Game console

The term game console is used, in the entertainment industry, to refer to a computer specifically designed to play games. Typically these devices do not come with the keyboard and mouse required to use them as normal computers. Typically, their underlying operating systems were proprietary.

When games were available on multiple vendors competing game consoles it meant that the game developers had had to manually adapt their source code to each manufacturer's proprietary operating system.

Some early game consoles have had emulator programs written for them, that, in theory, allow their old games to be played on more modern, more powerful computers. In practice some old games can't be run, because the old binaries made calls into the old console's proprietary ROMs. In practice many games written for early consoles relied too closely on the console's hardware. For example, when the game developer wanted a certain activity to happen a certain number of times, per second, they might rely on counting screen refresh cycles, and, with new hardware, with a different screen refresh rate, the game might play too quickly, or too slowly.

The Sony Play station 2 was an early example of a game console which could be turned into a fully functional computer. A Linux distribution was prepared for the PS2.