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They include a DVD burner? Ohhh, now when this baby is modded, you won't even need a computer to back up your games. And the contoller chip seems to be unchanged (from what I can see in this photograph -- can't read the numbers on it, though.). Good news.

Nintendo's favourite company, Lik-Sang, has modified versions of the Q with multi-region support. Unfortunately it's just too big, heavy and expensive for me to risk importing.

I bought a Likko DVD player from Lik Sang. It was around $200.00, but it will play anything. Normally, I try to buy only region free DVDs anyway, but it came in handy when I mistakenly bought one that wasn't.

This is my current personal favourite. A GameCube memory card with USB uplink... store a GPG key on your gamecube cart? You betcha! :-)

There is a multiplayer hub being released shortly in china. it will be connected to the USB-Port. The hub can be supplied from Lik Sang

It supports already-existing N64 and SNES games, though the logo in one of the screenshots looked like they had edited it to run on the iQue, so all bets are off whether they support unedited N64 games natively.

From Lik-Sang,

Plays customized SNES and N64 titles

It appears unlikely that it would support "native" N64 games without editing.

The demo was released with all sorts of XBox settings.

I wish they had gone one step further and included an option to auto-configure a gamepad with the XBox controls.

I've been playing almost exclusively console games lately, and trying out the demo made me realize just how much I hate using a keyboard and mouse as a controller.

I just picked up an adapter from Lik-Sang that lets me use my PS2 gamepad as a PC controller (with force feedback!), and I was hoping to try it out on this demo. I think I'll just get the console version instead when it comes out.

the iQue was not a version of the Gamecube. It was a new console that played old N64 and SNES games. The flash cards was inserted directly into the controller, with no 'console', per se. Here and Here contain articles on the iQue. The controller also is remarkably reminiscent of an xbox controller. Thought someone might be interested.

I'm really surprised that more manufacturers haven't jumped on selling replacement transparent and/or coloured cases made to otherwise look like the originals for the most recent wave of consoles.

It's easy to find them for the PS1 and Dreamcast, so why not the current ones?

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about.

I can just imagine a Naruto game where you actually have to make the hand seals to use a jutsu. That'd totally rock. Too late for the PS2 fighter though.

Am I the only one who sees a striking similarity between the Nintendo iQue and the Sega Dreamcast controller? Just wondering.

Disclaimer: I am a GBA programmer.

GCC, VisualBoy Advance, (checks wallet) = Free.

GBA flash card = easy to obtain ($112 incl shipping), but not free(beer). GBA multiboot slave cable = also easy to obtain ($26 incl shipping) or build, but not free(beer)

[The difficulty of distribution of your program on a Game Pak] is only a problem if you live in the fantasy world of making money off of your video games.

Otherwise, how would a game programmer eat?

I really want a Zodiac, and I really want it to do well. This thing is what the N-Gage should have been. With a cellphone added in, in a well designed, non-taco way, and the ability to run Linux, this thing would be the ultimate convergence device with a reasonable amount of power to boot.

Mind you, with all that said, I would quite like a GP32 too, if just for the ability to home brew hand held games out of the box.

So what do you think of the Panasonic Gamecube? It's more than a game console and a major manufacturer is producing it.

Yep, here's the one I have from lik-sang :

link

Works like a charm, and lets you use Saturn and Dreamcast controllers to boot! I use the Saturn controller for SC2, and I never looked back! :)

Try the Hori Digital Controller for the GameCube. Available at Lik-Sang. Combine it with the Skillz Cube Connection USB and you can use it with your PC as well.

Try the Hori Digital Controller for the GameCube. Available at Lik-Sang. Combine it with the Skillz Cube Connection USB and you can use it with your PC as well.

Try the Hori Digital Controller for the GameCube. Available at Lik-Sang. Combine it with the Skillz Cube Connection USB and you can use it with your PC as well.

You need one of these!

Now, if the guy had produced a cartridge with a real, full-sized slot for, say, Atari 2600 (insert your favourite old console here) carts which were than played with an emulater, that would be a "console hack".

Liberal and exotic usage of the words "nice" and "portable!"

Get a far better effect by hooking a GBA TV-out convertor to either an Olympus Eye-Trek or Sony Glasstron head mounted display.

Honestly, the things can be had for right around $200 on Ebay. This person probably spent about that much on his little setup.

That just the perfect gadget to be bundled with the next pokemon release...

and of course it's also a milestone on the road to a GBA SP2 with integrated wireless capabilites, some GP 32 way.

Well I think we can thank N-Gage for that, even if at Nintendo they will swear that they were in no way inspired by Nokia.

>>PC controllers are trash. I have yet to find a gamepad that's half as good as a PS2 one

which is why I bought this.
It rocks. They have cheaper ones also.

Tho playing mario and such with gc controller might feel a bit wierd.

The answer is the Hori Digital Controller. It is a gamecube controller that mimics the form and functionality of the Super Nintendo controller. It was designed for use playing games that don't require analog control such as Mega Man Anthology and Game Boy Player games.

It comes it two high fashion colors: blue and black.

Tho playing mario and such with gc controller might feel a bit wierd.

The answer is the Hori Digital Controller. It is a gamecube controller that mimics the form and functionality of the Super Nintendo controller. It was designed for use playing games that don't require analog control such as Mega Man Anthology and Game Boy Player games.

It comes it two high fashion colors: blue and black.

Port a GC controller to the PC and THEN I'll be impressed.

There's a USB adaptor, but I haven't seen any homebrew circuits yet.

The adapter is here and I will also note that it works with dance mats using StepMania. A lot of adapters do not work with dance mats.

I received mine about a week ago and it works great (have to turn off analog mode in Stepmania though!).

$15 US is cheaper than ruining 2 controllers, so how poor was this college student again?....

The adapter is here and I will also note that it works with dance mats using StepMania. A lot of adapters do not work with dance mats.

I received mine about a week ago and it works great (have to turn off analog mode in Stepmania though!).

$15 US is cheaper than ruining 2 controllers, so how poor was this college student again?....

Some of the motherboard being sold today don't include a Parallel port.
For US$15 Lik-Sang sells the "PS/PS2(TM)-PC USB Converter" make by a company called Boom.

Product Features
# Use Playstation Joypads on your PC (through USB interface)
# Automatically turns on the PS controller in analog mode, no need to switch.
# Supports Dual Shock function in games which support DirectX force feedback
# Analog joystick resolution in 256 positions on each axis
# Supports all buttons (4 axis analog joystick, 16 buttons)
# compatible with Win 98 / 2000
# Plug & Play, no additional power source required

Description
The PS Joy adapter lets you play PC games with a Playstation Joypad. Perfect for any emulation program such as Bleem or other.

Yes, yes they do.

Well, this is just the most recent installment in Nintendo's campaign to shaft us Euros! They've happily been doing it for 10+ years, so it shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone. Why they do it, I'm not sure. It's probably just the good ol' German censorship laws, localization (and most of us could do without localization, thank you very much), stuff like that.

Knowing this, as soon as the cube was released in the US (more than half a year before it hit our shores, how's that for a warning sign?) I imported myself a JAP/US cube. Yeah, it's sort of a hassle having to import all my games, but there's a thriving industry that's realized you can make a buck off this region bullshit. So now I'm a proud owner of Soul Calibur 2, F-Zero GX, Winning Eleven 6 and Mario Golf, neither of which are even CLOSE to releasing in Europe yet. Hell, WE6 probably won't even go outside Japan, seeing as footie games aren't very big in the US.
...but anyway, my point was - Nintendo have always been doing this, they will continue to do it, and the best you can do is try to work around it. It sucks, really; they make the best consoles, the best games, but their business decisions sometimes seem to be made by monkeys.

A USB -> PS 1&2 memory card adapter from Lik Sang can be found here.

You need one of these. My cheque's in the mail! :)

I bought the SNES Advantage when I was a chittlin' so that I could train in Street Fighter II:Turbo at home for the arcade. That is one nice looking stick Namco is putting out. Very ergonamic. They will probably hook me, because I can use the stick with the PS2 as well, but I alread found my gaming solution. There is just something about the way of the game pad, and the SNEW game pad is still the best IMHO.

It says it's 5-10x the speed of the Super Nintendo, with 2-4x the graphic power. That's better than the current Gameboy Advance!

Are you sure? The Super NES had a 3.6 MHz 65c816 processor, essentially a 6502 with 16-bit registers and a 24-bit address bus. The sound side of the system had a Sony SPC700 processor at 2 MHz, which was in essence a 6502 with a reshuffled instruction set encoding. The GBA, on the other hand, has a 16.78 MHz ARM7TDMI processor with a halfway modern RISC design. This XGameStation has a "Third-generation Motorola 68HCS12 16-bit processor @ 25 MHz" according to the spec sheet. A speed rating in MHz is relevant only when combined with operations per clock, but because a couple minutes of Google searching didn't tell me whether or not the 68HCS12 is pipelined (the 6809 wasn't, and neither was the 68000), I can't guess an operations-per-clock value for the 68HCS12.

Also, it's projected to be $99.

Yeah, but the GBA is only $99 ($70 for the GBA and $29 for the coder's cable), and it's a handheld.

I know what i.Link is, and I know why Sony would be sued for using the term Firewire. Go look at a real PS2 system link cable. Note how its connector is the 4-pin i.Link cable connector!

They are phasing it out because the system link games (Armored Core series, Grant Turismo 3) were so few in number. The cable is impossible to find at retail (you have to go online for it), as is the software available (2 games, woo). It's just like on the Dreamcast: you needed a special DC serial cable (good luck finding one), a game that supported system link (Virtua On, F355, and Daytona USA 2001), and two systems + two TVs + two discs. (The PS1 had Wipeout as its grand system link game..woo)

As for your line, "xbox live has very few customers even with it's 10 million networking kits" -- I find in very revealing that the Xbox has as many people online playing Mech Assault at any given time as the PS2 has people playing SOCOM: US Navy Seals. The PS2s outnumber the Xbox 5 to 1, yet there are that many Xbox owners willing to buy Xbox Live (which costs the same as a network adaptor) and play online.

Nintendo's stance is, wait until it's profitable. Sony's stance is, we don't care. Microsoft's stance is, let's make ourselves a new market of sustainable revenue. And they're doing in quite nicely. There are more games with online play and content download on the Xbox than there are online games on the PS2 by at least 2 to 1; possibly 3 to 1 by September.

The one thing that would seem to entice more developers is having the device based on a system (like palm os, coincidentally) that would potentially be future cell phone tech and thus be easily portable to the lucrative cell market.

If some synergy between handheld/cell software got going, it could get interesting and actually non-spartan for this device and devices like it.

Calm down, child. It has USB 2. All will be interfaced. As for the VGA output, Lik Sang didn't have any trouble aquiring RCA AV in/out adapters for the GBA SP.

Cool but what about the game itself, does it worth 79$ plus shipping ( lik-sang)?

I mean is this more a Dreamcast-Sega or a 32X-Sega stuff? ; )

Or you could just buy one of these and keep an eye on savegame sites.

>Having said that, how well do peripherals hook up to an XBox? I've never tried to hook anything up to it, so I'm not sure off the top of my head whether it even offers USB, but since you seem to have tried modding an XBox, how well does it accept peripherals?

I've not tried peripherals, but all the joystick ports are (non-standard) USB. This cable should allow you to interface your devices. It seems, according to sourceforge, that all linux supported USB devices will work inside linux, but not the X-Box games (obviously).

>And, once you modded it, did it still play XBox games?

Yep! And 100% off the hard drive also without the original disc (a big bonus if you have kids that think DVDs are indestructible).

>I know you wouldn't be able to use XBox Live with a modded box; Microsoft started shutting them out of the service a while back

They have, but many of the more advanced chips let you turn off the mod chip. Of course then you need the original DVD, but if you're all legal, that's not too big of a a deal.

X-BOX live should be fine if the chip is turned off -- the chip only takes control of the BIOS, nothing more (IIRC). I'd read more on this before trusting my advice, though, since I only mod the boxes, I actually don't own an X-BOX (yet), so it beats me if this works as advertised. ;-)

I know about the PS1 adapter; I currently use an EMS USB2 adapter. However, I also mentioned Super NES controllers. Can you provide a link to an adapter that turns a Super NES controller, or any of the dozen or so other models supported by DirectPad and NTPad, into a USB HID joypad?

However, your USB to parallel solution may not work well for the MBV2 cable that connects a PC's parallel port to a GBA's link port. Does this cable have a USB equivalent?

pwned
for you modem users: they just pop in a burned mini-dvd into a gc, and it works

If you don't mind using Freeloader or Action Replay, you can get a Japanese version from Lik-Sang. The hardware is exactly the same (the GBA doesn't have region coding) but the boot disc is region-specific. It would add an extra disc swap when you first boot the system but it would solve your color coordination dilemma...fortunately, I bought a black Cube. :)

"Because Sony's PSP will not play existing PlayStation games..."

I know that you wont be able to just pop in a PSX game and play that, they're doing it in a mini-disc format called a UMD, which is like a DVD mini disc cartridge.

But I thought they were going to convert some of their flagshipt psx games to mini disc (umd) format, so you could play the originals on the PSP.

Was I mistaken, or is this articles context misleading?

actually, you CAN!

(it is used in Phantasy Star Online)

...before we see Lik-sang taking preorders for these.

Is that a powder-blue, silver, aqua, Ocean Blue, or Zen Black PlayStation 2?

Nintendo may have been first on the "same hardware, new colors" bandwagon (Game Boy Pocket) but they're not the only ones.

So you're saying your flights are so cramped that having one of these 80 gram adaptors on the end of your headphone cable is just out of the question?

This is something I'm really looking for. The AM3 movie player for Gameboy.

"The Adapter is supposed to play 24 minutes of animation (movies) on a standard 32MByte Smart Media card, a 256MByte Smart Media Card could hold up to 192 minutes. The compression technology used is provided by IMAGICA, which are also known for the HDCAM video compression."

And it doesn't look too expensive either.

Basically, you re-encode a movie in their format and dump it on a compacflash or cart for the GBA.

Of course, the 240 x 160 pixels resolution is a bummer, but I can already see myself watching some South Park episodes on that.

Damn.. I'm drooling already.