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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
N64 is a pointless system compared to improving the portable playstation stuff
There seems to be an awful lot of "why bother" posts on here. Obviously hardware hacking and/or "portablizing" isn't for everyone - so why assume that what you think would be cool is what someone else thinks would be cool? The fact is that this guy decided to take something apart and build a smaller custom cabinet for it, interfacing a few things that aren't supposed to go together. Regardless of what your iBook does, what the XBox could do with a really long extension cord, or what games look better on what system, the point is that some guy took one of his electronic devices, and repackaged it into something smaller and funky looking. It could have been anything - stop thinking about what device he chose (admittedly his contraption is pretty strange) and instead look at what he did - some interesting hardware modifications and some neat "use whatcha got" hardware adaptations. No need to fire off cheap shots of discouragement.
-- "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." (Charles Darwin)
Actually, the portable SNES is called the Game Axe.
I'm sure that a Nintendo "Portable N64" would have a much better battery life, but that Nintendo still wouldn't do it. This is because, since the Nomad and Game Gear, Nintendo and their technology partners could undoubtably design more energy efficient systems. Also, Nintendo wouldn't use a backlit system, most likely opting for the current screens, which require an external light source, which would provide a comparable savings in power.
However, Nintendo is unlikely to release a Portable N64. N64 is one of Nintendo's close calls to failure. (Yes, it was successful in it's own right, with 30 Million units sold, but still, compared to the console market share it had with NES and SNES? It's absolutely not a resounding success.) Also, because of one of Nintendo's major mistakes in designing the N64 Using the most expensive parts available on market (ie- remember the Silicon Graphics fiasco?)), it would be technologically unfeasable to create a Portable N64 at an acceptable mass-market price point for handhelds (which is $100, just like the console mass-market price point is $200). People just aren't that likely to buy a handheld, even if it is capable of the N64's power, at more than $100. I'm sure it's feasable, but if Nintendo thought that a Portable N64 had a lick of a chance to be a success, I'm sure they'd be all over that, especially with PSone. But it doesn't. And with GBA coming out, that is capable of having many NES, SNES, and N64 games ported to it, there's no need for Nintendo to waste money on a Portable N64. Any Portable N64 would be yet another "Virtual Boy" scar on Nintendo's back, and right now, they don't need that, especially in the face of Sony PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox.
the "light" mode removes all of this frippery, except for the top banner ad.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
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?
I have so far seen a lot of posts basically saying "Why would someone do this?" and "Nintendo is never going to come out with that". Phooey to you. This is someone's mod! Someone came out with Linux for the dreamcast, he modded an operating system to make it work with a console.... no purpose or function, just a modification. Everyone seemed to think that was cool. This guy really liked his NES, N64 and PSX enough to take them wherever he went to play with them wherever. I think that's cool, he even shows you how he did it in case you like to do it too. Why are people so pessimistic at such an early hour?
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!
I guess around 4-5 months ago someone ported snes9x to the arm cpu and made it work nicely on the iPAQ. A year ago now, I helped on getting xmame to work nicely on the iPAQ (sound fix ;). xstella works well too (atari 2600). Plus it can ssh or receive ssh sessions for your remote pleasure.
Read: iPAQ == computer. (and wow, it's portable too!)
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
Actually - that isn't a bad idea - back during the 80's, when everyone and his brother was competing with Atari (it seemed), a lot of small pong systems were developed. In fact, at one time there was a "pong-on-a-chip" made (forget which manufacturer) that required very few external parts. Your idea, in fact, would not be unfeasible - and if built, I bet, would instantly be a "classic hack", at least with the /. crowd...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
i wont make the mistake of saying "impossible", but i do feel ok about saying "highly fucking unlikely, given the hardware you mention"
1) the xbox GPU is a GF3 type core with a few extra units that the GF3 doesn't have. In other words, the XBox GPU is a more powerful one than any nVidia product you can get your hands on. A GF2 Go wont cut it. Not at all.
2) XBox is UMA.
3) XBox kernel + game code is much much smaller than any mainstream PC OS, and gets to live in kernel mode. Compare that to an emulator running on a host OS.
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