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Songboy Turns GameBoys into MP3 Players
farfisa sent us linkage to
Songboy which is a $99 addon for a gameboy which allows it to play MP3s. I just used my to play B mode tetris (Start at level 9 with the blocks all the way up and try to get 25 lines: total adrenaline). Its pretty amazing how general purpose these ancient little devices have turned out to be.
weirdos
Yup Yup. I have great faith in the linux community. Reinforced every day. Yup yup.
What is preventing Gameboy from becoming a palm-pilot-like organizer device? Just a cartridge with non-volitile RAM and an operating system?
I2Go at http://www.i2go.com is selling mp3 players with a 320MB compactflash drive, at about $650, but they don't reccomend using them with batteries. (They say to use them for car audio, or with an AC adapter.) There's also the Personal Jukebox at http://www.pjbox.com, which stores 4.86 GB for $800. This Songboy looks like a piece of garbage, seeing as my old, outdated, first-generation 32MB Rio costs less than their 16MB unit, is smaller (than the unit with the gameboy), and gets better battery life.
What's stopping it? How about any kind of useful input device?? PDAs use either a keyboard or a touch screen. The GB has a total of 8 switches for use as input. While they could be chorded to produce a multitude of results, the more likely alternative would be an onscreen keyboard on which you have to manipulate the cursor with the *digital* pad. Nothing's more annoying than digital cursor control. And the keyboard would take up more than half the screen to be readable. Lime
Wouldn't you need MP32MPE rather than MPE2MP3? Or am I confused...?
sorry off topic, but just curious anyone know of a project to convert PlayStation into an mp3 player...???
Level 9 High 5 challenging? Come on! The challenge is to get as many tetrises as possible on Level 9 High 5. Or reach the highest level on game A. I reached level 22 with a big bad-ass Russian super-rocket :)
nintendo won bung in court and they're not allowed to make those cartidges anymore
Instead of wasting time looking for mp3 players with enough features, enough memory, enough whatever, just buy a minidisc recorder. You can record digitally from any source, which means you can put your precious mp3s on minidics, too. 74mins on one pocket-sized disc. Toss a few in your pocket and you're the envy of all your RIO-using friends.
Considering the power (or lack of it) that the gameboy has.. running any PC OS on it would be a really dumb idea, in my opinion. There are a lot of other things that would be a lot better use of anyone's time... The gameboy has been a peice of shit for over a decade.
There's an MP3 player for around $800 built around one of those mini IBM harddrives. It's got a 6.4GB (or was it 4.6GB) harddrive, and can store something like 80 hours of music. It's also about as small as the current mp3 players (like RIO etc). There's a story on slashdot somewhere about it, can't remember it's name right now.
"This is a secret!"
I find it hard to believe that you think that the Game Boy version of Tetris sucks, especially considering that this was the first version of the game ever released. No other version has the quality of control nor the range of game features (consider how drops work in most clones compared to on the Game Boy, not to mention rotation) that the Game Boy version does. It may be over 10 years old, but I still regularly play my 1989 copy of Tetris that I got for Christmas. It may not be colorized and have fancy cut secens (though the 250,000 plus rocket launch is pretty neat) like my other games, but it has something that most of the others don't: good game play.
A big "fuck you" to whoever marked this Troll.
but the point is that memory above and beyond the initial 16mb costs extra--so having 32MB or 64MB will cost you than $99... Now how solid of an alternative is it to the Rio?
color gameboy owns and the games are pretty low price too :P
actually the gb has stereo sound
Sounds like you want one of these buggers: http://www.firingsquad.com/features/ces2000part1/p age4.asp Especially considering this announcement: http://www.americas.creative.com/pressroom/release s/1999/p991216a.html
wtf is this standard? nothing related to SDMI is it? why does industry bother to try and control music, when mp3s have been around for ages. go with the flow...
This GameBoy/SongBoy duo sounds a bit queer (that's homosexual for you Yankees). I guess everyone will be playing their favourite Back Passage Boys tracks on it! :-)
Another C64 Unix style os: Lunix.
Note that was a US decision applied to the sale of the unit within the USA itself, there is nothing to stop a Canadian from doing so in Canada. Also there is nothing stopping a US cit. from buying one from Hong Kong direct from Bung.
It was an add on that let you use its outputs to a radio via RCA jacks. You Just Pop a CD of mp3s in the PS and it plays/decodes the in extr. brick.
MD are just to dam expensive ...
They will never get any backing from the recoding indy. MPE... There will always be some way of ripping music to dif. formats so blah its crap.
the workin man is a sucka
I'm tired of paying all this money in taxes so you nigger monkeys can live off welfare and hit your crack rock. Go back to Africa Nigger.
I be hollerin 187 with my dick in yo mouth biatch.
SmartCom from Datel
GB Station fan
MD can do anything .mp3 can, and has much cheaper media. The only possible advantage the .mp3 players have is their lower size, but it's not as if MDs are massive.
I'm dead. My life sucks. I hate myself and want to die.
No one ever accomplished anything by being caught up in self pitty. Thats not what Im about, and thats not what i want YOU to be about. Now whattya say are we gonna get down with our own bad self?
Thanks Mr T!
Cmon man blow for a rock?
Why don't get you off the street and get a decent job?
Cause I need the Bread!
Then get a job at the Bakery!
Seriously, is there any project around for trying to run a bunch of these little boxen together in a big-ass cluster? Now that would be cool.
(Not Troll. Not Offtopic. Not Flamebait. Just a random though.)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Old Archie here says you're a royal fuckhead
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I think Game Boy has survived this long only because of the games. It has the largest collection of games, and as kids get older and tired of Game Boy, younger kids go into it because of all the games like Pokemon. It's still underpowered compared to just about every other handheld game ever released.
I recently bought a Neo Geo Pocket Color. It's definately better hardware than the Game Boy Color, but kids don't really like it too much because the selection of games is more like what older people play.
Hong Kong is probably my favourite place on earth - worth spending the money to go there and have a look around.
Once you're there, ofcourse, there are plenty of _cheap_ geek toys to buy to keep you happy. The cost of accomodation, food, etc., is/was quite cheap.
Don't know the cost of getting there from the US, but there are often really good deals from the UK (and, I guess, the rest of Europe). It's also a pretty common place to stop over on the way to/from Australia and the UK. Last time I did Sydney to London we had a six hour stop over which was just enough to zip in to town, ride the Star Ferry, get some fake watches at the Night Market, and get back to the airport in time for some duty free shopping.
Would move there in an instant if it wasn't for the whole communist rule thing. Oh well.
...j
No way man, if you play it in mono out of the gameboy speaker, I'm sure you could just encode all your mp3's at 32kbps or something. :)
.au files?
Heck, if we're going to be this silly, why not just make the gameboy processor do the work, and play
(Oh, you want to use the *headphones*...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Infogenius blows goats. Try it for a couple weeks and see. It's the same problem as the GB emulator for Palm. Just isn't meant to do it.
:-) I developped a little hardware dongle and software that talked to a reduced voltage soft starter (see here) via I2C. They called it too much of a toy so I now do it on a Palmpilot for 5x the price. :-)
:-)
Faceball 2000 isn't exactly what I meant by raycasted 3D graphics. I was meaning more along the lines of Doom/Quake. Wolfenstein graphics are pretty "blocky", as are Faceball's.
developing for a handheld that's still being commercially developed for sounds really cool
It is.
'sides.. The GB is a $70 child's toy, which means that our techs can't break 'em. Plus, they can play Tetris on the flight home.
I bought a couple year old model in which the book says 9.5 hours on Alkaline AA batteries. And it seems pretty accurate, although I get slightly shorter times due to the fact I play it loud in a noisy environment (with / as earplugs!).
Some of the newest ones are so small that they only take a rechargable NiMH or Li ion battery flat pack. Think in terms of how thin the latest and thinnest Palm units are, the battery fits in half THAT thickness.
Minidisc players only take 1 AA battery too, for 10 to 20 hours of operation. REMOVABLE 74 minutes recording media costs me about 1.50$US per disc in 20 disc quantities, at a quality that is about that of a well encoded 256kbps mp3. I have yet to skip my MD player and I sure have tried. Before you think that MD is such an obscure format, consider the market for MP3 devices now, there is probably the same level of general awareness involved.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Go away, and come back when you've studied your history a bit better. Tetris had been around for some time before the gameboy was released.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Wow. I haven't found another version where the control is remotely as badly done.
I'm kind of insulted you don't like the Gameboy one
Don't be. I'm merely expressing an opinion. I don't get insulted when people have different opinions to me, so why should you?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Probably the best version is Mirrorsoft's (IIRC) one for the Amiga. Twintris was always a bit of a laugh, too, although having the blocks rotate in the wrong direction wasn't so clever.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Twice I managed to get 4 tetris' (don't know the plural) on level 9 height 5. That was a while back when I still had reflexes. I also made it to level 21 on the tetris game for NES. That was an adrenaline rush!
Bleh!
I paid $110 for my gameboy, of course that was in 1990...
And the name Songboy is no worse than Gameboy, or Walkman, Discman, or the hordes of other like names.
Shaun Nelson - Bastard Operator (From Hell / For Hire)
It was the fish sonar I couldn't believe :)
Anyone got a URL that confirms this? The best I've found is this one, which only states 42 hours using a "Nickel-Hydrogen cell" (NiMH?). How many AAs in the holder?
-j
Sony just released such a beast. Check out their newest portable player... MZ-E75. 45 hours with the Li-Ion battery, 31 hours with the AA battery holder, for a whopping 76 hours of battery life combined. - Ed.
Personally, I find it very surprising that the GB's architechure has lasted as long as it has. I mean look at the console and computer gaming markets, and the changes that they go through to keep up with technology. Now look at the GB's rather simple architechure and consider how they have managed to keep it around as long as they have. I guess that it has something to do with its simplicity of design. The way I figure it, Nintendo must have allowed for the cartridge to do a great deal of the processing thus allowing for its great "expandability."
# They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. --Fran
MD are just to dam expensive ...
No way, dude... MiniDiscs are the shit. I recently bought one (Sharp's most expensive model sold at Best Buy) and it's great... sounds great, looks cool, and you can name tracks, split tracks, and everything else you'd need. It was only $200 (you couldn't get a portable mp3 player for *too* much less than that, and then only one that has 64mb of RAM [which would hold 1/2 the music that a MiniDisc holds if you used a decent bitrate of mp3]) MiniDiscs themselves are only ~2 bucks a pop if you buy a 10-pack (again, at Best Buy.)
You can record with a standard stereo headphone-plug type input or an optical cable from a digital source. I record using a splitter->RCA from my computer to my stereo, then RCA out from my stereo to a converter to a headphone plug and then into my MD player. I get absolutely no noticeable noise with this setup and the sound is perfect (and I have a pretty good ear for this type of thing) It even sounds damn good from an mp3, the compression in the MiniDisc doesn't fuck with mp3's compression too badly.
Sorry to go off on this rant, but I think that everybody who likes portable music should have one of these babies instead of a portable mp3 player, since they seem so much more practical to me (and to switch songs, you don't have to hook it back up to your computer, just pop in another disc)
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
-Linus Torvalds
er, there was a palm driven lego set on /. not so long ago... used jini technology :)
"DNA is God's contribution to the Open Source movement"
Next Linux for Gameboy!!!
Maybe that Color Gameboy I got for Christmas won't be completely worthless!
Why not just buy a rio? I can't see why anyone would waste their money on this when the 32 meg rio is less. Not to mention how crappy that gameboy speaker is gonna sound.
"I don't like this deep shit about crazy crap"
Aside: I wonder what using the Soundboy does to battery life?
I wonder the same, but, I also wonder how it uses battery life if you happen to have one of those rechargeable battery things. I have one of those.. you charge it for about 8 hours, but you can also play the Gameboy as it's recharging. It lasts for a long time as well, and so I wonder how the Songboy takes its toll on these things. I bought the battery thing so that I wouldn't have to waste money on batteries. Nice piece of equipment.
The other thing about this is it's coming at a time when I:
Insert mind here.
The details on this are just a touch vague. Which piece of hardware does the actual decoding? I would think the addon, since I don't think a gameboy has the horsepower.
Note quite: "Sore wa" means "That". So the exact translation would be: "That is a secret!" Just being pedantic... :)
Just wondering if you knew what "Sore wa HIMITSU desu?" means. (I do)
I too was a tetris junkie. Nothing I liked better than starting at level 9 hight 5 and then finishing that off and seeing that Huge frikin rocket take off. All I ever got on the progressive game (the one where you could go forever) was the dinky little rocket, of course I didn't spend a whole lot of time on that one. I would be more that happy to get addicted to tetris again if I knew that the gameboy could play mp3s as well. However there can't be a whole lot said for the quality of the speaker in the gameboy (8-bit sound anyone?). I don't know that I would be worth the effort to get mp3s to play on a piece of crap speaker.. although i suppose you could hook up headphones to that thing and get some pretty jammin toons. If anyone ever gets ahold of this they will have to tell everyone how well it works.
~Jester
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
Man, These chips have been around for a LONG FRIGGIN TIME. I think I read here on /. about motorola or somebody working to enhance it with more speed..
-Oy Vey
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Good thing it's already been done here. Of course, the Linux kernel, even when stripped down to the bare essentials, will need exponentially more memory than 4K... try 500K.
seems like a waste of money. i think any mp3 player with less than 64 megs is kind of a waste. maybe its just me.
"Users will be able to download music directly from the SongBoy website. Advertisers will sponsor the first 10,000 downloads of a new song which will be available free to consumers. As the music plays, images and advertising will show in Game Boy's screen." Wonder if when you play your own mp3's, you still have to watch ads? Well...I uh...well...well...look Nancy, the carpet is growing again. Bring me the lawnmower!
I was trying to point out that any user who wanted the /extra stuff/ (liner notes and the like) would have to spring for the .mpe's.
Ahh. I see the confusion -- I wrote 'mpe2mp3' when I meant 'mp32mpe'.
I bought an MD for my gf for xmas.
.oO0Oo.
It rulez. Uploading mp3's to ur mp3 player EVERY time you want a new set is a pain surely.
We can make a new MD from our mp3s on HD but once you've made the disk you can just pop it out and the next one in. MUCH quicker.
Who fancies lending their 32Mb Flash card to a friend? I can give my MD's away and not be too bothered.
Ok when my mp3 hardware has 256Mb as standard then it might be worth it but 32Mb just isn't enough.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I said No Text
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I don't know. I think "Songgirl" would have been better than "Songboy". I can see the marketing now.
Castrate your GameBoy today with the new "Songgirl" add-on (or should we say clip-off).
ok, just to make sure i don't get off on the wrong foot here, i'll say that i love mp3's as much as the next nerd. Although, i think that the things they are trying to use to play mp3's nowadays are getting a little out of hand. The other day, i read an article about a watch that plays mp3s, and now an addon for gameboy? I think that mp3s should be left to computers and portable mp3 players myself (and hopefully CD players than can read mp3 cd's in the future), i didn't even know a gameboy was powerful enough to play mp3s (maybe it's not!). Another thing to note is that Gameboy doesn't even have good speakers (but i guess you could use headphones.), anyway that's just my two cents.
Maybe I missed something on the page, but how do you get the stuff from your computer to the....the thing? USB would make sense, I think, but I didn't see it mentioned anywhere...
--Colbey
does this mean were all going to be developing for game boy now ?
is that even possible(seriously)?
it actually doesnt sound like a bad idea. i would suggest doing n64 games or whatnot, but we would all fight over which system is better, and new systems would be coming out too fast.
at least with gameboy you KNOW its gonna be around a while
This sounds like one of the more useful addons for the gameboy :) :)
When i saw the little snap-on camera and printer thing, i couldn't believe my eyes, but this is even funnier
Personally, I'd rather listen to my mp3's on the road using my boring, simple rio player.
Apple II series and Nintendo NES also used a 6502 type CPU. NES also had a nice character-cell management chip.
and then port all of the usual GNU programs to 8-bit code
Using GCC and GNU binutils would simplify making open-source NES games immensely. (O.S. works better than "free" as an adjective when not in front of "software"; sorry RMS...)
Will I retire or break 10K?
I love that game (I've even cloned it for Linux and other platforms that support Allegro), but Tetris sucks. The company that makes it is greedy.
But let's get back on topic, shall we?
Try typing "Tetris" into the song title search box on the Napster client and see what cool techno remixes don't pop up.
Will I retire or break 10K?
PDA software
Been done. InfoGenius.
raycasted 3D graphics
Been done. FaceBall 2000.
If you've got one and you want to hack it, join up. You can buy Bung's cartridge to transfer your software to a real GB or use one designed by one of the list gurus. There are some people in there who do GB code for a living, others who are under Nintendo NDAs, and even others who seem to know more than Nintendo themselves knows about the GB. :-)
Right now I'm on nesdev instead, but developing for a handheld that's still being commercially developed for sounds really cool. Just think what will happen when Game Boy Advance comes out though...
Will I retire or break 10K?
What about the world's smallest digital camera according to Guinness® World Records? Game Boy® Camera kicks.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If I remember correctly, the 6502 is the chip the Commodore 64 ran on. The is an operating system called "GeckOS" which runs on 6502's (esp C64's) and it has a Linux-like environment... complete with internet access and a web server. I don't know about Linux for Z80, but you could possibly make a custom kernel in assembler basing it on the Linux code, and then port all of the usual GNU programs to 8-bit code. Of course, you can't really run much with only 16kb of ram :) Imagine slashdotting a gameboy....
I kmowthis amy seema little off the subject but isn't itweird how game boy (whcich was first released in 1989) has outlasted all other game playing console such as segaand super nintendo, and hand held consoles such as turbo graphics, sega nomad, and sega game gear. Gameboy was the least advance thing nintendo could spit out yet it has lasted the longest...weird isn't it...LONG LIVE DOT MATRIX WWITH STEREO
Is this only available in the Japan? Us? How about Can? how on Earth can a colour Game Boy be worthless? I have one of the old nes from 1990.
I think it might be cool to build a portable MP3 player around a 100MB ZIP disk. If it could be made small enough, it would make memory a non-issue for many users. And you wouldn't have to deal with any cables. I think i'll hold on an MP3 player for now though. Once a portable CD player can play a CDR full of files, then I'll buy that.
Add to the advantages of MP3 players
1) they have the potential to hold more music without a lot of disk swapping (just buy a bigger flash RAM card. Hopefully the prices of these will come down.)
2) music upload is quite fast using USB or parallel cable.
3) you can use the flash RAM to store any kind of files you like
I must admit those little MD players look quite nice. There are thousands of the sleek little buggers on display in the streets of Akihabara in Japan. Amazing how popular they are there. They're really not much bigger than the MP3 players I've seen.
But doesn't MD uses some form of compression? So I would be worried that the quality of MP3's copied to and MD would suffer since they must be decompressed and then recompressed.
Also recording to MiniDisc seems to require a separate recording deck. I like the convenience of being able to transfer tunes directly from most any computer to the MP3 player using a USB cable.
What I would like to know is this: would it be possible to make an MP3 player that uses MiniDiscs as the storage media? That would really rock.
16MB is not enough. You could store what, like 3-5 songs on that? Woo-freakin-hoo.
I'm waiting for MP3 players w/ a whole lot of space. There are digital cameras w/ 320 megs of space. If I could get an MP3 player w/ that much space, I would be happy.
It might be nice if one could pry into the flash memory of the more exotic sound cards to program the DSP into playing things like mp3's. When I find a site that shows more detail on how sound cards are constructed, I would like to try programming one of those things.
Right now, I just have a few simple sound cards and am not sure if they can be reprogrammed. I do know that looking at my RIO that uses only 1 AA battery, nothing is more effecient or flies like assembly on a DSP!
I'm waiting for the springboard based mp3 module for my Visor to become cheaper.. Cant really afford anything more than 99 bucks for a mp3 springboard..
:)
Then again, I'd love to own a GPS, Wireless or bluetooth module
--
Songname: whatever.mp3
First image: whatever.1.bmp
Second image: whatever.2.bmp
You can do text somehow too. (probably "whatever.1.txt") I've already got a few bits of artwork copied off MP3.com and epitonic.com that come up when the appropriate tracks are selected. Hopefully the hardware version will also allow for this...
BTW: I also submitted this story, based on an article at MP3.com.
Nintendo just won a permanent injunction against Bung last month. A US court ruled that the Bung carts were intended for piracy, not development, and ruled that Bung must pay Nintendo some $7 million as well as cease selling its flash carts in the US, Canada, Mexico, and (I believe) parts of Central America that the court has jurisdiction over.
As a GB Developer myself, I'm upset about the ruling - I was planning on buying a cart soon. Now you either have to have them purchased and imported by someone outside the Continent or win one in the current Bung Amatuer GB developer contest. Frankly, I doubt Bung can stay in business now, with a hung debt and a huge market dead (then again, Hong Kong is where they make all their cash off of software pirates anyways).
I think that a large percentage of the people who purchased these ARE using them for piracy, but now I have to and either continue to use an emulator or wait for my "studio" to become Nintendo licensed (soon, I hope) and purchase a several thousand dollar cart =(
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
The page said it's coming out in 16, 32, and 64 meg versions. 64 megs is enough for 8-9 normal quality mp3s. :/
That thing has only 16 megs of Ram, meaning about ... :(
.. :)
1/4 hour of mpeg music
It looks that they use the gameboy only as "display" for the song titles, etc, so I think
this is a pretty useless invetion.
I think I stick with my RIO
This comment is *not* insightful, it's just plain wrong... the device can play both mp3's and mpe's... you just get some extra features with mpe's (lyrics and copyright info).
Songboy has licensed the .MPE file format from Destiny Media Technologies for use with the SongboyTM portable and Songboy PC PlayerTM.
The .MPE or encrypted multimedia format enables artists to release music tracks that are encrypted for the purchaser.
As far as I can tell, users (who would like the fancy-shmancy liner notes and the like) will have to purchase .mpe's from songboy.
Until, of course, some geek builds mpe2mp3 (if it doesn't exist already).
I sure would feel weird about bringing a "Songboy" with me while I went on my jog during lunch break. Imagine what girls in the weight room will think when they see you with one of these...
... Needless to say, you know how that encounter ended up.
"What's that?" the pretty brunette doing sit-ups asks flirtatiously. "This? This is my Songboy!" I reply smoothly.
At $99 it is an add-on that's twice the price of the original product. Probably not gonna do too well, me thinks!
This "pluggable" MP3 player for the Gameboy reminds me a whole lot of the Handspring "Springboard" MP3 player from Innogear. The MiniJam Player uses the same approach as this Gameboy product uses of inserting a module with a DSP, stero-out, and memory; and leaving the "host" hardware to do management functions.
I might actually buy the player from Innogear: I just love those buttons on the top (ala MiniDisc)! It is just too bad they had to go with a proprietary flash memory spec. Bummer.
For the MiniJam spec in PDF, click here.
-AP
I think the fish finder's a cooler hack. At least that uses the gameboy as a something more than just a display.
i pherals/pocketsonar.html
http://members.xoom.com/nintendorep/gameboy/per
-=- SiKnight
I got a Rio PMP300 for $99 about a month ago... I can certainly see the geekiness of a gameboy that plays MP3s, but I think the costs outweigh the benefits in this case... it's less portable, it has less RAM, there is not, AFAIK, a good solid codebase of open source to support it, there's no reason to believe it's going to use anything but a proprietary memory expansion (ie probably not compact flash or smartmedia) and of course it presupposes you already own a game boy, which I don't. Since the Gameboy's CPU doesn't have the strength required to do this on it's own, we assume that this thing will have a processor on board, so essentially it's just a slightly dumbed-down Rio that's permanently tethered to a Game Boy, for the same price... the ONLY benefit I can see is that it can use the display for visualization or some other optical goodies (the page lists album covers, lyrics, etc), and this is not a good enough reason to warrant the drawbacks, IMHO. Game boy owners, just buy a Rio and have two excellent devices that are specilized to their respective tasks, and do them well.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
... in the gbdev mailing list. I run the archive at mixdown.org/gbdev.
:-)
The add-on would be a DSP or fast processor because, as one poster correctly put it, the GB processor (a bitched-up Z80) simply does not have the balls to decode an MP3 stream at any usable rate.
I too consider a GB MP3 device totally useless. A RIO gives you all that, has more memory (IIRC) and is better on batteries, to boot. The GB can't even be used as a (proper) audio output because there is only a single pin on the GB cartridge you can inject audio on, so that leaves stero operation out. Unless they've somehow used the GB sound chip in its digitized mode.
The people in that list have a lot of great ideas, but some seem to want to push the platform too far (read: beyond something economically worthwhile). Things like MP3 addons, PDA software, raycasted 3D graphics and <cough> a multitasking OS are, IMHO, a waste of effort and brainpower for otherwise bright minds. However... full-colour imagery, robotics and a multitude of cheap computing projects are well worth the effort.
If you've got one and you want to hack it, join up. You can buy Bung's cartridge to transfer your software to a real GB or use one designed by one of the list gurus. There are some people in there who do GB code for a living, others who are under Nintendo NDAs, and even others who seem to know more than Nintendo themselves knows about the GB.