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Portable GameCube
Bodero writes: "After Slashdot ran a story about the Portable N64 over a month ago, many of us have been enlightened to the idea of portable home console systems. The Portable N64 was more of a novelty item whose cost and development factor outweighed its feasibility. However, IGN Cube is running a hardware review on the Interact Mobile Monitor 5.4, a 5.4" LCD that hooks up to your gamecube, providing a screen and power from either AC or an included car adapter. All that for only $150. For only $50 more, Interact sells an optional battery pack, which IGN claims can power the GameCube and monitor for up to three hours."
Now I'll get run off the road by some guy playing Luigi's castle instead of reading his morning paper? Isn't progress grand?
...$400 and it becomes portable for 3 hours of play. (Game cube retail $199 + 150 screen + $50 battery pack.)
This is getting into used laptop territory. Why would I want this GB setup when I can buy a used laptop with 10.4 inch active matrix screen and 5 hours of gameplay?
I think their price point is a little high. Maybe for $250 it would be sweet. At $400 it is for the rich kid that has everything and needs one more thing for the closet.
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Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Over at Emugaming.com they have a short but informative article on IGN's portable GameCube. Includes some nice pictures.
What do you think of MusicCity now?
something like this is already out for the XBox, it's called a TV! if you have room for the XBox you can bring a television too :)
I used to work for InterAct Accessories, Inc.
;) In conclusion, I wouldn't purchase this product, it's most likely produced by STD, and will probably break for you in the not so near future.
First off, let me tell you that Interact has a very close business relationship with IGN. IGN/Snowball now hosts their website. In turn GameShark provides them exclusive codes, and other perks. So I don't trust this review very well to begin with.
I no longer work for them now, but I can tell you this, InterAct products are not of good quality. In fact InterAct makes no actual products. They are outsourced from two major companies, one, STD based in China, and Datel based in the UK. Datel makes semi-decent products (eg, GameShark), but STD makes shit products. For example, STD produced a Lightgun for the Dreamcast, not only was the Lightgun made of poor housing materials, but the aim wasn't accurate. It would shoot about an inch to the upper left of where you actually were targetting. When Interact gave STD a call to ask what was up about the lightguns, STD's response was merely, "Sorry, we're not very good at making lightguns." I'm glad I didn't work in customer service, because they god a beating all the time. Nintendo 64 GameSharks will fry randomly. Interact really didn't bother pressure Datel to figure out why, and just kept making them.
Secondly, InterAct/Datel has violated the GPL multiple times. Anyone that's listening, the GameShark that was produced for the PC (another horrible product, and has been discontinued), includes an MP3 player. The MP3 player is not of their own creation, but merely a hacked up version of FreeAmp, which they sold and never released the source too. As you can see I have a lot of greif with this company, so my views are a bit slanted myself
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
natural progression of technology via miniaturisation and improvements in power consumption. We've already witnessed essentially the SNES being shrunk into the Gameboy Advance. The next handheld will surely be a shrunken version of the N64, and so on.
We're only really up to the second generation of portable consoles, so these things are naturally surprising to us. Not that I'm putting it down - I think we'll see a lot more power in portable gaming/computing units in future. I think the issue that needs to be addressed now is battery life.
Perhaps combining those technologies that provide power from body movement (eg, rapidly moving thumbs) with these handhelds is the answer...
As if you can really get into a good game of Quake on a small device like that.
/. article says so.
Actually you can, this
Anyway a portable GameCube would be sweet.
you can get Doom for the Psions and, as the Psions come with a Keyboard, you can get a dam good game out of it.
Mlk
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
I dont see how well this could really work. Outside of using it for the once a year trips to somewhere, little jimmy would have no use for this. I doubt that it would even work that well on a road trip, how do you balance a cube that has a 5.3 inch screen sitting on top of it? It might work fine on a desk, but i dont see how you could play it in a car where there would be no sturdy surface to rest it on.
This sounds like a fun device for those plane rides. I would think that the GameCube and the LCD screen don't put out enough RF to really interfere with the plane. I could get three hours of Rogue Squadron or Super Smash Brothers lovin'! That would make the ride THAT much more bearable. Of course, you'd also have about a dozen little kids clamoring all over your seat trying to play. You could then charge admission or something and make back your plane fare. :)
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
In a couple of years, when the components have shrunk, become cheaper and less power hungry, we have the instant Gameboy Advance successor selling for $100 a pop, with a nice library of games on small, portable media.
Nintendo is the king of portables, and I think they intend to stay that way.
I agree with you. I have a feeling Nintendo designed not just a powerful home system, but their next portable system in the next 5 years.
Think about that... by the time it launches you have a library of 500 or so games. Heck, by then they might even have an 802.11 adapter for it. Imagine the LAN Party you could have then? Everybody brings their GBA sized GCN and their Network cards, somebody sets up a cheap $100 wireless hub, and everybody sits around an apartment playing a cool game.
Heck.. have the party at StarBuck's or something. Heh.
"Derp de derp."
An LCD that size must use a fair amount of batteries and be reasonably large.
If you really want to make you're GameCube or PS2 portable ( Xbox's themselves aren't portable so I'll skip them ) you can get a pair of Sony Glasstrons. These are glasses that do TV resolution. Unfortunately they have been discontinued.
You can pick them up on Ebay for ~$350. I've used these things once or twice and I was quite impressed. Has anyone else used them for any length of time ?
You can get an old Mattel Football game on Ebay for around $20. That's about $400 less than the (NCube + Madden 2002 + PortaScreen).
I also think the screen is slightly bigger, although I haven't actually measured.
That'll free up more than enough cash to buy yourself a GeForce3, processor, and giant bag of Doritos. Morpheus will happily meet your software needs.
About 2 years ago in my last semester of college I got pretty deep into a few RPGs for the PSX. Since this was back in the let's-recruit-every-college-grad-that-knows-Java days, I had to fly out to job interviews every other weekend, which seriously hampered my game playing progress.
(hey, it was senior year...time to goof off a bit)
I had this great idea of taking my PS along and playing during the evenings in those nice hotel rooms they put me up at (now of course they fly you out 5 minutes after the last interview). I mean the alternative would be...what, going out and drinking? So I embarassingly packed my PS along in my carry-on bag, which I'm sure the x-ray peeps would love today -- "can you turn that on please?" -- and tried to hook it up to the TVs in hotel rooms. So apparently a large number of hotels really do not like their guests bringing their own electronics. It was a repeated nightmare trying to get physical access to the back of a TV, and in some cases they did a great job making sure the original cables could not be easily unplugged (plastic boxes screwed in around the plugs, etc) for the use of other devices. There were a few times when I had to dig out the swiss army knife i never otherwise use to really go to work, sometimes wreaking havoc on the cable TV setup -- all for my gaming habit/addiction. And I never stayed at a hotel with TVs with convenient RCA plugs in the front.
But I guess the point of my lame story is that it's sometimes a pain in the ass to assume that just because there's a TV, you can play your XBox/PS1/PS2/N64. It's more worth it to just get a Game Boy with Harvest Moon, or maybe even go out at night in a new city (imagine that).
Are you the guy that made the Xbox controller? I'm asking because you apparently can fit both a flatpanel and a PS2 in your hands...
I can't wait for the Xbox version, complete with diesel generator and trailer.
This is a neat toy, but I'd say save your money.
Most people get a gameboy to hush up their kids, to play on car trips/plane trips, or to play at a boring desk job. Where gameboy is well suited for this because of its high portablity and battery life, gamecube is not.
This thing is a $400 investment which can be easily damaged if dropped. It only lasts for 3 hours and it has many cords that could easily get tangled. The controller aspect alone is enough to not warrent the trouble. The only use I see for this is if you want to bring it to work to play during your lunch break (Hey smash brothers is really cool, might be a good way to make friends). That makes it only worth buying more as a small TV than as a portable toy.
If you're board during work and can get away with a small display, go for this. Otherwise, get a gameboy.
Rob
Wow, now that I think about it that really does make sense. I mean why else would they have gone with such small sized media (those mini dvd-rom things).
Doesn't really make since to cut the size of your game discs down so much, especially when your last gaming system was flamed so much for having cartridges that were lacking in space. They must be doing it so when they come out with the portable game cube all the games will still work fine.
Interesting.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
I want a battery I can carry on my back.
A battery whose half-life is guaranteed for over 3000 years.
A battery that is not environmentally safe or even a good idea to carry around.
A battery that doubles as a flamethrower and ghost-catching device.
I WANT A PROTON PACK!
Seriously...I don't mind toting a batterey that weighs 20 pounds and is approximately half the size of my laptop/portable device. Then maybe I'd get a good 10 hours of use out of it. Am I alone? I think that would solve a lot of the battery problems.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I know the GameCube is small, but it's not nearly small enough for this purpose, IMO. Plus, it's a cube--not flat like the PSOne...
Call me a pessimist, but I just don't see this as being all that worthwhile...
What's a sig?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I'd just like to say I'm shocked and appalled that not one single /.er has said anything about using one in conjuction with (insert whatever game machine is currently booting Linux) and using it to hack on the kernel source in the back of the car. Oh, yeah, and usb wireless nics will allow them to surf the net through the chain of all the wireless nics in all the cars. Hey! A beowolf cluster! rotflmoa, I slay me...
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
I fear purchasing one so my girlfriend doesn't think I'm gay.
Well, I don't have an exact number on the amount of data that can be stored on the little dvds, but it is still quite substantial for a game. Somewhere around 1.5 Gigs should be plenty for a majority of games out there for the near future. The only thing that takes up tons of space is FMV, and if you want a game with tons of that, put it on a couple little dvds. They can't cost that much.
Besides, by doing this, Nintendo is essentially free from piracy.
Here's a link to the 1.5 GB estimate.
Why does it have to be used in a car? That would the most annoying place to use it. Why not on a pinick with your girlfriend? Come on you can't wait til Mario Karts comes out for this system..
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
There is a reason XBox and PS/2 sell at a loss for $300. Anything more and they are too expensive for most consumers, or so Microsoft and Sony believe.
... why not just buy an even better laptop?
The issue is not about buying a used $400 laptop for retro games. It is about people having enough money for a computer that they can use for school/work and some games OR a game machine.
And of course, if you can afford both
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Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
First off... I believe that all the consoles out now are being sold at a very small profit. Perhaps a dollar or so. I've heard that only the Dreamcast was sold at a loss and even then it wasn't a very big loss.
A game console is not a computer. A computer is not a game console. Although one can serve as the other, it cannot do the same things as well. And, of course, if you want to play Pikmin, Halo, or Metal Gear Solid on your PC... uh... well, you can't.
The GC, PS2, and XBox can all pump out better graphics than my $1200 laptop, not neccesarily because the hardware is better, but because the hardware is specialized. The games are written specifically for it and it is designed to do ONE thing (I leave it to your imagination to figure out what that is)
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I don't think people know what flamebait means.
I assume someone looked at it, and didn't like it for a reason like:
1. He was trying to be funny, but I didn't laugh
2. XBox isn't portable. Gamecube rules!
3. GROUTY!
4. He was making a point via sarcasm and humor, which is no longer allowed on here.
Don't think this is the place for meta-moderation? Just write some replies!
Let's not stir that bag of worms...