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Nintendo had the SNES, N64 and Gamecube which all went without backward compatibility.

True about the Nintendo 64, but the Super NES could play 99 percent of Game Boy games through the Super Game Boy accessory. (The exceptions were a few games that required the link port, as the upgraded "Super Game Boy 2" that had a link port was never released in North America.) The GameCube could play 98 percent of Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games through the Game Boy Player accessory. (The major exceptions were tilt sensor games and a few GBA titles that relied on full-motion video, where the publisher didn't want people videotaping the FMVs.) The unofficial GBA Movie Player accessory combined with the Game Boy Player to emulate hundreds of NES games in PocketNES.

If he doesn't care much about the quality of the picture.. Gameboy Movie Player

Buy a $10 card-reader and a $50 gigabyte (hell, buy two) compact flash card, and you've got 3 movies, lots of music (as long as you don't care too much about the quality of that music) customizable interfaces, e-reader, image viewer, AND a NES emulator (kinda sucks, only supports roms under 200k) for your Nintendo GBA/DS.

The player comes with DVD ripping software and converter for Movies, images, and music. But if you're lazy like me...

GBA film, a Chinese DVD to GBA format site. Has a ton of movies to peruse, Most have subtitles, but the American native ones are in the original english.

Switching from Movies to Old school Mario to new school Mario Kart DS have made those long flights almost bearable.

I'm very interested in testing the GBA Movie Player cartridge on this new device. It works fine on bot the GBA and GB/SP but the screen on the GBA is pitifully dull, and the lighted GB/SP screen isn't bright enough.

For those who don't know what the GBA Movie Player is, it is a GBA cartridge w/Compact Flash slot. It can play videos, music, images, ebooks, and NES game ROMs. Not bad for a $15 cart.

If this works as well as I hope, then it'll make a nice little mobile entertainment system. ;)

MPEG-4 videos played from Memory Stick Duo media are decoded at half the PSP's native resolution and stretched to fill the screen. This 240x136 pixel playback is not much better than the 240x160 pixels you get on a GBA Movie Player, and the GBA MP uses cheaper CompactFlash media to boot.

So, NDS is a DRM free, non-proprietary machine.

There is the PassMe adapter. When used with a GBA flash card or a CompactFlash adapter it lets you run homebrew on a DS. And unlike Sony and its firmware-of-the-month club, Nintendo is still selling systems compatible with homebrew.

With this http://www.movieadvance.com/ I can do the same.

I have one of those, nice toy :)
They recently released new firmware and conversion software for it at http://www.movieadvance.com/. First thing I noticed is it keeps the title now when you convert your divx's.

When it came down to the choice between getting a DS or a PSP now, the choice became the PSP. Granted, I'll get a DS later for other games that I'm interested in and the rumored Palm Pilot module - but it was the usefulness of the PSP *now* that interested me.

A lot of people underestimate the usefulness of the GBA and Nintendo DS now. Like the PSP, the GBA or Nintendo DS supports its own proprietary memory card format. A GBA memory card such as the Flash2Advance or the EFA-Linker greatly expands the capabilities of a GBA or Nintendo DS system:

• Like the PSP, the GBA can play music, through the GBA GSM Player.
• Unlike the PSP, which can't run games for any previous Sony platform, the GBA can run most NES games, many Game Boy monochrome games, and even some PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16) games, in emulation.
• Unlike the PSP, the GBA does not use digital signatures for programs stored on memory cards. Developers have created several homebrew games and made available to the public. I am one of those developers.

The only thing you're lacking is video, but there's another peripheral for that.

If you have a Gameboy Advance and a piece of compact flash, you might try this for a cheapie solution.
http://www.lik-sang.com/info.php?category=246&prod ucts_id=3983&
http://movieadvance.com/
The GBA movie player reads ebooks.
I don't know how nice it is for those, if you point me to a little ebook sample, I can try it out and give my 2 cents.

And you whine about UMDs being proprietary... and the DS uses...???

The DS uses Compact Flash, up to a gig.

Go get one and prove yourself wrong. I hemmed and hawed over it at first, too. Then I picked it up and played with it for the first time, and I was sold.

Yeah, As much as we'd all love to go blow 400 bucks on a bundle that we might not even like, I think I'll pass on this amazing offer.

You need a $40 3rd party cartridge, but you can play divx movies, mp3s and read text on the GBA and DS off a flash card. It's an import called Movie Advance There is a good review on Lik Sang but that site seems to be having troubles so here is a Google cache. Another review is at PlanetGC. The good thing about this is that it isn't controlled by Sony like their fucking UMD that no one else can use. Anyone with a flash card reader can use the DS for movies. The downside is that it's another item to carry with you which is bad for those without big pockets or bags. Given that the old GBA roms are a known format, I'm guessing that there will be a lot more third party apps for the DS than with the PSP. Particularly when someone figures out how to get the DS to play games over WiFi without a physical disk. This is a known feature of the DS, but it's not a public spec yet.

--
Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof

More good news is you can play NES games, movies, music, pictures, and Ebook's if you have the gameboy advance movie player. It works flawlessly in the DS, and is cheap as hell. And lik-sang got it to me in 2 days from hong kong w00t!

I have also heard speculation(or was it official from Nintendo? Can't recall...) that the GBA port could/would be used for additional accessories in the future. Well, even if Nintendo doesn't come through with that idea, at least there's the GBA Movie Player, which has been confirmed to work in the DS.

The Gameboy Advance SP can play movies too. No need to convert the files either. Just put on CF and go. :) My brother has one and it was pretty cool until he updated the firmware and broke it... bummer.

Supported NES format file, which is 200k limited. Before you play FC game, do remember to put the Pocketnes.gba file to the root directory of the CF Card. Save function is not supported. Just copy the TXT format file to the CF Card then read it on the GBA/GBA SP.

The customer reviews for the product at Lik Sang, as well as the review over at ShackNews both talk about scratchy sound quality and low frame-rates. Neither talk about the emulators (since they are reviewing the earlier model, I assume) - but for the price you can't really go wrong can you ? I think this is the actual product homepage, but it isn't much more informative.

Or as they put it in Engrish on their site:
"Photo scan rate: 10fps, photo playing quality equals to a digital camera! Our digital photo enhancing technology ensures you fresh display in your GBA (SP) screen!"

Very simple cartoons like South Park looks ok at 10FPS but Simpsons etc start to look a bit wonky. Action scenes are completely unwatchable. You can't descipher what's going on.

http://www.movieadvance.com/SPterminal.htm
"Photo scan rate: 10fps, photo playing quality equals to a digital camera! Our digital photo enhancing technology ensures you fresh display in your GBA (SP) screen!"
(Gotta love that Engrish)
I also tried the conversion software, and 10 fps seems about right. Very simple cartoons like South Park looks ok, but anything else looks pretty much terrible. Action scenes are completely unwatchable.

Also annoying; there is a device with identical functionality made by the same company for the chinese market that is the same size as a regular gba cart. but for some reason they decided to bloat up the cart to more than twice the size for the international market.
Pics of the chinese version.

http://www.movieadvance.com/ - website for the international version.
http://www.gbalpha.com/ - website for the chinese version.