And these "dozens of other people" all too often end up blasting sexual and racial harassment and griefing right back at him.

This happens often in households with children or at family reunions. Unless a game is rated M, children are an expected part of the audience, and parents not willing to buy each child his own gaming PC to create a home LAN are an expected part of the market.

As somebody who wants to get into professional video game development but who is not currently in a position to move to Austin, Boston, or Seattle to do an internship in order to gain the experience that the console makers expect, I do care. If set-top PCs somehow become attractive to typical users, or if Ouya takes off, then there will be a market for indie games that use gamepads. Otherwise, there will be no such market. I'm trying to find a plan B in case Ouya fails to gain traction the same way the various GP2X products have failed.

Likewise, working Wii consoles for dumping one's own copy of a game will be hard to find.

So do I, but I'm a geek. Most users are not geeks. How exactly does a PC's versatility benefit the average user in the living room? The average user expects a device connected to a TV to play video games, movies, and TV series, and that's pretty much it. The user doesn't expect to use a set-top device to surf, e-mail, tweet, or edit documents because a mouse and keyboard won't fit easily into the user's lap while in a recliner, nor can a user at a typical TV seating distance read the small text on web sites that target desktop PCs. Or if I have something all wrong, what am I missing?

Don't get me wrong; I want set-top PCs to become popular. But first I have to understand how to make them practical to a crowd accustomed to the limitations of consoles.

Likewise, a console owner can toss a new console at an existing setup to keep up with new games.

Even if I, a geek, am willing to learn to solder, the sort of end users that enable economies of scale aren't geeks and aren't going to want to solder. They want to buy something that somebody else has already made, so that they can plug in the adapter, plug in the cartridge, push a button, and get a ROM file to play in an emulator.

Which means you have to own the Wii in the first place, so why buy a gaming PC in the first place instead of just playing games on the Wii that you already own and doing everything else on a homework-and-Facebook PC or a tablet?

I'm surprised the application form allowed that to be submitted. Quite often, such forms have told me "Please enter only digits."

Until you discover that in a particular field, all three suppliers of a particular essential good or service deal only with companies that have already demonstrated "financial stability" and verifiable "industry experience", and the only providers of such experience require a college degree followed by an apprenticeship hundreds of miles away.

Cut those in half because a lot of people work part time while attending college full time.

You'd need to pay the cost of living whether or not you go to college.

So what should a junior developer with no full-time experience put down as an acceptable salary range? In general, what steps should one take to learn "what someone in his position should be earning" for each combination of job title, years of experience, and location? Is there a widely accepted set of reliable statistics?

If you treat the system software update as something that people are expected to choose not to install, then the PlayStation 3 has no online play because Sony shut down PSN on April 1, 2010.

But how many PC games will recognize more than one game controller? I was under the impression that most were intended for mouse and keyboard and a separate PC per player. And how many allow use of a controller during the first-time installation that you acknowledge "may take a bit"?

You'd have to build one that plays games of PlayStation 4 quality for that price, because you can get a PlayStation 3 that plays games of PlayStation 3 quality for about $250.

True, the last major set-top console to use cartridges was the Nintendo 64. But Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita are currently for sale and currently use cartridges.

I was looking for brands. I know Retrode works with Super NES and Sega Genesis cartridges, but what works with NES cartridges?

The law does.

If I build a PC for someone, and I recommend that the customer break the law to obtain games for it, I'm committing contributory copyright infringement. See MGM v. Grokster.

Even Nintendo's discs that use a slightly nonstandard physical sector format that a lot of DVD-ROM drives have trouble with?