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EOL for Hydra? — Parallax Forums

EOL for Hydra?

blittledblittled Posts: 681
edited 2013-08-07 20:30 in Propeller 1
I noticed the Hydra Game Station is out of stock with no estimated date when they will be back in stock on the Parallax site. The link to XGameStation takes you to that site but most links are either broken or giving warnings that the inventory items are invalid. It looks like XGameStation is no longer in business. This makes me believe the production of the Hydra has stopped. Does this mean the Hydra has reached its end of life? A quick search of the web shows Fry's and Edmund Scientific still has them in stock and I saw some other sites that have it.

Before I got mine you could find most of the components in break out boards. I did make one on a breadboard. I'm not sure you can find enough to breadboard one anymore.

About a year ago I was lucky enough to pick up a Hydra with an acrylic case, SD Expansion card and Memory expansion card at a discount from a couple of friends. The only thing I never got was the short lived Ethernet expansion card.

Comments

  • AndreLAndreL Posts: 1,004
    edited 2013-08-06 13:37
    Yes, the HYDRA is EOL, the manufacturer that builds them won't build reasonable amount of units, so parallax can't keep that high of inventory. So, they are EOL.

    Now, I am not sure what you are talking about with the XGameStation.com site, it works perfectly, you need to register and log in to BUY something since we get so many bots, we make it hard to use the cart without registering. But, we have HYDRA's in stock (we designed it), and we will actually start manufacturing the product in a few month in low volume with some small changes to make it cheaper.

    The HYDRA is the flagship product for the propeller chip and put the propeller on the map, our work on reversing engineering the propeller chip, documenting it, and writing games and demos to push the boundaries of the chip, not to mention the 800+ page I personally wrote on it, really started the community off on the chip. And its sad, that a manufacturing issue is going to stop production of the product when it sells thru each month just fine. But, these things happen.

    So, if you want a HYDRA, simply go to xgamestation.com, register, and make sure you have cookies, and security set to allow javascript and sessions, etc. For example, if you log in with safari I have heard people have trouble with cart.

    But, if you have any problems simple email us at support@nurve.net -- we have been in business for 12 years, and will continue in business for the next 12.

    We tried to get parallax to explore other ways to get the HYDRA's built, but they just couldn't get it to happen. Its too bad, they didn't do one last build, but oh well...


    Sincerely,

    Andre' LaMothe
    CEO | Chief Scientist Nurve Networks LLC
    Creator of the HYDRA
  • blittledblittled Posts: 681
    edited 2013-08-06 19:34
    Andre, thanks for the reply. I just checked the site and it is working well as you said. I don't know what happened on my computer that caused the weird results I saw. I'll do some diagnostics on it. I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that your site was closed.

    Also thanks for all the work you have done on the Propeller. The Hydra book has become my "bible" for the Propeller.
  • AndreLAndreL Posts: 1,004
    edited 2013-08-06 20:11
    No problem. One of my friends David Betz (he was the lead on the Prop C compiler), anyway, he emailed me and said your site is down and the hydra is EOL. I went into a half panic :) Since I new about the EOL for months, but not that my site had a problem :)

    But, yes, the HYDRA is EOL from Parallax. But, there is stock at a lot of stores (Edmund, Fry's, xgamestation) and many others. But, I will take this opportunity to re-release a slightly cheaper version, remove the printed book for example, and maybe pimp out the PCB with a new color. But, the HYDRA is a great "get started" product for microcontrollers and graphics programming, so I would hate to see the product die for now reason. If you don't find out what happened when you visited my site, please let me know. I could have been as simple as a microsoft update and an automatic reboot for a few moments.

    Anyway, glad you liked the book. I just finished a new one, actually I started a new publishing company to publish tech books, this is our first book, I developed it, edited, and one of my interns in CS wrote it. Its a beginner book titled "The Black Art of Multiplatform Game Development". Based on SDL, so works on windows and linux, so now I get to go out and shop it to all my publishers and see what I can get for a book that is already COMPLETE :) Which will be nice.

    Andre'
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-08-07 06:38
    AndreL wrote: »
    No problem. One of my friends David Betz (he was the lead on the Prop C compiler), anyway, he emailed me and said your site is down and the hydra is EOL.
    Well, I have put a lot of effort into PropGCC but the P1 project was acually lead by Steve Denson (jazzed). I like to think I had a big part in encouraging Parallax to undertake the port though. Also, most of the actual compiler porting was done by Eric Smith and Ken Rose did most of the work on binutils.
  • Roy ElthamRoy Eltham Posts: 3,000
    edited 2013-08-07 13:48
    AndreL,
    I'm glad you are keeping the Hydra alive. It's what introduced me to the Propeller, and was a great introduction! Thank you.
    Also, I'd love to see a Hydra 2 (based on the Prop 2).
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-08-07 14:04
    Roy Eltham wrote: »
    AndreL,
    I'm glad you are keeping the Hydra alive. It's what introduced me to the Propeller, and was a great introduction! Thank you.
    Also, I'd love to see a Hydra 2 (based on the Prop 2).
    Maybe the revised version of the Hydra could have an on-board SD card slot and a SPI flash/SRAM plug-in module for the game slot?
  • SRLMSRLM Posts: 5,045
    edited 2013-08-07 15:14
    David Betz wrote: »
    Well, I have put a lot of effort into PropGCC but the P1 project was acually lead by Steve Denson (jazzed). I like to think I had a big part in encouraging Parallax to undertake the port though. Also, most of the actual compiler porting was done by Eric Smith and Ken Rose did most of the work on binutils.

    Who is Ken Rose? Does he have a forum handle? I'd like to add him to the contributors list on the FAQ.
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-08-07 17:29
    SRLM wrote: »
    Who is Ken Rose? Does he have a forum handle? I'd like to add him to the contributors list on the FAQ.
    Ken Rose, Eric Smith, and I worked together at a company called VM Labs in the late 90's. Ken and Eric ported GCC to the VM Labs VLIW processor and when Parallax wanted a port of GCC to the Propeller I suggested that they contract with Ken and Eric. Eric ended up doing the GCC port and Ken did the initial binutils port. Ken stopped working on PropGCC a while back because of lack of time. Ken and Eric are two of the smartest and nicest people I've ever worked with. I was very fortunate to be able to work with them again on the PropGCC project.
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-08-07 19:47
    SRLM wrote: »
    Who is Ken Rose? Does he have a forum handle? I'd like to add him to the contributors list on the FAQ.
    Thanks for adding Ken's name to the FAQ but it probably should be up next to Eric if order is supposed to be significant. Porting binutils is not a small job and he also did the initial work on gdb as well. Sorry, I forgot to mention that before.
  • SRLMSRLM Posts: 5,045
    edited 2013-08-07 20:26
    Sorry. I forgot that I had a rough order going, and just appended his name to the end. Fixed now.
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-08-07 20:30
    SRLM wrote: »
    Sorry. I forgot that I had a rough order going, and just appended his name to the end. Fixed now.
    Thanks!
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