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The third.

Off course, I may not be in the markedsegment a pda/phone/portable console is aimed at, but as I'm in the markedsegment that will end up paying for it, I feel that I got a right to say a few words...

A phone is for comunicating. Anythign beyond that is a 'bonus' feature. To comunicate, you don't need much in the way of screen nor sound - and I'm more than happy to keep my old Nokia 5110 until it dies, as it gives me both voice and SMS coupled with a longlasting batterylife. In short, it is a good phone even if its a tad large to hold in one hand and cradle against my cheek.

On the other hand, both gaming and a PDA simply screams for large screens, and gaming in particular needs a decent soundsystem. My Palm130 has a screen thats about 5cm square, while my GBA has a screen thats about 6cm by 4cm. The ergometricks of the PDA and the GBA is also radicaly different (the PDA is held in the palm of one hand whiel the other manipulate the stylus, while the GBA is held with both hands, letting ones thumbs do the playing).

Then there is the power of the processors and the batterylife to consider. You may or may not be right that a 'modern' phone is more powerfull than a GBA, but I has a hard time beliving it can outrun a PDA. So you'll have to build the phone around the processor requirering the most powerfull CPU, in other words the PDA-prosessor (unless you make a design with mutiple CPU's). This in turn means that you'll eat up your battery faster than fast - my old phone lasts five to six days between recharging, while I must rechage my PDA about every day (I do use it a lot). If my phone was powered by a PDA-prosessor, I fear I would have to recharge it several times a day (the phone is on all the time when all is said and done).

The point of this rant? The 'intergrtaded device' is a pipedream. The requirements for the portable console, the PDA and the phone are mutualy incompatible - the ergonomics alone means that compromises must be made. Better to keep them seperate I say - that way one of them can break wihtout leaving you completly without mobile computingpower as well.

ps: I've also noticed that while the mobile phone is banned on all flights, and most cabincrew asks you to turn your PDA off if it contains transmitters, no one has yet told me I need to shut my GBA off on long flights... not to mention that keeping them seperate allows me to pick and choose what to have along.

No kidding. I just picked up a (very sleek) Gameboy SP (in onyx black, of course) after seeing Advance Wars 2 and Final Fantasy Tactics on a friend's system.

These two are amazingly good for a portable system and would have even done well as Playstation 1 games.

And the new Gameboy Advance SP is about to kick everything's ass... again.

It's 2D, it doesn't run under WinXP, it's buggy (sound keeps switching itself on, units keep disappearing), it's missing features that appeared in commercial RTS's years ago (unit queueing, and fullscreen. Hello, FULLSCREEN?).

I wrote a comparable engine using DOS4GW/allegro back in 1995, and canned it because it was obsolete back then. Seven years later, I'm not seeing any great improvements, nor any incentive to bring my commercial games development skills to this project.

This is a neat hobby project, and probably a great learning experience for the dev team, but that's about as far as it's going. I showed it to my (non-OS) coworkers and they laughed their collective asses off. One guy asked me if it was a GBA emulator, and if so, how come it sucked so much compared to Advance Wars, and I really had no answer for him.

Look, don't get me wrong. I'm an open source developer, and I support good open source project when I see them (like the Demeter terrain engine), but if it looks like a turkey, and walks like a turkey, and sounds like a turkey, then it is a turkey, and all the cross platform compatibility in the world (except for WinXP, of course) won't turn it in to an engine that anyone other than the development team would really choose to use.

Two final thoughts:

• Writing a full game that people actually choose to play is damn hard, and it's getting harder every year as expectations rise. Trying to clone a full commercial game is egotistical folly. Try something like Advance Wars, which is twice as much fun with half of the features.
• Better yet, stop living in the past. Aim a couple of years into the future (high polygon 3D) otherwise you'll lose another player or developer every time the Upgrade Fairy pays someone a visit.

Since you look a little confused, let me help you. If you want quality portable classic NES gaming, I suggest the following:
PocketNES NES Emulator for the GBA
Gameboy Advance
Flash GBA Cartridge for "burning" NES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance games
Note that you could burn all of your favorite NES, GB, GBC, and GBA games to that one Flash Cartridge because the Flash Cart comes with a multi-rom menu feature.

With all of that gaming on the go... the great battery life, nice controls, etc... what else would you need? Also, note that running the NES emulator directly on the Gameboy Advance's hardware is far better than running it ontop of a non-realtime operating system such as Linux and WinCE. Gaming, imo, requires a realtime OS or no OS at all. I mean, who really likes those pauses in the middle of a heavy action sequence in your game?

No, Linux versions of games from commercial developers will be nearly exclusively x86. Non-x86 Linux is too small a niche, niche of a niche actually, to consider.

Non-x86 Linux may be, but if you have a good SDK, and the SDK is ported to the major PDA operating systems (Palm OS and Pocket PC), you can recompile for free.

PDAs will also lack the horsepower/memory/etc for nearly all commercial games.

Commercial games != commercial first-person shooters. Not all commercial games are 3D. Tetris, in particular, continues to sell well, even though it's been cloned on a 1.2 MHz machine with 128 bytes of RAM. If 16.8 MHz and 384 KB of RAM is powerful enough for the Game Boy Advance, then games should have no problem running on PDAs. (Or by "memory" do you mean "storage"?)

And with GBA coming out, that is capable of having many NES, SNES, and N64 games ported to it [...]

The Game Boy Advance has been available in the States since June 11th. No idea where you've been since then, though I must admit to being a bit curious.

you can spend less and have more fun with a GameBoy Advance. Just make sure you buy a light for it. You'll get tired of a PDA after a while, but with a GBA you can have endless hours of fun.

Playstation 2 is similar, IMO. Sony only has one game that I'm interested in for Playstation 2 and that's Metal Gear Solid 2. SSX is pretty cool, but its not enough to warrant purchasing the system. But it is a DVD player too, you might say. I already have 2 of them, one on my computer and a home console version. Besides, there's no remote in that USD$300 price tag. No memory card either. So I'd have to shell out about $400 for a decent starter system. Way too much for me!

I really like my Sega Dreamcast, because Sega has the balls to release some new games. Not Madden Football X, Cool Borders whatever, Tekken gameplayhasntchange Tag, or whatever other sequels. Granted Sega has their share of sequels, but they have some of the most original games of the last several years. Samba De Amigo, Virtua Tennis, Jet Grind Radio, etc.

OK...enough ranting...

Amigori
----------------- I'm looking forward to Gameboy Advance. How about you?

Here is the newsflash from Gameboy.com

According to Nintendo, GBA will have about a 15 hr. battery life. (5 hrs. more than Game Boy Color) Of course, I guess it depends on the quality of the batteries, etc. You can read about it on their web-site. I don't think any third party has tested the system out yet, so we just have to trust what Nintendo says for now.

I just hope Nintendo realizes that a large portion of gamers today are adults, and leaves the Pokemon crap off of this system.

You just KNOW Nintendo will dive right in with a Pokemon game at launch, or closely afterwards. I just hope 3rd parties jump on board for this system (which so far seems to be happening) more than they did for Nintendo's N64 console. Capcom appears to be porting their popular titles (Super Street Fighter II is listed as one of the games in development for the GBA), and I believe I saw some Konami titles further up on Nintendo's games list.

Will I buy one though-- **absolutely**. $99 is a little much (Japan is getting it for around $82), but it's still reasonable and well, I can't help it, I love the idea of playing 4-player Mario Kart Advance. =)

Heh. I wonder what they'll be able to do with the GameBoy Advance that's due out soon. Already, just with the basic GameBoy and GameBoy Color, they've released a camera, a printer, etc.

Interact, the company that makes the ever-popular Gameshark cheating system created a device that lets you send and receive email through your GameBoy much like a Pocketmail device. Looks like all of those jokes about PalmOS devices looking like GameBoys can be applied the other way around as well.

It might be interesting to see t-shirts with woven screen shots from Game Boy games. Of course, the pornographers would jump on that. Ho-ho-ho, what will Nintendo think of that?

Check out this for the full specs. Looks like a pretty good machine.