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Every time a story like this is posted, everyone begins reminiscing about the "good ole days" when they had to enter their programs using toggle switches or paper tape.

Fortunately, most of the platforms of old are still around and anytime I get to feeling nostalgic about a particular machine I used to work on, I just fire up one of the many emulators available. After about 10 minutes of playing around with it and the reality of how much dealing with the limitations sucked, I simply shut it down and get back to my current 8Gb Quad-core machine and I'm happy again.

For those of you who haven't checked these out and are feeling nostalgic, here's a few links that may bring back some memories...

http://applewin.berlios.de/ (Apple IIe emulator)
http://www.discover-net.net/~dmkeil/ (Various TRS-80 emulators Model I, III/4, Coco 1,2 & 3)
http://www.altair32.com/index.htm (Greate Altair 8800 emulator - complete with front-panel)
http://www.viceteam.org/ (Various Commodore emulators - C64, C128, VIC20, PET)
http://fms.komkon.org/Speccy/ (Sinclair ZX)

For the greybeards out there
http://www.hercules-390.org/ (IBM System/370/390/z emulator)
http://www.ibmsystem3.nl/emulators.html (IBM System 3 emulator - anyone remember this baby!)

And for the "whitebeards"...
http://members.optushome.com.au/intaemul/Emul1401.htm (IBM 1401 emulator - Autocoder anyone?)


Go ahead, get it out of your system so you can stop pining for the "good ole day", that were, in truth not really as great as they seem in restrospect.

Enjoy...

It would be like the PS3 not being able to play PSP games if there were a working adapter to play PSP games through a PS2.

I've read about Advance Game Port, and it appears to load the ROM into RAM and then use an emulator called Virtual GameBoy Advance by Marat. I seem to remember that emulator having compatibility problems with some games, especially 256 Mbit games (compare to the 192 Mbit main memory of the GameCube), and it doesn't support Game Boy Color games (including Pokémon red/blue/yellow/gold/silver/crystal) at all.

If you started with the slimline, then you have little to worry about, as you aren't going to need to replace a worn-out PS2 anytime soon. As I understand it, PS2/PS3 style backwards compatibility is intended in part to upsell people who are considering replacing a broken OldSystem to the corresponding NewSystem.

Ah, you are right on 'palmOS is nicer than CE' bit. I've been a loyal palm user for years (III, V, Vx, m505) but in the end I switched to CE because Palm kept dragging their feet on the wireless, CE devices typically have higher processor speeds, and because it seemed most software developers were switching to CE as well. So I've resigned myself to CE hell, which mostly seems to consists of resetting the device on a regular basis, and doing a hard reset once in a while.

But once you have Super Mario World running on your CE-based PDA, well, welcome to the dark side ;)

see
http://fms.komkon.org/MorphGear/
a NES/SNES/gameboy/GBA/Sega mastersystem/sega gamegear emulator. Kick. Ass.

Sorry for being a correction nazi, but the NES tiles are 8*8px and 4 colors. Below is a blurb if you're interested to know more. Else skip.

I wrote a program that extracts the tile tables from NES roms and thus had to do a bit of reverse engeneering. It seems the tiles are 8*8px and 2 bitplans, which means 4 colors. One of the colors is transparent though, so 3 is sort of correct. A tile only requires 16 bytes of memory (8*8 bits * 2 bitplans).
The tiles are arranged in 16*16 blocks or banks, and two of those can be kept in memory at the same time, which means that 256x2 tiles can be kept in memory at the same time.

When you get to a new area, the game will swich banks, and you get new enemies or whatever. The game can also switch palettes so the enemies come in different colors. To further save memory, the tiles can be flipped and stuff, so less angles will have to be drawn. The octorocs on Zelda 1 are just two tiles that are mirrored to make a fully symetrical creature, then there's two different palettes (red & blue).

This guy knows more than me: NES Architecture - by Marat Fayzullin

So does a PC. Not to mention some o t h e r s

So does a PC. Not to mention some o t h e r s

In fact, here's Zilog's page on the Z80 still in production after 25 years! How many other computer technologies do you know that are still available after 25 years? Pretty remarkable.

I guess there's just one reason for that. No, maybe two. =)

One is called iGBA. It is really slow but seems to have decent support for game functions...
iGBA

This one will cost you $35 and there is no demo. No thanks. Virtual Gameboy Advance

Pretty amazing that emulators are available already. Ethically, I don't think they are such a huge deal really. They just arent the same as the real thing.

The X-Box is not the first time Microsoft has chosen to go after this space. It has tried at least two times previously, failing both times. I hope that the lessons of the VIS are not going to be lost on them.

The first try was with the MSX standard - an attempt to create a computer/videogame hybrid that ultimately failed. More information can be found here.

More interesting was the failure of the VIS. The VIS was supposed to be a videogame/info dispenser. It ran a forerunner of Windows CE ("Modular Windows"), and it failed spectacularly.

Will MS learn from its mistakes? Well, they never did in the PDA arena. I'm guessing that the X-Box is going to be a nice also-ran.

hirschma

there sure is, buddy.

Well, I don't think so- various emulators of Nintendo systems have been around for years. The first SNES emulators started development some time back in '93-'94. There are already many game boy/NES/SNES emulators out there, I don't see why they would care about one more. Go look here for info about Virtual GameBoy, the first (and one of the best) gameboy emulators out there.