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Personally, I'm still holding onto my GBA SP for travel. Its small, nice battery life, backlit for redeye flights.

I bought a 512MB GBA Flash Advance cartridge from http://www.easybuy2000.com/ so I can load the emulators from http://www.zophar.net/consoles/gameboy.html and play classic gaming on the go. The 512MB card holds every NES game I own, plus a few of my GBA cartridges. This makes it very easy to travel, its an all in one unit. No loose games to loose.

I couple that with a PDA screen protector on the GBA SP screen. The GBA closes to protect the screen, but I had some old protectors laying around and they work great for this. Just cut them to size. You could do the same thing with the DS; if you don't have any, look on ebay for a discontinued PDA's protectors. You pay more in shipping then the actual item, but its still less than $5.

• System Mods
• ModChipNow.com
• EasyBuy200.com
• etc...

Next version better have full-on network multimedia capabilities. I want to run my ripped DVDs on the TV without more than a network cord to me server. My current multimedia computer is too loud, and quiet ones are either too expensive, or too low end (no surround sound, etc)

Then just get a normal Xbox, throw a mod chip, then get a copy of XBox Media Player..

It works beautifully.

Also, if the stock Xbox makes too much noise, improve it. I ripped out all the shielding and replaced the fan with a quieter one. It runs a few degrees cooler without that insulation, but collects dust more readily. I just leave the bolts out so I can pop the lid off and vacuum it out when it comes time to vacuum out my PC's (monthly)..

Or you could quit trusting a HDD with all your rips and just slap them on a DVD(+/-)R and get a DVD player that'll read them reliably (all the progressive scan Sony's do, to my knowledge). :]

isonews has been degrading in quality for quite sometime now. Other release sites have taken its place partly because of ventures like modchip selling.

I doubt if it will stop them. Wonder how long it will be before a domain/server is running in remote parts of the world for the business.. oh wait

Not that I'm advocating this.. but EasyBuy2000 has some very interesting satellite products...

then why is their site still up and running? in fact, here is the link for the modchip.

Easybuy2000, the exclusive distributor of the MAtrix no-solder modchip got busted a few days ago. That will be a major stumbling block for people trying to mod their Xboxen.

Like this?

-- Dr. Eldarion, amazed that his submission got posted --

• Buy the mod chip, $59, no soldering required and Flash it with your own ROM
  
• Buy a USB keyboard ($10 appx OEM)
  
• Make it work on the the XBox (some wire work involved)
  
• Dittos on the USB mouse.
  
• Download and burn ISOs for the Xbox Linux boot CD-RW/DVD-RW and the Mandrake install
  
• Hardware specific Mandrake install instructions can be found here.
  

Actually there is another chip on the market now..it requires no slodiering at all, only patience (you have to arrange some contacts in right order before attaching it...but nothing serious). You can get it for 59$ @ easybuy2000.com... More info here

Easybuy.

For now, at least.

Note: I have no affiliation with LikSang, or EasyBuy - they're just pretty similar. LikSang had a larger variety of video-game oriented products, but EasyBuy has most of the more popular modchips as well.

This must scare the hell out of the XBox group at MS.

These guys didn't see the law either?
This seems like a legit company selling a device to allow Playstation 2 to play copies, backups etc. Is this illegal?

As a followup, this definitely "brightens" the already vibrant homebrew development scene.

The Visoly flash linker and carts are great, and available from (your friends and mine) Lik-Sang, GameGizmo and Easy Buy 2000 (all no-referral URLs).

The multi-boot cables (for downloading small apps to your GBA without needing to flash a cart) are cool, too, and have been exploited to turn your GBA into a handheld terminal. Check out the PDF on that last link; much nicer than reading the page, with pictures. Wish there was someplace within the continental US to order a couple non-ugly ones from, though. Those MBV2s are just too unweildly to use in sexy handheld terminal demonstrations.

*cough*.

I know it's slightly redundant, but I figure in this thread it'll get more OGG-related attention.

The Soul Player is firmware-upgradeable, so if they see enough people wanting Ogg Vorbis support, they can write an upgrade to have the thing read (and play!) the format, and all you'd have to do is burn the update to a CD-RW.

Or, alternatively, some ambitious hacker-type person could figure out the firmware format, and write their own Soul Ogg decoder.

Personally, in terms of money per storage space, I like my MPTrip clone.. I rarely ever listen to more than 11 hours of music at a time, and this thing works wonderfully. Despite the warning on the page, it actually does read CD-RW's, and when I have to change it, it takes about 9 minutes and I'm done. Best of all, this thing is er.. competitively priced, and it's a very high-quality first-gen mp3/cd player.

If you're willing to spend a bit more and don't mind not having Duren686's Personal Seal of Approval, you can try the AVC Soul Player. I've never used one, but I've heard nothing but good about it, and as an added bonus, the upgradeable firmware gives it the possibility of reading OGG files.

Personally, in terms of money per storage space, I like my MPTrip clone.. I rarely ever listen to more than 11 hours of music at a time, and this thing works wonderfully. Despite the warning on the page, it actually does read CD-RW's, and when I have to change it, it takes about 9 minutes and I'm done. Best of all, this thing is er.. competitively priced, and it's a very high-quality first-gen mp3/cd player.

If you're willing to spend a bit more and don't mind not having Duren686's Personal Seal of Approval, you can try the AVC Soul Player. I've never used one, but I've heard nothing but good about it, and as an added bonus, the upgradeable firmware gives it the possibility of reading OGG files.

Good price on it here. Check out their other MP3 players too, some good deals.

Possible? VERY MUCH SO. It's already been done to the PS2 for less than 20 bucks.

This site has tons of system hacks.

As a matter of fact, you can chip out your ps2 right now. It's a bit of a bitch to do it, but you can. Check out easybuy2000. There's a million other places as well.

> The Rio Volt by Sonicblue is the greatest of the CD/MP3 players and has upgradable firmware.

Ah yes, the Rio Volt, also known as the Soul Digital Media Player before Sonicblue started marketing it under their brand. You can find the Soul DMP at http://www.soulplayer.com/dmp.html. Apparently the latest firmware update adds ASF support to the MP3, WMA and standard CD audio that was there when I bought mine. Hopefully they'll be adding OGG support too.

For those of you who can't get the Rio Volt outside North America, you may want to look at the Soul DMP instead -- same beast, different colour. The "buy" link on the Soul site sends you to http://www.easybuy2000.com/ where they've got the Soul tagged at US$129. They also imply that they will ship overseas. (From the bottom of the page, "Overseas shipments will NOT receive the AC Adapater, and will therefor get a $5US discount on their purchase price.".)

(No, this isn't an ad, just a pointer. I've never dealt with EasyBuy2000 nor directly with Soul. I picked up my DMP from Computer Geeks when they stocked it a number of months back.)

Get the small player and a regular CD-R drive that writes both large and small CDs and you save $100 and get a faster burner to boot.

Easybuy2000.com has sold these for about 6 months. Not that they're wonderful, but the full size eXpanium wasn't without its problems. If you really want an MP3 CD player (and they're damn cool) go with a RioVolt (or Easybuy's full size player, which is a RioVolt in different casing for $30 less) or a Pine D'Music. They don't play .ogg files, but they do play WMA and VBR encoded MP3s. Plus those cute little 3" CDs are only 170 megs, which is an order of magnitude smaller than 700..

A standard for storing files on a CD already exists, it's called an iso9660 filesystem, or maybe even Joliet stuff. In any case, these standards already exist, and my experience with my MPTrip (device which reads mp3's off of a cd and plays them) is just fine -- I can't complain about slow access times or whatever, and I can even jog with it, and even bang it around on my desk for minutes, without any distruptions to the music.
All these corporate types want to do is make it harder for me to stick all my music on a few disks.
The best thing to do would be to just build devices that play stuff in alphabetical order (or random, or in a specific directory) from a regular old iso, so you can use it in your computer transparently, there is no point in introducing a new 'standard'.
Blah, all these people want is money!

Damn. THey would have to go and do this *after* I spend the money to buy my wife one of these things. Oh well, I got the cheap model (MPTrip, only $89+tax), I'm glad I didn't go for the more over-the-top models that were like $200-$300. I'll just buy something spiffy in about 6 months, and hopefully the CD-R "records" I burn in that period will work on all machines. I should make sure all the MP3s have ID3 tags, and probably put WinAmp playlists in all the directories too...

You can buy a cd player that plays CD-Rs (and CD-RWs, I think) now for $87. It may not be "standard" yet, but whatever... it will read files off of a standard CD-ROM file system which is standard enough for me. Sure, the user experience could use a little work, but $87 for this much storage space can't be beat right now.

I agree with your first two points, but not this third one. I had around 150 CDs beamed to my.mp3.com before it was originally shut down and they were all my own and all very legal. Re-inserting these CDs would be a royal pain for me for several reasons:

• I have a lot of CDs and if the number of re-insertions that it asks for is proportional to the number of CDs I have then this is a lot of work for me.
• What if I'm at work when it asks me to re-insert a particular CD? That completely defeats the purpose of using my.mp3.com so that I don't have to lug all my CDs around.
• Worst of all (in the sense that this is more than just an annoyance), this defeats one of the big advantages of having something like my.mp3.com. Before, if I happened to scratch or otherwise destroy a CD that I owned I was at least assured that I would still be able to listen to it on my.mp3.com. Now, my.mp3.com can no longer be used as a backup for my collection.

That's OK though, because after my.mp3.com got shut down I started using mp3.com to find indie music and I started converting my existing CD collection to mp3s using Grip. I also picked up an MPTrip which lets you listen to CD-Rs with MP3s on them! Grip and MPTrip are taking the place of my.mp3.com for me (but I still use mp3.com because there is a lot of good indie music on there).

This would be easier (and cheaper). I'm very satisfied with mine.

-- Dr. Eldarion --

You can pick up a blank 32meg cartridge & a pc interface with software from here .. Looks pretty cool - Although I have not personally tried it & Its $73 bucks for the kit. ..This is just for "game backup" purposes, and does not have any creation tools.


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I just recieved my MPTRIP - Cool! Just threw in a MP3 cd and pressed play.. 14 HOURS OF MUSICAL GOODNESS- Now I could rip all my CD's, but its much easier to download them..


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Ummm... the Tips page says that you shouldn't record the CDs at more than 2x speed if you want them to work in the MPTrip - so while your point may be valid with future models, the current ones still have this limitation

The specs say that it supports only 196 bits/sec.
I must be really out of touch but since when did they improvise so much on mp3 technology?

Here's a link to "EasyBuy2000.com".

Please note I know NOTHING about this online retailer, I'm just posting a link I saw on another weblog earlier today.

According to this page the MPTrip barfs on any files that aren't MP3s. That means you can't have m3u playlists on the disc. I was all ready to buy one of these things until I read this the other week, but then I concluded it would be too much of a hassle when I read this. I probably would have even bought the thing had it been built to just skip non-MP3 files (lack of playlists isn't a huge deal to me), but it dies when it encounters one. I think it would just be inconvenient to have to burn two seperate MP3 cds every time I make one - one for my MPTrip and one for computers I encounter or future mp3 cd players that aren't differently enabled. Arghh... maybe I'll break down and buy one anyway - I just want one so bad.

I believe that this may be what you're looking for. Get a 486, install mpg123 and those scripts and just insert your CDR of MP3s and it'll play. Works great and it's cheaper than something like these MPTrip Discmans which are $115, which isn't too bad but you can't beat free =).
-Antipop

MP3 Discman. It took 3 weeks or so to get it, and the way you change dirs on the CD is screwy, but other than that I'm very satisfied.

-- Dr. Eldarion --

Why haven't I seen this anywhere else???: easybuy2000 has portable ones for $109 - they play ISO9660 CDR's with MP3's in any directory structure, as well as regular CD's... The construction's a bit cheap (it looks like your average discman from a few years back, but the buttons are chromed-over plastic things that push all the way through the cover to the main unit), but there are separate headphone and line outputs that pump out sound easily comparable with regular portable CD players. It includes random or single-directory play - the latter will keep you in the same subdirectory, but doesn't seem to work quite like the manual (which reads like a bad web translation) implies - i.e., trying to jump from the first track of one subdirectory to the next dir confuses it, requiring you to switch out of that mode and back. For some reason, it also has an absurd amount of memo space if you want to hook up a microphone to it - might have something to do with that 50 seconds of anti-skip...? The extra EQ settings aren't terribly impressive over the car stereo, but they help make cheap headphones sound a bit better. It even comes with an AC adapter that will charge Ni-Cads in the battery compartment. It decodes my 160K-encoded MP3's just fine - I don't think the manual says anything about what rates are supported (I've already misplaced it). ...and it's OEM to boot, so no corporate logos. An insanely good deal despite its quirks, from my perspective. I'm baffled that I haven't been able to find anything about it anywhere else (and saddened that my story about it was rejected because it was too similar to this one \). fri-'net-ik