Anyone who has used I-Magic will know that it's a fantastic product (can't wait to see the new Fortius version!)  But I can't help thinking that not everyone has room for a PC and monitor to sit in front of their turbo training area...  (Or the money to have a laptop powerful enough to run the software!)

I can't speak for everyone, but I generally do my turbo training in front of the TV as I find it quite boring and I no longer have enough room to do it in front of the PC (my laptop runs Gentoo Linux and I-Magic doesn't run well under WINE unfortunately) anyways, maybe I should get to the point of this post   I own an Xbox, which is a fantastic and quite powerful piece of kit for it's sub £100 pricetag  - it's essentially just an 800MHz PC with a DVD drive, 8Gig Hard Drive and 64Meg of memory in a nice sleek looking box, but the point is that it's based around a Windows kernel.  Obviously I'm thinking...  Wow!  Wouldn't it be GREAT (and convenient) to be able to just play I-Magic on the Xbox through my nice large 36" TV?  BUT!!!!    Even better than that!!!  - The Xbox has an online gaming feature, so you could actually race your mates over the internet (and talk to them via a headset, while you're racing - if you're not too out of breath!!)  I really think it's an amazing idea which would boost both Microsoft and Tacxs profits I'm sure!!!

Possible problems:

• I guess the biggest problem is the amount of RAM the Xbox has - 64Meg isn't enough to run I-Magic on a PC.  I don't know the specs of the graphics processor though, if it's good enough I guess the on-board RAM wouldn't necessarily be a problem?  Not sure on that one...
• The Xbox runs a stripped down Windows kernel which means it isn't as easy as installing a Windows driver for I-Magic to use...  I-Magic *is* USB and it's widely known that USB keyboards happily work on an Xbox with a converter (indeed I use one!) but anyhow I'm sure it wouldn't be an awful lot of work to write a new driver...
• Updates...  New courses...  Tacx do release updates fairly frequently and although the Xbox is able to download new courses as extra content, the program 'core' would be on a DVD and so if you wanted to update the program itself you'd have to go out and buy a new DVD...

Of course this is just a fantasy idea I had while having lunch today, but it's the kind of thing that confuses me as to why it doesn't exist?  I'm sure there's a market for it, and maybe it'll be mysteriously released right after I finish this post (in which case I want 5% of worldwide profits!!!)  But anyways, it's food for thought so to speak   Something to talk about!

Pobster