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I know for certain that Linux ended my computer fun. WHERE ARE THE GAMES?!

VisualBoyAdvance runs on GNU/Linux, and both Tetanus On Drugs and Lumi-what? run on VisualBoyAdvance.

StepMania runs on GNU/Linux if you have 3D working.

3. The fact that the only significant PSP-exclusive title (one that isn't a sequel to a PS2 title) is a falling block game, a 2D game that would be more at home on a GBA than on a 3D system. (And in fact, thanks to the homebrew community, it is at home on the GBA.)

Never mind that there aren't any "system seller" games for [Sony's PSP handheld video game system] yet.

Are you taking into account Lumines? Or are you also taking into account a clone on a GBA flash card?

I don't see any decent upgrade for the GBA:SP on the market right now.

Some would claim that if you can still find a 1.50 unit, and you're in Japan or North America[1], the upgrade for the GBA SP is the SonyP SP with a GBA emulator installed. And yes, you can still play half of Luminesweeper if you ditch your GBA for a PSP; you just can't play game right (the Minesweeper portion) on 1.51 or newer.

[1] Sony has donated the European market to Nintendo.

There is plenty of stuff coming out of the DS homebrew community too

And don't ignore the GBA homebrew community, especially if you're planning on getting a PSP just for Lumines and/or the music player. A usable music player has been ported, and as people who have read the rest of the comments to this article know, Lumines is being cloned.

You say PocketNES works great, but can I fit 900 games on the EZCart?

I don't think 900 NES games were ever commercially released in North America or in Europe. But if you get a 1 Gbit (128 MB) or larger flash card, or you get a SuperCard (adapter for CompactFlash or SD memory), then yes you can fit hundreds of NES ROMs and/or GBA multiboot games (such as Tetanus On Drugs) on one cart.

Is there a GBA SNES emulator? If so, how do I use the X and Y buttons?

SNES Advance has been ported with sound to the Nintendo DS. Details are in parallel threads at pocketheaven.com and gbadev.org.

Also, I can't say I've ever seen any lumines clones.

There's Luminesweeper for GBA, and that page lists four other Lumines clones (but only Kaikai's is any good).

Maybe you're one of those people that sees a game that involves blocks and thinks every one is tetris.

Can you name them all?

I guess you're forgetting that nintendo is re-releasing all of their old games in the NES classics series

Well at least the GBA SP and Nintendo DS can emulate Nintendo's classic systems. The same can't be said of the PSP to the PS1.

You say PocketNES works great, but can I fit 900 games on the EZCart?

I don't think 900 NES games were ever commercially released in North America or in Europe. But if you get a 1 Gbit (128 MB) or larger flash card, or you get a SuperCard (adapter for CompactFlash or SD memory), then yes you can fit hundreds of NES ROMs and/or GBA multiboot games (such as Tetanus On Drugs) on one cart.

Is there a GBA SNES emulator? If so, how do I use the X and Y buttons?

SNES Advance has been ported with sound to the Nintendo DS. Details are in parallel threads at pocketheaven.com and gbadev.org.

Also, I can't say I've ever seen any lumines clones.

There's Luminesweeper for GBA, and that page lists four other Lumines clones (but only Kaikai's is any good).

Maybe you're one of those people that sees a game that involves blocks and thinks every one is tetris.

Can you name them all?

I guess you're forgetting that nintendo is re-releasing all of their old games in the NES classics series

Well at least the GBA SP and Nintendo DS can emulate Nintendo's classic systems. The same can't be said of the PSP to the PS1.

There's simply more options with the fact it plays movies on UMD or encoded on the memory card, views photos, and can play back music.

Any GBA with a flash card can display photos and play music.

Friends of mine who have a DS constantly complain about the lack of more mature types of games for the platform.

Mature in what way? Blood and guts? T&A? Some would say that smacks more of "immature" products designed for high school and college students.

And from a hardware perspective, the PSP's screen is pretty impressive.

If a larger screen meaks you can't afford any games, is it worth it? The price difference between the PSP and the Nintendo DS is about the MSRP of three DS games.

PSP or DS? A lot of it is personal preference.

Darn right. I don't prefer loading times, and I don't prefer any of the exclusive titles (no, Lumines is not exclusive anymore), and I definitely don't prefer overdrawing my checking account to buy a handheld game system.

and with Rockstar's involvement on the platform the prospect of a handheld Grand Theft Auto is just too compelling. ;)

It's too bad that all the Europeans who want to play handheld GTA have already bought Payback, a Europe-only gangster sim with impressive 3D graphics for GBA.

I could just wait for the emulation scene to get around to it, but I wouldn't mind paying for a gamepack including a bunch of simple things like checkers, minesweeper, solitaire, bejeweled, bustamove, etc.

Prockcore helped you with most of those, except for Minesweeper. There is homebrew Minesweeper for GBA, which works on Nintendo DS as well but doesn't use the touch screen.

I also picked up Mawaru: Made in Wario (aka Wario: Touched!)

Nit: Wasn't Touched == Sawaru and Twisted == Mawaru?

The only games that I still have/play are RidgeRacers, Lumines (HOLY CRAP, GREAT GAME), and Minna no golf (Hot Shots Golf).

If your argument is that they are well-produced, then you're correct. But as for exclusivity, nyet.

but I've got the emulators on the PSP

The versions of the PSP that can run emulators are no longer for sale. All shipping units run 1.51 or 1.52 firmware, which have not yet been cracked, and given Sony's cat-and-mouse mentality, there will likely be 1.53 by the time a 1.51 crack appears.

they both have some serious advantages over the other, and I don't see a clear winner no matter how you look at it.

What about someone with $250 plus tax in his wallet? Spend it on a PSP and get no games, or spend it on a Nintendo DS and get three games.

But you also need a strong line-up of "waste 10 minutes" games, which the PSP lacks (except for Lumines, which is best after you've been playing for a while so it gets hard).

Problem with "waste 10 minutes" on the PSP is that NOW LOADING will waste at least 2 of those 10 minutes. At least one high-profile racing game for the system takes a minimum of 1:50 to get through all the menus between booting and gameplay. And that's if the disc doesn't pop out while you're holding the system.

I got so fed up after reading all the reviews criticizing system defects and loading times, the cat-and-mouse game of anti-homebrew firmware updates, and all the notices of delays in Europe (essentially handing much of the English-language market over to Nintendo), that I decided to skip paying $250 for a PSP, instead making a GBA clone of the only notable PSP exclusive title. Luminesweeper is the alternative to Lumines for GBA.

Minesweeper, for example, would suck moving a cursor one block at a time till you get to the one you want.

That's why you play co-op with a CPU player, which plays the other side of the board. Try it; it works.

I don't know why the DS didn't ship with a couple simple games pre-installed.

Other than Metroid Prime Hunters First Hunt?

Minesweeper would've been a great start

Minesweeper, or Luminesweeper?

They probably could've licensed Snood for pretty cheap

Bust-A-Move and the knockoff known as Snood are already officially ported to the GBA.

Try listening to music being played down a GSM phone. That's just bizarre.

Only because the phone runs the GSM Full Rate codec at too low a bitrate. Crank the bitrate up to 30 kbps, and music starts to sound decent. For example, I took a Smile.dk song, encoded it, decoded it, and got this. In fact, a popular homebrew application for Game Boy Advance uses GSM audio at 30 kbps.

Yet you buy a DVD player with NO GAMES AT ALL.

Portable DVD player: $150. GBA SP system: $80. Savings compared to PSP: $20. Number of compatible titles: two orders of magnitude larger than PSP 1.51. Add a flash cart ($80 from kicktrading.com) and you can have the GBA play music, pirated NES games, and homebrew GBA games including the alternative to Lumines. In addition, you can use the game and movie features of your combo at the same time.

you can get an import PSP now

UMD Video is region coded. Japan is Region 2 at 60 Hz; North America is Region 1 at 60 Hz; Europe is Region 2 at 50 Hz.

If you actually want one, of course. There's a grand total of about three decent games available.

Aren't they all available on other platforms in some form, including the PSP's flagship falling block game?

And really, if you were a little more delicate than the average 8 year-old kid, you wouldn't have that problem to begin with.

I can't stop 8-year-old video-game-playing cousins from visiting my house. Now what do I do? Should I just hide the PSP and let people play the GBA alternative to Lumines?

The "1" music from NES Tetris is "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" composed by P. Tchaikovsky. The Game Boy, Super NES, and N64 versions, on the other hand, use "Korobeiniki", a traditional Russian folk song. There are lots of covers of that song.

Slashdot is teh borken

Screenshots here and here

I grabbed a screenshot

So did I.

Well, maybe two side-by-side for life-sized pictures of little people.

I already see life-size pictures of Little People on an ordinary 17" LCD.

(explanation)

I got 6 games for the PSP, so far, and the best games are Minna No Golf and Lumines. Kollon was ok, but no where near as addictive as Lumines.

If you want Lumines, but all you can afford is a PC, then try Verticube, or wait for something more GBA/DS-friendly.

This may cause them not to 'mod' their xbox 2 or whatever, it's like "oh damn! I can't play halo/halo2 on my xbox 2...this sucks!"

I've played Halo 2 on an unmodded original PlayStation. (Photo evidence)

because I've been waiting for a 9th mix forever.

9th Mix is here. Contact your arcade operator, or buy the forthcoming version for PlayStation 2 (NTSC U/C).

Just remember, ddr is a cool game... PERIOD.

More than a cool game, it is The legend. (period)

I wonder if old Gameboy link adaptors count as "game ports" for this contest?

Depends on whether you count Halo 2 for Game Boy Advance.

My GBA was a horrible disappointment - I pretty much ended up sticking to Mario Kart and Monkey Ball Jr. because of the weak library.

Weak? Then you haven't tried TOD. True, it's a time-wasting puzzler, but it has a gimmick that will bend your mind.

Or play Halo 2 on your GBA ;-)

Second, even if all the bits of the sample are wrong, an answering machine probably samples at 8k Hz. If one sample has the wrong value, then the pop will be 0.125 milliseconds long, so not really that bad.

A single sample error will sound like the click in this wave. But many digital answering machines use lossy compression optimized for the periodic sound of the human voice. A bit error in one of those may spread out over a whole speech packet, producing audible pops like in this wave.

In addition, even if the audio storage is lossy, there would need to be either a second certified defect-free part to hold metadata where in memory each message starts and ends, or an error-correcting code applied to the metadata.

Second, even if all the bits of the sample are wrong, an answering machine probably samples at 8k Hz. If one sample has the wrong value, then the pop will be 0.125 milliseconds long, so not really that bad.

A single sample error will sound like the click in this wave. But many digital answering machines use lossy compression optimized for the periodic sound of the human voice. A bit error in one of those may spread out over a whole speech packet, producing audible pops like in this wave.

In addition, even if the audio storage is lossy, there would need to be either a second certified defect-free part to hold metadata where in memory each message starts and ends, or an error-correcting code applied to the metadata.

No, it means people will start using covers and ReMixes of the classic tracks.

Did anybody else see this and immediately think of Balloon Kid for Game Boy?

Free. I got it from a friend. He got it from a Via representative

OK, so perhaps the Via box is for people with connections to Via representatives, and the modded console is for everyone else. How much would such a Via box cost at retail?

I don't like sitting still watching a tv for long periods of time without getting up and moving around.

Which is why you mod a console, so that you can run a Dance Dance Revolution clone on it. With StepMania you can get up and move.

This is arbitrage. A shortage in a good, such as a game console or a concert ticket, occurs when the price of a good in the market is set at a point where the quantity demanded exceeds the quantity supplied, either because the producer underestimated demand or because some other entity fixes prices below the equilibrium price (figure). Scalpers notice the potential for a shortage and start buying goods at the set price P and then reselling them at the (higher) price P' on the demand curve where quantity demanded equals the (constant) quantity supplied by the producer. Whether you call it "arbitrage" or "scalping" depends on what scope of rights under a government-granted monopoly you are willing to give to a producer.

You mean like this and this?

(Background: "Drop Out" is one of the more challenging songs in Konami's Dance Dance Revolution, taking even more stamina than keeping up with nine chatterbox AOLers in IM conversations.)

Why does the AOL running man remind me of a DDR song, namely Drop Out?

Why does the AOL running man remind me of a DDR song, namely Drop Out?

[The GBA] isn't even up to the standards of the SNES (far worse sound,

IAAGBAD. Super NES sound is based on hard-mixing eight hard-decompressed samples, where the fixed ratio is 9 bytes per 16 samples, and the loading time to get sound onto the DSP's RAM can be unbearable in poorly designed games. GBA sound is based on soft-mixing any number of uncompressed samples. However, soft-decompression of audio streams is possible on the GBA, allowing for GSM 06.10 audio at 33 bytes per 160 samples, making Bemani music games possible in theory).

lower resolution,

The screen on the GBA (240x160) is only 6% less wide in pixels as the screen on the Super NES (256x224). In fact, many games use ClearType style subpixel rendering (see here or here) to make diagonal lines even cleaner than was ever possible on the Super NES. In addition, compare 3D games on the Super NES (e.g. the Super NES version of Wolfenstein 3D, which used pixel doubling and a black border; think 112x80 or so) to 3D games on the GBA (e.g. the much cleaner port of Wolfenstein 3D).

poorer controls

Do you merely mean "lack of X and Y buttons" or did your GBA's controls wear out prematurely?

screen is too dark).

I'll grant you an initial production run of developer units with too-bright screens (dev units used 0-31 ranges for RGB components while final hardware used 8-31 ranges, causing visibility problems in launch titles). However, later games take this into account.

but the games are still going to look really blocky.

But will it matter? Remember that the PS1, which lacked bilinear filtering, beat the N64, which had bilinear filtering, in the American market. Also remember that Nintendo's battery life über alles strategy has worked in the past, defeating Sega's Game Gear which was superior in every way but sound and battery life. Sony has to ask developers to downgrade PSP games to GBA graphic levels and PS1 loading times in order to compensate.

That weak hardware is the bottleneck though.

OK, granted, the frame rate of some of the launch titles may suck, but do you think the launch titles' T&L will represent the performance that can be had with the dirty tricks in future titles' engines?

It was supposed to be 10 times more powerful than a SNES and the controllers were those of the PS2. I don't know what happened.

They just outsourced it to Nintendo and changed its name to "GameCube with a Game Boy Player accessory, a nYko Play Cube controller adapter, and an MBV2 cable". And that's what I'm sticking with for the foreseeable future.

[Whorf] lost all credibility for me when he turned up in Deep Space Nine.

You forgot the picture: Sapir-Worf hypothesis.

Kompressor does not dance.

Are you sure about that? Go get StepMania and then get this.

Did you miss this:

We're DDR fans, but that doesn't really separate the pack, since both consoles have DDR.

Not only does the GameCube lack DVD Video support, but it also lacks a port of Konami's Dance Dance Revolution unless you buy a Game Boy Player accessory ($50, bringing the Cube back up to price parity with the other two consoles) and one of the horrible Game Boy Color versions of DDR (listen and compare), and it still won't work to the fullest because the PS->GCN controller adapters typically don't work with dance pads.

Anybody want to see a GBA version of Dance Dance Revolution, Dance With Intensity, StepMania, or Pydance? Reply if you want me to continue working on what I have so far.

I guess DDR2-666 was a bit too... evil.

666 BPM? Isn't that "The legend of MAX"? I'd contend that the steps to "Maxx Unlimited" are a lot more evil than LoM's.

-- The legend.

If 2 files of the same recording are available, and are the same size, which sounds better, an mp3 or a wav?

If you can't predict the answer yourself, then here are some test files.

Compare a 56kbit wav to a 56kbit mp3 and you'll hear a huge difference...

To save Slashdot readers the trouble of going in and encoding it yourself, I've done it for you. Hear it here.

Fans of Nine Inch Nails should try this experiment: Listen to "Wish" from Broken and dance around like a DDR player on Crack 300. (If you have installed the free StepMania dance simulator on your PC, you can set this up with the "Maxx Wishful" simfile available here.) Immediately afterwards, listen to "Piggy" from The Downward Spiral sped up to 1.7xmusic and dance around like a hamster. Your brain's emotion center will have become so utterly confused that it'll have to reboot and choose a new random mood. You might just get the mood you want.

Do you find it sicker that I've made a mock-up of a toolbar icon for ^x^s (Emacs save command) or that I've made one for :w (vi save command) as well?

Do you find it sicker that I've made a mock-up of a toolbar icon for ^x^s (Emacs save command) or that I've made one for :w (vi save command) as well?

Or why M&M's are now missing their colors?

It's rumored to be a co-promotion with Shady Records. You see, Eminem has white skin but acts black. Notice that the black-and-white M&M's candies have a backwards 'E' written on them, which is Eminem's logo.

Or why M&M's are now missing their colors?

It's rumored to be a co-promotion with Shady Records. You see, Eminem has white skin but acts black. Notice that the black-and-white M&M's candies have a backwards 'E' written on them, which is Eminem's logo.