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.

Comments

Re:is it just me...

[kruhftwerk]

Well, considering that the gameboy is over ten years old with over a hundred million units out on the market, I think nintendo has made quite a bit back on thier initial hardware development investment. It seems that it takes about 5 years for a company to really start profiting on console hardware and with the number of re-releases of the gameboy plus an extra 5 year lifespan for the console, nintendo is probably making a pretty hefty profit on the hardware sales compared to most consoles.

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.

[S]NES off-system hardware

[yerricde]

• MMC3 and MMC5 (among other mappers) had integrated timers that counted down the scanlines (often used to tell the CPU to switch from the playfield to the status bar).
• E?ROM games for NES(Castlevania 3, several Koei titles) used MMC5 to generate additional color data for tiles.
• Several Konami games for NES had a sound chip called VRC?.
• Several Capcom titles for SNES (Mega Man X 2 and 3) used the C4 chip. I don't know what it did.
• Yoshi's Island, Doom, Vortex, Dirt Trax, Star Fox, and Stunt Race used various iterations of the Super FX chip.
• Kirby Super Star, Super Mario RPG, etc. used the SA-1 chip.
• A few games used a compression chip that decompressed data coming out of the ROMs.
• Nintendo's Super Game Boy accessory implemented a full Game Boy system (sans serial port) inside an SNES cartridge.

Money

[falloutboy]

Lets see.

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.

Control Issue

[the_demiurge]

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!

Re:Emulate an emulator emulating hardware

[Nonac]

Run Tetris on a Gameboy emulator running in a Windows Palm emulator running under wine running on a Linux machine running in a vmware window on a Windows box that you are accessing via VNC from a Sun server that you are accessing from a dumb terminal.

No Downloads

[drinkypoo]

More to the point:

July 7, 2000
Stockholm, Sweden
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.

// Aaron Ardiri
// Michael Ethetton
- the Liberty development team

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.

Re:GameBoy the best hardware?

[SuiteSisterMary]

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.

is it just me...

[vertical-limit]

...or are all these emulators really unfair? I mean, Nintendo went to a lot of work to design the Game Boy hardware and all its upgrades (Pocket Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Dolphin), and there's a lot of R&D costs involved in that. Now, when other people start cloning that hardware immediately and producing viable alternatives to Nintendo's hardware, all that R&D is basically "lost". Other companies are making the money from the hardware sales, and Nintendo doesn't get to see any of the rewards. And why would Nintendo want to fund other companies' profit? This is what's known in economics as a "win/lose situation" -- one company loses, and all the other ones win because they ripped the first company off.

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.

Re:is it just me...

[ShavenGoat]

I mean, Nintendo went to a lot of work to design the Game Boy hardware and all its upgrades (Pocket Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Dolphin), and there's a lot of R&D costs involved in that

Sure, there are a lot of R&D costs, but when they sell the hardware on the street I'll bet they either break even or take a loss. The games are where all the money is at, and in the long run th e cost of R&D will be recovered there.

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.

Two things here, first of all, how many games have you played in emulators? Often times the games have unstable sound, jittery graphics, or don't run at all. Second, the whole point of developing new consoles is to give home users a better gaming environment on dedicated hardware. Sure, you can put games on your PC, but then you have to have a fast enough processor, video, and enough ram to drive the game. At least with a console you know the game will run correctly on your system the first time, no brains needed.