Slashdot Mirror
Gameboy Emulator For PalmOS
isaac was the first of many to point out: "Gambit Studios has finally released Liberty, a Gameboy emulator for PalmOS."
Here's the
FAQ; there are reviews and comments on
PalmInfocenter
and
re-Visor.org.
Speed appears to be an issue and everyone keeps suggesting
Afterburner.
And for the impatient, here's the Liberty
download page.
Update 3 hours later:
Gambit says:
"It has come to our attention that Liberty is having some problems with a number of devices (and many devices NOT having problems). Due to this we have decided to stop the download of this application until the problem is fully investigated and a solution is found." Oh well; ref. the
first noble truth
of the Buddha. Update another 3 hours later: OK, it's available again.
Can we run this sucker on one of those Palm emulators, and if so, what's the performance hit, if any? I think it would be funny to get to the point where we could play Six Degrees of by writing emulators to run inside emulators.
Who is going to steal a mere 18 games?
I expect most would do that in their first day.
There are hundreds of gameboy games to download from the internet. You act a little differently when you can try something for free than when you have to cough up $25 every time you want a game.
I don't think it's right to rip off the game producers that way, but I don't think their distribution model is right either.
Nintendo is not a big fan of emulators (neither is Sony or Sega), but there really isn't anything that they can do to stop them. With the recent settlements/injunctions between Sony and the , there is no way to say that creating an emulator is illegal. Of course, to play the games without the hardware, you need either a cart ripper or to download the ROM images from the 'net. The emulator doesn't do that, the users do that.
In fact, emulators are a great thing for the game market. It gives programmers an opportunity to work with an almost exact replica of the hardware for nothing. Console development was always a black art because nobody but official developers ever had access to the hardware; emulators change this and allows for an all new generation of programmers to learn like we all did with our C-64's and Apples.
But, I digress. Yes, coming out with an emulator right after a new console comes out would not be good for sales. Coming out after 4,5 or even 10 years later is not as big as an issue, at least with regards to future console development. Gameboy emulators have been around for years and that hasn't stopped them from developing the Gameboy Advanced (which isn't really a development, just a handheld version of the SNES hardware with a different processor).
In other words, emulators are a good thing, IMSHO.
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
Ardiri is a stand-up guy. I wouldn't be quick to ascribe ulterior motives.
Just my $0.02.
and the real question is: can it play textmode quake?
The predecessor to Wolf3d (the predecessor to Doom (the predecessor to Quake)) is FaceBall for Game Boy. Buy the cartridge, download the ROM to your Palm device, and play away.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Game Gear is essentially a portable Sega Master System. Most GG emus also emulate SMS.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Most of the time, I play FCI's Panel Action Bingo on my Game Boy. When I want Tetris, I play Tetanus on my laptop. When I want Dr. Mario, I play Vitamins for X or Windows.
Will I retire or break 10K?
NES emulator inside a Basic interpreter inside a Java VM inside a Bochs inside a Bochs inside a Bochs...
Will I retire or break 10K?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I know you were being funny, but the market here isn't people that don't have GameBoys, it people that have them and a library of games, but don't want to carry around an extra device. If this works well, I'll be able to leave my GB and carts behind when I go on business trips, but still have the games around...
Hmmm, this with a TRGPro and a 340MB microdrive... neat!
Ehh... I think the loss is negligable, actually.
It's pretty much a fact that if you take a general-purpose piece of hardware and write a program for it that simulates what another piece of hardware was specifically designed to do, it's going to end up a) Slower, and b) More expensive. (Unless you wait several years for technology to catch up.)
Am I really going to wait until 2004 to buy a Pentium-7/3000 so that I can download an emulator that simulates the PSX2 at a reasonable speed? Probably not. By the same token, the Gameboy has essentially reached market saturation by now. If you were going to buy a Gameboy, you probably would have already.
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
1. Doesn't an equal amount of R&D go into developing an emulator and making it work on multiple platforms? 2. Couldn't they release their own GamingOS software as open source and make all their money off the games?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Good point. It is a commercial enterprise, so maybe they're concerned about bad first impressions.
Read the article.. It's not a hardware clone, it's a software emulator. Besides, where would we be right now without the original PC cloners?
Perhaps paying Big Blue for a box that requires one to reinforce their desk (seriously.. I had to move an old IBM AT recently.. the Keyboard weighed 10 lbs, the monitor 75, the CPU 60..)
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
A) It only works with 32k ROMs(the demo version at least), which are pretty old.
B) Even 32k ROMs are so slow on it that they are unplayable, you get almost 1 fps.
C) They recommend AfterBurner, games are still unplayable with it.
And a few funnies from thier website:
In the compatibility section:
0 games tested
0 games playable
In the Known Problems section:
Problem: -blank-
Solution: Download latest version
The only thing that is done on a gameboy cart is rumble. That's the only thing that nintendo provides other than added ram. I've never worked on older systems, but I think that adding functionality to the cart was a very special case and it cut a huge chunk into the profit margins for a given game. So unless you're totally in bed with Nintendo, such extras are *not* feasable for the average publisher.
Not to say that you're wrong, but could you point out any NES/SNES games that did use off system hardware?
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
Palm IIIc from buy.com: $449
Gameboy from buy.com: $70
Gameboy games from buy.com: $25 each
I only have to steal 17.96 games to make it worth it!!!
Then again, I've had a Game boy since 1997 and I only ever actually bought Tetris and Spider-Man anyway. And Tetris came with the thing. Hm.
I wouldn't think the Palm buttons could be a good substitute for the directional control buttons on a GameBoy. For me, at least, a good game of Tetris or Kirby needs a comfortable and reconizable controls set.
-- demiurge
You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!!
Score one for the downtrodden hacker!
With regard to point (a), remember that a Palm device is pretty slow to begin with, 'cause it's been optimized for longer battery life, not speed. The Liberty FAQ mentions that you may need an overclocker utility to get decent performance...and the faster you push the processor, the faster you're gonna wear out your batteries. You'd probably get better battery life out of a real GameBoy.
With regard to point (b), consider that GameBoys are currently going for something like $50 apiece, whereas the least expensive Palm devices (a IIIe or the base-model Visor) are three times that (and they only have about 2Mb of RAM at that, which won't fit very many of the newer games).
So this emulator is a possibly-interesting toy at best; if you want real GameBoy action, you should probably just cough up the dough for a real one anyway. Somehow I don't think Nintendo is going to lose a lot of sleep over this.
But I might download Liberty anyway and check it out, just for grins. (Hmm, I wonder if they've implemented, or are planning to implement, 2-player GameLink emulation using the IR port? That would be interesting...)
Eric
--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
More to the point:
This seems like funny timing to me. I wonder if it's just an attempt to avoid being slashdotted. I mean, just because it's having problems in some places doesn't mean that you don't want the other people to be able to demo it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually, Nintendo tends to design their hardware so that the carts can replace major sections of functionality. Remember how Star Fox for the Super Nintendo was hyped as having the FX chip, an onboard math coprocessor? Well, that's the first time they hyped it, not the first time they did it. In it's heydey, the 8 bit NES, on average, was doing at least half of it's processing on the cart itself, and not in hardware.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
At that rate, buy a Gameboy of each color: 7*70 = $490!
Or just buy 2 Gameboy colors, the printer, a handful of multiplayer games, and 2 batterypacks, and you are *still* ahead of the game.
Sigh
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I'm not saying that competition is a bad thing. Of course we want to be able to buy our hardware from different vendors and be able to get the best value for our dollar. But the availability of emulators sure makes it hard for companies to justify any kind of innovation, when they know that everything they do will become available for free anyway. Do you want to be stuck with the same game console for the next 20 years because Nintendo, Sega, et. al. can't justify the costs in developing in a new console?
Me neither.
Come on now, folks. Everybody knows that the only games anyone plays on the Gameboy anymore are Tetris and the various Pokemon incarnations. AFAIK, you can't get a pair of palms to link up and exchange data ala networked quake, can you?
My point is that is they can't play Pokemon, they won't be popular. Sick, isn't it?
--