Kevin Bachus shared the stage with Sun’s Scott McNealy at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco to announce the;
“Phantom Gaming Service is slated to go live Thursday, Nov. 18, 2004. The Phantom Game Receiver will ship with the full Java 2 Standard Edition Runtime Environment and supporting game APIs. All Java technology-based games will be able to run on the Phantom out of the box.”
The console will is based on an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ and contains a 40GB hard drive, 256MB of memory TV output and broadband Internet feed. The graphics come courtesy of an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra ship. The box, which clearly amounts to little more than a low-end PC, will retail for $199, Infinium said. The Phantom Game Service costs $29.95 a month, and if you sign up for a 24-month period, you’ll get your Athlon XP box for free.
The first launch was supposed to be in Q1 2003. The second was supposed to be Q1, 2004.