that damn perfectionism ! ) but its perfectly safe to mess with the skin in the default folder. Worst case you simply remove the folder and the internal backup copy will take effect ;-) Have fun, and we are looking forward to your comments in our forums.