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Trippy Tetris?
You want TOD!

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.)

did you know you can keep an original Nintendo Entertainment System running forever by: 1) Blowing as hard as you can on the bottom of the cartridge, where the connector pins are.

Don't. Instead, rub a cotton swab moistened with water or diluted rubbing alcohol several times across both sides of the connector, and then run the other end of the swab to dry the connector, as recommended in The Article.

Now let me go back to Balloon Fight. (listen to remix)

I don't believe in watching Disney's The Santa Clause or Disney's Kill Bill because I don't believe in watching movies published by The Walt Disney Company.

Screw politics and just go play Tetanus On Drugs.

[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?

[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?

[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?

What the hell more do you want? The individual unmixed tracks ready to load up in Pro Tools (or should they use a more OSS-friendly file format)?

"Audacity project" or "multichannel Ogg (Vorbis or FLAC) stream" anyone?

The instruments they were played on and sheet music to go with it?

You just described tracked music, which includes machine-readable instrument definitions (as a sample bank) and machine-readable sheet music (as a note sequence) in a file. Common formats for tracked music include .mod, .s3m, .xm, or .it formats. Other machine-readable sheet music formats, which reference (but do not completely define) the instruments, include .ly (Lilypond) and .mid (standard MIDI file format). Compare the concepts of "transparent" and "opaque" used in the GNU Free Documentation License.

Another thing some would want is a license allowing use of the work in a GPL program such as a video game for platforms that can't rely on the interpreter exemption because they don't have a file system per se (unless you count things like GBFS).

And if you find groceries to be too expensive, just take them!

I plant an apple tree on my property and license the general public to just take one apple per person.

Or I write a GBA video game, put it on my web site, and license the general public to download it. There are a lot of free and Free GBA programs, many of which you can download at pdroms.

it's got a full single-player port of Dr. Mario in it

I've tried Dr. Wario, but its playfield size wasn't near regulation. Good thing I had written and posted my own version of Dr. M before Made In Wario had even come out... IN JAPAN.

That said, once somebody cracks the PSP, I can guarantee that the first thing people will work on is a GBA emulator. Something capable of running basic GBA demos on the PSP will show up even before you start seeing dumps of commercial games on the P2P sites.

If a Russian family can't pay 30$ for a computer game made in the USA, they could probably pay 3$ for a game made in Russia and with Russian programmers and Russian artists.

Which game is that? Tetris?

Noone will buy your home-brewn game for $4 when they can buy a pirated copy of Quake 3 for 1$.

Where is this Noone fellow? I want to sell a few copies of TOD Deluxe Edition.

Microsoft used to be officially happy if you pirate their software at home

BS. Please read Bill Gates's open letter to hobbyists.

Whenever I have to send something to the company I work for, e.g., a request for vacation, it _has_ to be in some idiotic Word or Excel.

Send RTF or CSV renamed to DOC or XLS; Word or Excel won't care and will happy translate the document from the exchange format to its internal format. As for the other way, OpenOffice.org can already read Word documents (even damaged ones) better than Word itself can, and there's now too much of an installed base of machines that can read older Word documents for Microsoft to break back-compatibility again.

be a great graphics programmer, AI, something other than just a BS in CS.

Don't say I haven't tried. I made a few GBA games, was approached by a video game development firm who offered relocation assistance, but ultimately got turned down in favor of somebody else. Where can I find a list of video game development firms that do in fact offer relocation assistance? Or should I just go in the store, look at the back of the box of every game, and try to get in touch with HR to see if the company both is taking applications and offers relocation assistance? Or what other skills do I need?

The quality won't be the same as a drue DVD copy as you have to deal with extra D/A A/D conversions but it should be more than adequate for making backup copies for your kids to watch Disney videos 10k times on so they don't scratch up your $18 original.

Perhaps when they scratch up Pinocchio you could get them this or this or this or this (but definitely not this or hell no). That's the nice thing about Disney animated movies: as half of them are based on public domain stories, there are a lot of independently produced copycat versions you can buy. Heck, you can skip funding the lobbying effort for the future Chastity Bono Act and just buy the copycat titles in the first place; kids who are young enough won't be able to tell the difference.

And when they scratch up that fish movie you could get a completely different Nemo movie to help them kick the Disney addiction. Just don't confuse it with this or this.

So do you say that the little yellow running man on AOL, as seen here, is named Oscar after AIM's protocol? Have a source?

If you find something seriously wrong with one of my blurbs, please feel free to point it out.

Sorry, I forgot I was arguing with a member of Pin Eight, a game development group which posts self-serving rants about IP law on its web page.

Have fun with your armchair lawyering. Keep me out of it.

You mean content-consumption games, which are usually single-player or at best cooperative. There do exist games whose goal isn't to "beat" the game (that is, consume all the game's content). See also tackle football sims, tetramino games, WarioWare multiplayer, fighting games, dance sims, or any game that goes back to the good old days when a game's goal was to beat your old score or to beat the other player.

Some would rather just shoot the hamsters, and you can too with Hampsterdeath, part of freepuzzlearena.

you end up with a creature that walks upright, with two limbs for manipulation, sense organs located high up for good vantage, close to the brain for high speed transmission of information. In other words, humanoid.

Either that or with two arms that double as legs.

Such a shame, it had so much promise. I mean Nemo

Something smells fishy about that name.

Pac-Man is still a classic, but the modern tetramino games for PCs (such as TOD) have far surpassed Atari Games' 1988 arcade port of Tetris. I guess the problem is that nobody wants to bring Arika's "Tetris The Grand Master" series to the States because it'll have to compete with Dance Dance Revolution, the only arcade game still bringing in consistent quarters.

Unless this thing has an MP3 player, a phone and a digital camera [...] I don't imagine it will be that hot of a seller.

The Game Boy Advance system has a camera and a passable music player (which converts the MP3s to GSMs first). Not everybody who buys Nintendo handheld game hardware can afford 40 USD/mo for mobile phone service.

I wager it will detect current generation flash carts and prevent them from running

People speculated about exclusion of flash cards before the release of both the SP and the Game Boy Player. It didn't happen; in fact, if I remember correctly, TOD was the first thing I ran on my Game Boy Player.

Fuck Disney and get digital drugs for your GBA.

You can play many GB mono compatible games in emulation using a GBA flash cart. This includes Pokemon Yellow, Gold, and Silver, which Nintendo hasn't announced porting. This does not include Crystal or Puzzle.

However, Pokemon Puzzle was remade for GBA, under the name "Panel de Pon", one of the multiboot extras in Nintendo Puzzle Collection (Japan only). Rumors claim that the DS doesn't seem to support GBA multibooting or any other GBA link cable functionality; if you want to play Pokemon Puzzle on a DS, you'll need a GBA flash card and the ripped .mb ROM. If your flash card's menu software doesn't support ROMs in .mb format, you'll need a multiboot menu as well.

And if anybody cracks DS's smaller Game Paks, watch somebody port Snes9x, and you'll be able to play Tetris Attack, the Super NES version of Pokemon Puzzle.

I tried clone wars comboed with tetris worlds, and found that the old NES tetris was more fun

I agree that Tetris Worlds sucks Big Floppy Donkey D__k(tm). Try Tetanus On Drugs instead.

The Game Boy Advance is also an amazing developer friendly platform, and I myself hack on it. I'm afraid Nintendo will go in, armed with this precedent and foreign counterparts, and shut down all companies that sell GBA software development equipment to the general public.

especially as I myself, despite knowing how to program, have never programmed for a game console before.

Programming on the Game Boy Advance feels like programming on a PC running DOS. You ought to try it sometime.

I could've made a really nice old-style LCD game in Macromedia Flash that would not only have a nice visual touch as it took advantage of vector graphics (no pixels), but it could've run just fine on any Windows, Linux, Macintosh system without a problem.

What handheld devices run SWF? A $190 GBA plus a flash card will run GBA and NES homebrew games.

Anyway, one major point of PDROMS contests and other homebrew development efforts is to prove to console makers that there exist legitimate uses of, say, GBA flash cards other than for playing unlawful copies of proprietary video games. For example, if you have a flash card and my GSM Player, you can turn your GBA into a pocket music player.

the public domain clone

"PD" in the term "PD ROMs" doesn't always mean "public domain" in the sense of an abandoned copyright. It means only freely redistributable over electronic mediums. For instance, a GPL'd game such as Tetanus On Drugs is marked as (PD) in the GoodGBA list, but people who distribute the binaries without also distributing source code are Breaking The Law(tm).

...of "Bust a Move" is better than the commercial releases. It's uses the same sprites and puzzles of the original Neo Geo arcade version.

Isn't that copyright infringement? Aren't Taito's original sprites and maps copyrighted as graphic or audiovisual works?

I don't know why the commercial releases insist on using such small bubbles

Probably because the Game Boy Color's tile engine was a bit restricting; the choice was between 8x8 and 16x16, and eleven rows of 16x16 wouldn't fit on a 144-pixel-tall screen. The GBA, on the other hand, allows for easy 12x12 using hblank sprite multiplexing, and everything fits nicely.

If you want to find more technically impressive homegrown GBA games, check out http://www.gbadev.org/ periodically.

Specifically, <plug>check out Tetanus On Drugs.</plug>

I have a nice 1.5Mbit connection.

Which can feed 7 listeners at 192 kbps or 46 listeners at 32 kbps, as you seem to recognize with talk radio. Wideband Speex, an audio codec designed for talk radio and telephony, sounds listenable even at 12 kbps (listen). However, more listeners for talk radio does mean a bigger audience for conservative spokesmen, whether you agree with them or not.

32kb/s music just doesn't cut it.

Have you actually tried listening to a recent codec at 32 kbps? Sure, it's not transparent, but often it'll do in a rather noisy environment such as while riding your bike or the city bus. If you want to try, grab a few 32 kbps Ogg Vorbis files from this page.

Listening at that low quality doesn't have as much commercial, and quite frankly, personal appeal as it did back in the 90's.

Not every location is set up for wireless broadband Internet access. Can you get affordable broadband on your mobile phone? GSM mobile phones receive and transmit voice at 13 kbps using the GSM RPE-LTP codec; one often has to pay extra just to get 32 kbps data. Also think about digital radio; lower bitrate for a given perceptual quality allows for more music choices in the same frequency, possibly reducing the number of actual stations that Clear Channel needs to own. Another application of low bitrate audio is in handheld video games; I've written a program to encode music at 30 kbps and then play it back on the Game Boy Advance, a machine thought not to be able to handle the mathematical complexity of MP3.

What I really want to see is a rating of codecs that are able to achieve DBT-proven audible transparency

If you're looking for transparency proven with ABX double-blind testing, you know where to find it.

...and right now I'd need a really cool lo-rez pixel font too

If you're willing to settle for "really cute", grab the source code for this.

Are you a felon?

Yes, but not convicted. Yet.

The Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP still plays the original Tetris game that shipped with the version 1 gameboy in 1989. I was amazed by this fact

It also plays Tetanus On Drugs, which simulates Tetris under the influence of hallucinogens. Have you tried it?

Maybe we'll need to carry more than one phone (if you don't already)...one to play games, listen to music on and one to make calls with.

You only need one phone and one GBA. Use the phone to make voice calls, and use the GBA to play games and music.

[Is there a publicly available GBA SDK?] FUCK no.

FUCK yes.

And here's some of what I've made with it. Please hire me.

GBA currently can't decode MP3 in real time, but it can decode another compressed format based on the codec used in GSM mobile phones. You can fit 150 minutes of jogging-quality music on your 256 Mbit GBA flash cart with a GSM player that I ported.

I'm biased toward homebrew as well because I am active in the GBA homebrew community, having developed a couple games myself. Consider the GBA like a Super NES that you can program in C.

People just aren't taking any risk on new intellectual property (IP).

Could it be at least in part because they're afraid of subconsciously infringing somebody else's copyright? George Harrison got bit in the butt.

And so what Disney did was it didn't make R-rated moves.

Bullshit. Look at the Kill Bill movies, produced and published by Miramax Films, a division of The Walt Disney Company.

Or do you mean only the Walt Disney Pictures division? After The Lion King, the mean quality of WDP's in-house productions has gone downhill fast; at least Treasure Planet, Brother Bear and Home on the Range have bombed at the box office, and so did The Alamo. You may counter with Finding Nemo, but Pixar has announced it will dump Disney after the two more movies in its contract.

So what does WDP do? Sequels. Apart from Pixar, WDP is making money off Winnie-the-Pooh sequels (The Tigger Movie, Piglet's Big Movie, Springtime with Roo, etc) because it managed to buy enough senators to get Pooh's copyright (and thus Disney's life-of-the-copyright exclusive license) extended twice. See also this partial list; one reading that list could almost imagine the sequels popping up like the cliche badgers.

the most innovative game I saw was Destroy All Humans, which is destined for failure. But it is a very clever to twist everything so that you're actually an alien shooting people. It'll never sell, because it's over-the-top violent.

Gee. Tee. Eh?

Imagine simulating a hallucinogen trip while playing a tetramino game. This is TOD.

The new versions of it are cool as well

Except avoid anything marked "Tetris Worlds".

I certainly didn't purchase it to play crappy homebrew games

Do you claim that all homebrew games are crappy, that the homebrew games that are not crappy wouldn't even fill one of the older 64 Mbit flash carts? Do you call anybody who likes to play Tetanus On Drugs a "troll"?

You do realize that a GBA's use is not limted to these games, right?

As Nintendo cracks down on sellers of flash cartridges, it reinforces the perception that a GBA is to be used only for playing licensed games and not for playing homebrew games, music, or anything else produced by the community.

Right after we finish "Kingdom Hearts" I've told her Link is next.

Stop. Playing. Kingdom. Hearts. Now.

You don't want your 5-year-old to become a fan of the biggest corporate sponsor of the Perpetual Copyright Act. Trust me.

Anyone but a hypocrite can tell you that most P2P apps are indeed made for trading copyrighted material, much like emulators are made for running copyrighted roms.

Try telling that to any member of the gbadev community. I'm one of them, with a few free software projects for GBA under my belt. What do you find so unlawful about using an emulator "for running copyrighted roms" to which you own the copyright or have a license?

Another perfect example is Chess. It is hundreds of years old

But imagine what would have happened had Sonny Bono been around when it was invented.

I notice the same thing with many of the video games that I play for more than a year: Tetris, Quake, Super Mario Kart, etc

Super Mario Kart has been ported; once you've beaten a Grand Prix cup twice in Mario Kart Super Circuit, you unlock four SMK tracks.

For many other titles, only copyright issues prevent a port. However, abstract games such as Tetris aren't as susceptible to copyright-based monopoly enforcement; there exists at least one Free tetramino game for the GBA.

Sorry. I boycott Disney, so I didn't see Finding Nemo. You'll have to do better than that to effect me.

There you go, congrats, you found one use for C. Now, I ask you: How many low-level device drivers have you written lately?

Programs for some handheld systems contain customized video drivers and sound drivers. I had to write my own display and sound drivers for these demos. Do you know of a better language than C for implementing soft-real-time graphical video games on a device with a 16 MHz CPU and 256 KB of RAM?.

Lat least lhey lon't lave lo lange lilo's lame!

You sound like the Chinese version of Scooby-Doo.

[]at least [t]hey [d]on't [h]ave [t]o [ch]ange lilo's [n]ame!

Yes they do; otherwise, they become vulnerable to lawsuits from The Walt Disney Company alleging infringement of the Lilo & Stitch mark, no?