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PlayStation Portable
King Kool writes: "Apparently, some guy decided it would be cool to try to take apart his PSX and make it portable - and it worked. It has about 2 hours of batterylife (with screen and everything) and runs on a Sony Lithium battery. Pictures and documentation are included. Cool."
The GBA is supposedly equal to SNES power.
No. Super NES had a 2.8/3.6 MHz 65816 processor (essentially a 65c02 with 16-bit registers, 8-bit data bus, little pipelining) connected to the graphics chip and a 2 MHz SPC700 processor (incompatible variant of 6502 core with some instructions able to treat registers X and Y as a single 16-bit integer) connected to the sound chip. The two CPUs were connected through four slow 8-bit ports; most of the "loading" on Super NES games was actually copying 64 KB worth of sound data from the 65C816 side (which could see the cart) to the SPC700 (which could see only its 64 KB of RAM and its 64-byte BIOS).
GBA, on the other hand, has a 16.8 MHz ARM processor (32-bit registers, 32-bit bus to internal RAM, 16-bit external data bus, no hardware divide, lots of pipelining, C-friendly) connected to both the sound and graphics chips, making it much easier to code for. Its graphics chip also features hardware matrix transformation of sprite coordinates (allowing for 2D scaling and rotation of sprites) as well as four layers of straight background (vs. Super NES's 3) or two layers of "mode 7" 2 1/2-D transformation (vs. Super NES's 1), and a linear bitmap mode (allowing for easier porting of Wolf3d or Doom engines).
Will I retire or break 10K?
or halting every time the room shook even briefly
What the hell? For the record, I've never had my room shake, even briefly. We don't all live in California, buddy.
j/k, no terrible flames please.
BTW, my PSX takes shocks rather well. If you bump it while it's loading, sometimes it takes a few seconds to recover, but rarely does a PSX game read the disc continuously for something like this to cause a huge problem. Also remember that under most circumstances, you aren't jamming buttons while the disc is being read... you're waiting for the game to load.
The only time I can get a game to crash is to actually reach in and stop the disk from spinning. (No, not a good practice, I know. I've only done it twice.)
i already have a portable playstation, and mine has better battery life. plus, it can play SNES, NES, gameboy, genesis, hundreds of arcade games, just about any PC game, and, oh yeah, any game they make for linux or Mac.
:) through the power of emulation, i have a completely portable machine that i can use to play more games than any other single platform.
it can emulate just about anything you throw at it, since it has a spiffy, wicked fast processor inside (not the fastest in the world, but it'll do in a pinch), and it has enough keys and buttons in the built-in controller to bind to even the most complicated of game controllers - plus USB to connect additional players if you like. the best part, though, apart from the ~5 hour battery life - and only a little less under heavy load, even spinning CDs, i've found - is the amazing thin, small, high-definition LCD screen. it's a thing of beauty. another perk is that it has the ability to play games over the internet, wirelessly, with 802.11 (though the manufacturer refers to it as "airport")
yep, it's an iBook.
a little heavier (but not much!), and more general-purpose than the portable PS1, but infinitely more useful
so take these stories about a portable this, a hacked up that, or a MAME the other, and stick them.. well, i don't care where you stick them.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree