The Piston living room PC costs $1000, launching Holiday 2013

Pricing details have emerged for a new games platform that aims to bring the PC games you make into players' living rooms. The Xi3 Corporation opened up pre-orders for its Linux-based Piston game PC [UPDATE: Xi3 has since clarified the system ships with Windows, not Linux] over the weekend, and revealed new details about the hardware. The living room PC, first revealed at the International Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, currently costs $899.99 to pre-order, although the price will rise to $999.99 after March 17. That base price will get you a 128GB solid state hard drive. The 256GB model costs $340 extra, and the 512GB version is $750 extra. All three models are expected to launch to the public during the 2013 holiday season. The Piston is part of a larger movement in making PC games more TV-friendly. It's the first third-party "unofficial" iteration of Valve Software's "Steam Box. Valve is currently developing its own version internally. In a recent GDC survey, 45 percent of respondents expressed interest in developing games for TV-connected PC-based game consoles. Xi3 provided some added details about the device too: The Piston will have 8GB of RAM, and a 3.2GHz quad-core AMD accelerated processing unit. It'll come with a Radeon 7000-series GPU, and support up to three monitors simultaneously. The user interface for the Piston has also been revealed, as the video below from Polygon shows. The company says that the menu system will be fully customizable, allowing users to select exactly which programs are booted up for each separate media type.