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Portable N64
Tha_Zanthrax writes "After the portable PlayStation a while ago, now there is a guy who built a Portable Nintendo 64. He already made a portable NES which he is now 'upgrading'. Cool, hacking your own hack."
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Given the HW in the X-Box (Intel PIII CPU, nVidia GPU, IDE HDD, SDRAM, etc.), I'd have to say that a properly configured Dell Inspiron 8000 (GeForce 2 Go, PIII >1 GHz, etc.) could be made into a portable X-Box with SW work.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
why not make some device based around an atari on a chip or a nes on a chip that used a portable cdrom or compact flash or something and just loaded roms
A typical NES cartridge contained a program ROM, either a tile ROM or an 8 KB tile RAM, and "mapper" hardware that bankswitched the ROMs and often provided timers. Emulating the different varieties of mappers in an FPGA may be trouble, given that you have to take into account CNROM (for Milon and Tetyais (tengen's tetris clone) plus fallback for old games such as SMB1, Duck Hunt, and one of my favorites, Binary Land), UNROM (for Contra, Ikari, Mega Man 1, and the Codemasters games), MMC1 (for Metroid, Zelda, Tetris, and Dr. Mario), MMC2 (for Punch-Out), MMC3 (for SMB2, SMB3, TMNT2, Mega Man 3-6, etc.), MMC5 (complex monster used in Castlevania 3), and more.
Learn more about mappers from Firebug's document at NESdev
Will I retire or break 10K?
This equals a Portable NES. Of course, you need roms.
You can get a flash advance in a lot of import stores, or at http://www.lik-sang.com
PocketNES is a NES emulator being written. You can get it at http://www.nolag.com Currently it's up to Beta4 and runs many games. PocketNES has the following strengths and weaknesses:
Pro) You can have 'infinite' amounts of games on 1 cartrige (by appending roms to each other)
Pro) It's portable =)
Pro) Batteries last 12 hours approx.
Pro) Costs $200 for everything
Pro) Doesn't require any build time
Con) Not all games are currently compatible
Con) The GBA resolution is smaller than NES, hence some screens are cropped. The author of the emulator has not written in resolution fix into the EMU.
Pro) The EMU is in development, and will get better with time.
Pro) The GBA + (insert favourite system)EMU is bound to come soon, I expect to see Sega master system, Sega genesis, and possibly even SNES emulation to come in the future.
SO WTF are you waiting for? Go get a GBA, a Flash Advance, and join the portable EMU community!