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What I'm talking about is something like [Benss BX-98 DV 8GB Mp6 Player - 4.3" Camera Mp6 Player - Beats PSP - 8gb-PMP-BX98]

MP6 player? I thought the rest of the world was still on MPEG-4 players like the iPod touch and Android-powered phones. Let me guess: they skipped the model number of a well-known submachine gun.

So I check out the specs:

As game console, support NES, GBA, SMD, BIN formats multiple game simulator, 8-32/64 bit games

This covers NES, Game Boy Advance (GBA), and Sega Genesis (SMD/BIN) games, and by extension also Game Boy, Game Gear, and ColecoVision games through FluBBa's emulators that run on GBA. But what 32/64-bit platforms are they talking about? How accurate is the emulation of the systems that are emulated? And does it let one develop and share native games? Without native games, it seems like a lot of power is being wasted.

You wrote:

a single $10 8gb MicroSD will load the thing up with literally thousands of great classics like Castlevania and Eternal Champions right in your pocket.

Say I have the lawfully made cartridges of "great classics like Castlevania and Eternal Champions". (Some people actually collect such, though not I.) What do you recommend I use to dump cartridges now that Retrode is sold out and there are no plans to make an NES adapter for it even if they do start making more units?

what with two kids BDays and my GFs next month it seems my summers are spent buying prezzies for everybody but me :-(

You could always go the Jehovah's Witnesses route: stop celebrating birthdays and instead give presents throughout the year. ;-)

the Kyocera lady brags about how their new phone has a dedicated music player with "8 megabytes of storage".

Which is actually quite a bit if you listen to SID or NSF chiptunes or tracker files in an 8-bit style. For example:

• Rhythmic noise in a 15 KB S3M
• ReMix of a song from Nintendo's Balloon Fight in a 100 KB S3M
• Ambient in a 30 KB S3M
• Dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• More dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• Numerous soundtracks from NES and C64 games

It's too bad the official firmware of most popular portable music players can't play chiptune formats or tracker formats.

the Kyocera lady brags about how their new phone has a dedicated music player with "8 megabytes of storage".

Which is actually quite a bit if you listen to SID or NSF chiptunes or tracker files in an 8-bit style. For example:

• Rhythmic noise in a 15 KB S3M
• ReMix of a song from Nintendo's Balloon Fight in a 100 KB S3M
• Ambient in a 30 KB S3M
• Dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• More dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• Numerous soundtracks from NES and C64 games

It's too bad the official firmware of most popular portable music players can't play chiptune formats or tracker formats.

the Kyocera lady brags about how their new phone has a dedicated music player with "8 megabytes of storage".

Which is actually quite a bit if you listen to SID or NSF chiptunes or tracker files in an 8-bit style. For example:

• Rhythmic noise in a 15 KB S3M
• ReMix of a song from Nintendo's Balloon Fight in a 100 KB S3M
• Ambient in a 30 KB S3M
• Dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• More dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• Numerous soundtracks from NES and C64 games

It's too bad the official firmware of most popular portable music players can't play chiptune formats or tracker formats.

the Kyocera lady brags about how their new phone has a dedicated music player with "8 megabytes of storage".

Which is actually quite a bit if you listen to SID or NSF chiptunes or tracker files in an 8-bit style. For example:

• Rhythmic noise in a 15 KB S3M
• ReMix of a song from Nintendo's Balloon Fight in a 100 KB S3M
• Ambient in a 30 KB S3M
• Dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• More dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• Numerous soundtracks from NES and C64 games

It's too bad the official firmware of most popular portable music players can't play chiptune formats or tracker formats.

the Kyocera lady brags about how their new phone has a dedicated music player with "8 megabytes of storage".

Which is actually quite a bit if you listen to SID or NSF chiptunes or tracker files in an 8-bit style. For example:

• Rhythmic noise in a 15 KB S3M
• ReMix of a song from Nintendo's Balloon Fight in a 100 KB S3M
• Ambient in a 30 KB S3M
• Dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• More dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• Numerous soundtracks from NES and C64 games

It's too bad the official firmware of most popular portable music players can't play chiptune formats or tracker formats.

the Kyocera lady brags about how their new phone has a dedicated music player with "8 megabytes of storage".

Which is actually quite a bit if you listen to SID or NSF chiptunes or tracker files in an 8-bit style. For example:

• Rhythmic noise in a 15 KB S3M
• ReMix of a song from Nintendo's Balloon Fight in a 100 KB S3M
• Ambient in a 30 KB S3M
• Dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• More dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• Numerous soundtracks from NES and C64 games

It's too bad the official firmware of most popular portable music players can't play chiptune formats or tracker formats.

the Kyocera lady brags about how their new phone has a dedicated music player with "8 megabytes of storage".

Which is actually quite a bit if you listen to SID or NSF chiptunes or tracker files in an 8-bit style. For example:

• Rhythmic noise in a 15 KB S3M
• ReMix of a song from Nintendo's Balloon Fight in a 100 KB S3M
• Ambient in a 30 KB S3M
• Dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• More dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• Numerous soundtracks from NES and C64 games

It's too bad the official firmware of most popular portable music players can't play chiptune formats or tracker formats.

the Kyocera lady brags about how their new phone has a dedicated music player with "8 megabytes of storage".

Which is actually quite a bit if you listen to SID or NSF chiptunes or tracker files in an 8-bit style. For example:

• Rhythmic noise in a 15 KB S3M
• ReMix of a song from Nintendo's Balloon Fight in a 100 KB S3M
• Ambient in a 30 KB S3M
• Dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• More dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• Numerous soundtracks from NES and C64 games

It's too bad the official firmware of most popular portable music players can't play chiptune formats or tracker formats.

the Kyocera lady brags about how their new phone has a dedicated music player with "8 megabytes of storage".

Which is actually quite a bit if you listen to SID or NSF chiptunes or tracker files in an 8-bit style. For example:

• Rhythmic noise in a 15 KB S3M
• ReMix of a song from Nintendo's Balloon Fight in a 100 KB S3M
• Ambient in a 30 KB S3M
• Dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• More dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• Numerous soundtracks from NES and C64 games

It's too bad the official firmware of most popular portable music players can't play chiptune formats or tracker formats.

the Kyocera lady brags about how their new phone has a dedicated music player with "8 megabytes of storage".

Which is actually quite a bit if you listen to SID or NSF chiptunes or tracker files in an 8-bit style. For example:

• Rhythmic noise in a 15 KB S3M
• ReMix of a song from Nintendo's Balloon Fight in a 100 KB S3M
• Ambient in a 30 KB S3M
• Dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• More dance pop in a 5 KB NSF
• Numerous soundtracks from NES and C64 games

It's too bad the official firmware of most popular portable music players can't play chiptune formats or tracker formats.

but the xbox 720 has Halo 5, so there!

I've run Halo 2 on an original PlayStation (see photo) and Halo 5 on a Dreamcast.

But the pandora supports Game Boy, SNES, PS1 & MAME as of right now.

So how does one get PS1 I can see, because the user can fairly rip his game discs to ISO images using a PC CD-ROM drive. Game Boy Advance cartridges are easy to dump using a DS or DS Lite, a DS homebrew card, and the appropriate software. But how would the median user who owns a game for the other platforms (an 8-bit Game Boy Game Pak, a Super NES Game Pak, or a JAMMA PCB) dump it to a PC for use with an emulator? Which copier for Game Boy Color or Super NES Game Paks do you recommend?

One tip: Bookmark SlashdotCity, and visit it every time you get duped into visiting a spammer's city.

ObTopic: It's too bad there will probably never be a first-person exploration mode in MyMiniCity.

Fixed. The major label games that need high-end graphics will be dual-platform Xbox 360 and Windows Vista releases, and independent games will also work with OpenGL or older DirectX versions.

Unlike the PSP firmware, the DS firmware is not intended to be upgraded in the field. The firmware is write-protected (first 64 KiB on older models; first 248 KiB on newer models including the DS Lite). Installing DS firmware requires opening the battery door using a + screwdriver (right) and pushing a metal paperclip device (lower left) into a hole in the case next to the battery slot to bridge a test point called "SL1".

Perhaps you're wanting to play Halo3 on your shiny new PS3

I've played Halo 2 on an original PlayStation and Halo 5 on a Dreamcast. I've even played Halo 2 on a Game Boy Advance. Your point?

but if you invest in an Open Game Console [GP2X] in the first place, you'll find its not so hard to do yourself ..

Say I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA, and I have eleven $20 notes in my hand. What store can I walk into and buy a GP2X system? Wal-Mart and Best Buy don't seem to carry them. Neither does EBGames, which tends to carry a larger selection of video game hardware. The advantages of hacking a DS ($200 for everything you see here) are 1. the DS's selection of commercial games if you get tired of homebrew, and 2. network effects such that people looking for a multiplayer match are more likely to randomly encounter another DS owner in the mall than a GP2X owner.

They need to get it done with a flash drive.

It's already been done with flash drives. From the image "What you see is what you need", bottom right is a CompactFlash card, and bottom center is a CF to DS SLOT-2 adapter.

Now most PC hard drives communicate with the PC using a wire protocol known as parallel ATA, on which CF is based. One could run a ribbon cable out of the CF adapter, run it through some level shifters (DS is 3.3 V while hard drives are 5.0 V), and run it into the 40-pin data port of a hard drive.

It's about $80 in hardware (for a flash GBA card - $40 more if you can't find a proper Wifi card to run WifiMe)

Actually it's not 40 USD more, and WiFiMe works only with DS systems from before 2005 Q4. What you see is what you need:

• DS Lite: $130
• MAX Media Launcher: $25
• GBA Movie Player: $25
• CF card: $15
• CF writer: $14
• Set of precision screwdrivers: $1
• Paperclips and cellophane tape: Steal them from the office

They made it more difficult to run homebrew code on the iQue DS and the DS Lite. (And more difficult to flash the DS Lite's firmware without causing some hard-to-reverse damage)

Yesterday I installed FlashMe on a DS Lite using a Datel MAX Media Launcher (a NoPass card) and a GBA Movie Player. It's actually easier than PassMe used to be, as NoPass is NoBigger than a standard DS Game Card. A couple paperclips plus some Scotch cellopane tape make a handy tool for shorting SL1. What you see is what you need.

This is a recording of a woman (more or less) singing a scale.

Of course vowels aren't going to have a lot of content in the upper frequencies. Now try saying "This is the eighth utterance" into a microphone and see what doesn't happen. I did it myself, using a crossover at 4 kHz to split the signal into low-pass left and high-pass right channels. Listen to the Ogg Vorbis file and play with the balance. Notice how the phoneme /s/ comes through three times clearer when you have both speakers on (8 kHz bandwidth) vs. just the left speaker (4 kHz bandwidth).

Maybe we Revolution owners want to play Guitar Hero too.

Even the GameCube standard controller would work for at least a 3-key game such as Konami's Guitar Freaks.

Um, you can't play guitar hero with a gamepad

Fundamental limitation of the game, or artificial limitation of the software (like dongle-based PC copy protection)? To use a standard controller for a game like Guitar Freaks, which can be considered a predecessor to Guitar Hero, one would have to place one hand on the buttons and the other on the Control Pick. Is that so hard?

and DDR via a gamepad defies the point of the game.

Tell that to people who play 15-foot songs in StepMania on their arrow keys.

The DS's touchscreen has created new gameplay, both in the available games, the interfaces and the interaction.

Touch screen gaming as seen on the Nintendo DS is nothing that could not have been done on a PDA running Palm OS or Windows Mobile. Likewise, the early Revolution games will be ports of PC titles that use the mouse for control.

Um, you can't play guitar hero with a gamepad

Fundamental limitation of the game, or artificial limitation of the software (like dongle-based PC copy protection)? To use a standard controller for a game like Guitar Freaks, which can be considered a predecessor to Guitar Hero, one would have to place one hand on the buttons and the other on the Control Pick. Is that so hard?

and DDR via a gamepad defies the point of the game.

Tell that to people who play 15-foot songs in StepMania on their arrow keys.

The DS's touchscreen has created new gameplay, both in the available games, the interfaces and the interaction.

Touch screen gaming as seen on the Nintendo DS is nothing that could not have been done on a PDA running Palm OS or Windows Mobile. Likewise, the early Revolution games will be ports of PC titles that use the mouse for control.

And I've already played Halo 5 on my original PlayStation. I don't have photos, but I do have a photo of playing Halo 2.

There's _way_ too much value in developers being able to work with VMs for Microsoft to make them unusable.

Bungie developers are allowed to use a version of Microsoft Virtual PC signed by Microsoft to debug Microsoft games. Residential end users don't have this special version; Windows Vista would start but Halo 2 would likely give an error message.

But then, I have run halo two on my PS1.

If you like the Tetris theme, go ahead and leech this folder.

With a few notable exceptions [AW, Nintendogs and maybe Mario64] they're all fairly lame in the technical department.

So is Bandai's Lumines, according to some critics. What others call the PSP's killer app amounts to just a Tetris style puzzle game with a music video running in the background. Lumines could have easily been made on the GBA (and in fact it has).

No matter how good a composer you are, a little 1MB piano sample is going to sound, well, fake.

But some composers embrace the fakeness of a 12 KB toy piano sample and make something like this.

it claims to let you use a ps2 controller! No more carpal tunnel after a marathon session of Lumines.

Or use your PS2 controller on your PC (through an appropriate adapter) and play Luminesweeper, where you can even make your own skins.

sadly, if a console is open, you can bet that the openness will be used 95% of the time to play pirated games, not homebrew ones.

There is a middle ground of legal emulation. If you own a copy of a Lucasarts adventure game, and you use your right under 17 USC 117 to use ScummVM DS to install it onto a CompactFlash card and then put the CF card into an adapter on your Nintendo DS, you can still play commercial quality games without piracy.

Quite simply because commercial games are of much higher quality than any homebrews!

Not always. Would you rather play Tetris Worlds for GBA, which actually breaks the concept, or would you prefer Tetanus On Drugs for GBA? Would you rather play Lumines on a PSP and Minesweeper on a Pocket PC, or would you prefer Luminesweeper on a GBA SP while your backside is cushioned by a wad of cash?

(Separate reply for a separate issue.)

What song do you have the most versions of and what are the differences?

That would probably be "Korobeiniki", a famous Russian folk tune used in the game Tetris for Game Boy. Because it's been out of copyright for probably over a century, it's been covered dozens of times by different artists. Yarr.

What if he wants games PSP has?

Most of those are either direct ports or direct sequels to games on the PlayStation 2 computer entertainment system, or they're cross-platform and available on the DS or GBA. Even the popular PSP falling block game is on the GBA now. My suggestion is to wait it out until there is a wider selection of compelling exclusive titles.

the homebrew

You can determine which model PSP you have by looking under the 120V on the UPC label. In North America, model ' ' and 'A' (firmware 1.50) have been cracked for homebrew, while model 'B' (firmware 1.52) hasn't. As of September 2005, stores have only model 'B'. If I go used, what's the most polite way to check firmware version over the phone while I have the yellow pages open to local pawn shops?

etc etc?

What about 4 pack-in games? For the price of a PSP, that's what you can get if you go with a DS.

See GoldenEye's music as an example

Do you mean the real GoldenEye by Nintendo and Micraresoft (which had excellent music), or do you mean Rogue Agent?

I think Id be willing to put p with 64

Would you find the quality of this recording acceptable compared to General MIDI? It's a DDR song encoded with a GBA codec and then decoded as it would sound on a GBA or DS.

[Among games rated T or more inclusive,] The only game I want for the PSP is Lumines

Got a GBA, or an emulator? Try this.

Yes, but I'm not going to pay a portable based on ONE game.

Neither am I, especially given that there doesn't seem to be anyone in Fort Wayne, Indiana, who's hiring CS grads without a driver license in an entry level position, which is why I decided to make it $290 cheaper for everyone else.

Lumines.

It's on the GBA now.

I hear tell Rockstar has yet to release a seminal GTA title.

Apex Designs has released Payback for GBA, if you live in Europe.

The biggest as of yet is actually 32 megabytes, not 64.

Meteos is 512 "megabits" or 64 MiB. So are Jump Super Stars, Splinter Cell, Kirby Canvas Curse, and the new Castlevania game.

It does when the difference is MIDI to CD quality.

Doesn't have to happen. Try listening to a GSM based soundtrack on a GBA, such as the music of Luminesweeper, and hear how serviceable cartridge music can still sound. At least it'll give the developers something to do with an extra 32 MB.

Load times are highly exaggerated by common trolls.

Who's to say that a particular highly anticipated title won't end up poorly engineered like Midnight Club or Need For Speed?

You already said it was on the N64 with similar controls.

True, but Gamespot's review of Starcraft 64 points out: "Moving the analog joystick is similar to the cursor sweep of a mouse, though this gesture fails to approximate the quick swipe needed in panicked, fast-response situations." The N64 also has two more face buttons than the PSP.

[True, the DS has 2D acceleration.] Now add multiplayer to the mix. DS wouldnt handle it as well as the PSP

But where are you going to find opponents for such multiplayer? Nintendo DS games tend to have "spawned" versions (DS Download Play) more often than PSP games do.

I owned a PSP (for Lumines)

Other people don't have to. The luminous game is now on GBA.

So I sold my PSP. The DS I'll never sell.

Did you try buying a GBA flash card with the money that you got, so that you can play GBA homebrew?

It's the beginning of the Legend of Ganon.

Almost. Another source claims that Zelda and Link will become dancers along with Mario in Super Step Bros., the sequel to DDR Mario Mix. This game will continue the Legend of Max.

Sorry but im not spending $50 on Lumines

Especially because if you buy a GBA and a GBA Movie Player or a GBA flash card, you can get Luminesweeper free.

Why are the movies priced higher then DVDs??

Because the UMD-ROM and UMD Video patents are newer, for one thing.

[I own a DS.] And no, not fanboy. I want a PSP and Lumines.

You can have the lumines without the PSP.

Or just play hundreds of old nintendo games on an emulator on my computer for free.

I hope you're talking about homebrew games for Nintendo platforms, such as Solar Wars and Bombsweeper and Tetanus On Drugs and Luminesweeper. Otherwise, go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. If you want to compare unauthorized Internet copying of 1980s video games to something, compare it to unauthorized Internet copying of 1980s movies.

Except Lumines there isn't a single unique PSP title that kicks Ass.

It's not so unique anymore.

You forgot about the DS ports of Hexen and Heretic. I am currently in the process of creating a Lumines clone for DS. Tepples has already released a Lumines clone for GBA called Luminesweeper.

I also forgot to mention ScummVM, which ironically... I was flashing to my flash cart while I was writing that (it works great!).

Lumines is a minor variation on Puyo Puyo, and Puyo Puyo has been around since at least the Super NES. Besides, it isn't PSP-only anymore.

My PSP plays PSP games, GBC games, NES games, SNES games, SMS games, Genesis games, MAME games, movies, mp3's, and anything the homebrew writers can create. Does your GBA do all that?

The GBA doesn't support all platforms you mentioned, but it does support a lot of them. Full list here. As for PSP games, what exclusive games are there that aren't already on a PS2 or something? Lumi-what?