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The other reason nintendo can't do this is that they don't own the rights to most of the games released for the NES. They would have to keep track of the rights of all the games and then send small royalties out to all those companies...

By the way, nothing against Super Mario 3 (definately one of the best in the series and one of the best NES games ever), I am really glad they are releasing Yoshi's Island like this. Have you played it before? Its an amazing game, and definately a worthy member of the series. It always seemed like it was released and marketed more as a offshoot of the series instead of a bone fide sequel. I'm looking forward to it being in my portable library. Besides, a Mario All Stars for GBA is almost assuredly on the way.

Another thing - if you want SMB3 on your GBA now, head over to lik-sang, get yourself a flash cart and linker, and then download the PocketNes, a GBA NES emulator.

PocketNES does this by dropping every third scanline to make the image fit on the GBA screen. Nintendo will probably want to redraw the graphics to remove the visual artifacts caused by this aliasing though.

Ha Ha Ha!

I've got the afterburner backlight so I can actually see my screen!

I've got the 256Mbit flash cartridge so I can load roms onto it!

I've got PocketNES v7a NES emulator with over 100 of my favorite NES games installed!

It all cost $69 (GBA) + $35 (afterburner) + $159 (256mbit flash) + $45 (linker for copying roms to flash) = about $300! Hey, that's kinda expensive. BUT WORTH IT.

HA HA HA!

There is already a NES emulator available for the Gameboy Advance called PocketNES. This emulator is great - it runs at full speed and has great sound support. You can even link up another GBA and play 2 players with just one cartridge. You have to have a Flash Advance linker in order to play on your GBA hardware though.

There are many excellent NES emulators already available for the GBA - most noteably PocketNES. I wonder if Nintendo will take an aggressive stance against these kinds of developers, and NES ROM trading in general?

Descent is probably beyond the GBA's capabilities, since it uses arbitrarily-angled perspective-correct textured polygons, which are a fair bit harder to render on a low-end CPU (the GBA has a 16MHz ARM7 CPU).
You should see some of the stuff that's going on. There are a number of fully textured 3D engines out there, one of which actually uses Descent levels as its examples! (I linked to another in my previous post which uses the quake level 1) A good example is the Raylight [raylight.it] engine, though there are probably a dozen that I've seen (and a few proprietary, one of which I'm about halfway done writing :) )

None of these engines do true perspective correct texturing. And yes, I'm fairly aware of the work that's going on out there - I am the author of FooN, and have also written a bunch of 3d engines for the GBA. My point was that, while DOOM/GBA is a more-or-less exact replica of the PC version, Descent/GBA is not going to look anywhere near as cool as the original.

Sorry - should have clarified - the ones I listed are all emulators for the GBA.
Sorry, but not even remotely close. You didn't even get the popular ones. There's a pretty decent list here [zophar.net], at Zophar's Domain (a pretty good dev site)

Read. Comprehend. Post.

"The ones I listed are all emulators for the GBA". Not "These are all the emulators for the GBA".
In other words, the emulators I listed are all emulators that run on the GBA, and emulate other machines.

Another thing - you mistakenly state that the GBA has a Z-buffer. WTF? As someone who claims to be developing a 3D engine for the GBA, you must be aware that the GBA most certainly doesn't have a Z buffer. It doesn't even have any polygon rendering hardware.

The 65c816 was more than a 6502 on roids. It was a fully functional 16bit cpu

The 65c816, used in the Apple IIGS computer and Super NES game console, was a 16-bit processor with an 8-bit data bus and only three integer registers (A, X, and Y).

at least as capable as some low end 32bit cpu's

The Motorola 68000, used in the Sega Genesis and SNK Neo-Geo game consoles and the original Apple Macintosh computer, was a 32-bit processor with a 16-bit data bus. So was the Intel 386SX processor, used in some PC clones.

Without looking at the specs, the GBA is certainly more powerful than the SNES

After becoming intimately familiar with the specs, I'd say twice as powerful overall, or about as powerful as the Super NES with Super FX.

but we're not talking orders of magnitudes.

Correct. In general, you need at least an order of magnitude speed difference to emulate a video game console. The 16 MHz ARM7TDMI in the GBA just barely squeezes by when emulating a 1.8 MHz 6502 and the rest of the original NES chipset.

NES emu
Spectrum emu
Sega Master System Emu

NES emu
Spectrum emu
Sega Master System Emu

Since you look a little confused, let me help you. If you want quality portable classic NES gaming, I suggest the following:
PocketNES NES Emulator for the GBA
Gameboy Advance
Flash GBA Cartridge for "burning" NES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance games
Note that you could burn all of your favorite NES, GB, GBC, and GBA games to that one Flash Cartridge because the Flash Cart comes with a multi-rom menu feature.

With all of that gaming on the go... the great battery life, nice controls, etc... what else would you need? Also, note that running the NES emulator directly on the Gameboy Advance's hardware is far better than running it ontop of a non-realtime operating system such as Linux and WinCE. Gaming, imo, requires a realtime OS or no OS at all. I mean, who really likes those pauses in the middle of a heavy action sequence in your game?

Here's the trick.

Get a GBA and then head to www.lik-sang.com and get flash cart/linker set.

Hmm, piracy...

Actually I put PocketNES on my GBA since its way more fun than have of the clone stupid side scroller GBA games.

Tom

I haven't heard of Nintendo exactly "closing in" on other projects for the GBA, such as an NES emulator or the Afterburner front-light mod....

By the way, the NES emulator alone is worth getting a GBA for - not some dumb old webserver that nobody (especially not the Big N) is going to care about :)

AC

Oh! I just discovered that a NES emulator that can live on a GBA flash card already exists, the link is here.

But my challenge still stands regarding the SNES emulator.

Site is Here

I load this shit up on my 128 megabit flashcard, and play all day at work, and This sure as HELL isn't Nintendo supported :)

If any of you here are British, (or just inordinately fond of the ZX-Spectrum, or Timex-Sinclair whatever-it-was-released-as-in-the-USA), you may be interested in looking at http://foon.pocketheaven.com.

You need a GBA flash cart (available from a number of vendors), and a GameBoy advance. Hey presto - portable Speccy!