Slashdot Mirror
SNES Portable
Tha_Zanthrax writes "This guy is really good: the same dude that built a portable PSX a while ago and has also made some really old Atari 2600 portable has did it again. This time he 'compressed' a Super Nintendo System. The comicbook-like intro is nice to."
Last word of the article should be "...nice too."
I'm not as impressed this time. A PSX was a major achievement, but a SNES? Nah. And anyway, his portable PSX made a nice weapon with that CD spinning in the open on the back ;-)
What is impressive, however, is the way he's made it look like a comic strip this time around. That's nice stuff.
As an aside.. 'has did it again'? Nice to see literary standards are on the up with Slashdot contributors.
mogorific carpentry experiments
..gameboy.
Has DONE it.. This should be intuitive!
One of the good things about the dot come failures is that there are now many more geeks out there with enough spare time to come up with these cool ideas. One of the downsides is it also gives them the time to come up with odd presentations of their cool ideas.
An ability that would be really nice is being able to store ROMS on a memory stick or something. That way you could download obscure games and play them on this thing. It works great for computers with SNES9X and ZSNES; why can't it work for this?
I just thought of what he could make next..
A portable 286.
Think about it.. you could run all the old favourites. Windows 286. GEM. DOS 2!
mogorific carpentry experiments
Really, isn't the Gameboy Advance as powerful as a Super Nintendo? I'm happy to see some great SNES games coming to Gameboy Advance, like Breath of Fire and Mario Cart.
But the continued akwardness between Nintendo and Square will probably keep classics like Final Fantasy II & III and Secret of Mana from the Gameboy Advance. What a pitty!
Maybe this project is just the thing to take these great games on the road.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
Good for you and your father!
We can play games on our cell phones now.. and have been able to for some time. With games on our PDA's, GameBoy Color... Why would someone want this? I guess if SNES is more addictive for you than heroin, maybe this'd be up your alley.
Now, PS2, XBox, those are at least current. I wouldn't mind seeing one of THEM in a portable model.
-- Hi! I'm a
After reading this article there is no way in hell I will ever move to Wisconsin. Clearly, there is nothing to do there.
"Smokey, this isn't Nam, there are rules." -Walter
Not only is he a sick designer/engineer, but a funny bastard as well.
My favorite line:
Like Timmy T, I had to give it one more try
What an amazing obscure reference. Anyone remeber that old joint from about 10 years ago?
One more try,
Let me show how much
I love you.
One more try,
Let me put my arms
Around you.
Livin all these lonely nights
Without you.
Oh baby, can we give it
One more try?
In my experience, portable gaming machines wouldn't be very helpful. Especially having to build one. I'm not so much of a gamer that I'd have to sneak game-time between hours at work, or during lunch, but I have a laptop just in case. It works fine for my portable gaming machine. Even does SNES, Neo Geo, NES, Genesis, and various arcade games!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The comic styling of this guy is quite hilarious, but the lighting on that isnt done very well. Is there anywhere with a parts listing and instructions on how to do this. I wouldnt mind doing something like this. It would free up room for newer consoles on my wishlist ;D and im sure more than just I wishes to attempt this obviously dangerous feat of heroism. Now im off to find a somewhat dusty Atari to prevent any further alarming !
every dark cloud has a silver lining, but lightning kills hundreds of people every year trying to find it.
check out his posting history first.
you mean: fatherS. Thanks for that.
I'd gone for about 8 years without hearing or thinking of that highschool-mixer, slow-dance ass-grab song. That and anything by C&C Music Factory, or Another Bad Creation, or Martika.
Blasts from the past they ain't.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
um...didn't Nintendo already do this? I think it's called Gameboy Advance
Ya, right... sure... Unlike the Gameboy advance, this unit has a display that is actually visible in a room without a 3000 watt light, and your hands don't cramp up trying to play it for more than 5 minutes. Oh, and a good software library to boot.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Now that there is the Snap-n-type keyboard and snap on game controller are out, the HHLinux iPAQ really starts to shine as a gaming device.
xmame, snes9x, 2600, C64, etc. games all run, from pretty good to damn slick. The snes9x port was running over a year ago.
You can get a *TON* of ROMs on a 1GB udrive, too.
The new Sharp Linux handheld should rock too, once somebody gets an X server running on it.
Cpt_Kirks
If he's going to have all of these systems, he needs some kind of a belt that he can use to carry all of his portable systems on. That, and portable controllers, batarangs, and webshooters.
I think we should call him "PVGSman" (portable video game systems).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Jesus... Grow up.. Obviously the SNESp isn't as powerfull/pretty as the GBA but I doubt that it was posted on slashdot for that fact. It was posted because it's cool that this guy did the hardware hack in the first place. Why do people build arcade cabinets when they could just run mame on a standard windows or linux box? BECAUSE IT'S FUN TO HAVE A PROJECT LIKE THAT. God.. I'm glad people like you aren't in charge of choosing what stories make it to slashdot or not.
How many times are we as a community going to /. this guys site. I bet he dreads putting up new articles, because within a week of him doing so /. finds out and sends a million hits his way making his bandwidth bills go through the roof.
...a commercially produced portable PlayStation. In fact, a buddy of mine bought one. So what's special about this?
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
The fact of the matter is that many gamers love playing older games. New games can be fun, but I often find myself longing for the days of 2D, side-scrollers.
Not that I want to revive the old games vs new games rant...but I can't help it...I TOTALLY agree with this, most older games were a truckload more fun than most new games (with few exceptions).
Space Taxi,Archon or Zaxxon anyone?
Or even Ghost n' Goblins or Moon Patrol :)
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
um...didn't Nintendo already do this? I think it's called Gameboy Advance
GBA isn't binary compatible with Super NES. Thus, even though you have ports of many Super NES games, you don't have ports of anything by Square (FF, Mana, Chrono) because Square and nintendo no longer talk to each other after SMRPG and FF7.
However, this curse becomes a blessing once you get GCC for ARM and a $50 "MBV2" PC link cable: you can easily write your own code for GBA.
Will I retire or break 10K?
These devices are awesome. Some games are novels to me like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger. So having these portable units around would be cool for those 15 min breaks and lunch periods.
this portable PSX2
Stupid Cheap Guitars
The whole metal-gear getting into the shop thing was by far the most amusing read I've come across all week.
It's been a slow week.
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?
If only Sega would make a portable genesis.
I know, they could call it a nomad or something...
oh wait, never mind!
It's not polite to bitch about the individual's presentation choices.
In addition, what makes you think this guy ever worked for a dotcom? He appears to have actual electronics and design skills, unlike the geniuses who worked for dotcoms. I assume he has a real job, which pays him well enough and gives him enough time to pursue his hobby. That has nothing to do with the late mass hysteria which resulted in thousands of clueless, unskilled individuals getting paper-rich off the ignorance and greed of even more clueless investors. HTH.
VisualBoy Advance or Boycott Advance
I recommend VisualBoy Advance, as it focuses on compatibility über alles.
a PSX to USB controller adapter (or any USB gamepad)
The official GBA development system uses a Super NES controller. Play the exact game the developers made with an easily-soldered parallel port adapter. Read More in this journal entry.
Morpheus to download ROMS
Why? With Morpheus or WinMX, 1. it's illegal, and 2. you can never be sure you have a good dump. Better to buy the cartridge and use a Flash Advance linker to dump it. Follow the links at gbadev.org (I don't work for gbadev.org) to see where to buy a linker. Plus, with a linker and a flash cartridge, you too can make GBA games.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Arrrgh! My eyes! You bastard!
Let the rhythm take control...
Let the rhythm move you...
*bump* *bump* *bumpbumpbump*
Hi-Technical Excellent Taste and Flavor!
It depends on what you mean by portable. If a laptop is "portable", then you can run SNES, old dos games, NES, gameboy, SEGA, PS2, etc. emulators on your laptop.
If you mean a gameboy is portable, it's only a few more iterations until we get there. Right now, I run PocketNes and it works great! Genesis and Lynx emulators also exist. I haven't tried Lynx but the Genesis one is still too slow. If you are willing to run Linux on your iPaq, you can run SNES. As for people who want XT, there is even an 80186 emulator! That means you can run DOS on top of WinCE! They even have screenshots of Windows 3.0 running on a PocketPC.
In short, I am amazed at my iPaq. These things are actually powerful enough to be classified as PC's. These 200Mhz handhelds are what sat on desktops in 1997. Check out Gateway's homepage as of 1/1/1997, they are selling P166's.
Why aren't we told when editors moderate our posts?
How about a portable Amiga 500 or C64
also, while more powerful, the GBA decided to go with A and B buttons and Two Shoulder buttons, L and R. This does not compare to the extra X and Y buttons included on SNES. Sports gaming is annoying when you have to use shoulderbuttons to throw to recivers and such. I think you need 4 Regular buttons to make a solid gaming system, and thats why this project is a good idea.
Besides the 'geek factor', this guy has once again done somthing ingenious. He obviously knows what he's doing, and even routes out his own cases, and they look professional, i think the latest SNESp (his word) is very well done.. I think a console company should hire this guy to help design the next portable..
he didn't even show any action photos of what the games actually look like on that tiny screen
I guess you didn't see the video of him playing it.
For great justice
An emulator on a laptop, I swear that will be the top reason for eventually buying a laptop.
Is it just me, or did anyone else think this guy is a spitting image of Conan O'Brien?
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
what you say ?
Okay, the comic book intro and story was worth a laugh, but jesus christ, can't he actually show us what the damn final product looks like? I was anticipating at least one high res frontal non clipped shot of what he actually built. Now I read through the article to know what the back of it looks like, what the battery looks like, and what the internals looks like, but I still haven't seen the actual finished product.
How about clicking on the "Home" button at the end of the article? It shows a nice shot of the damn final product.
...alt tags.
I swear the comic is funny enough, but get read the alt tags for a bigger laugh... Montezuma's Revenge... Hehe
Hmmm...
If any of you here are British, (or just inordinately fond of the ZX-Spectrum, or Timex-Sinclair whatever-it-was-released-as-in-the-USA), you may be interested in looking at http://foon.pocketheaven.com.
You need a GBA flash cart (available from a number of vendors), and a GameBoy advance. Hey presto - portable Speccy!
How are you enjoying playing Star Fox on it?
Oh wait, you can't play Star Fox on the Game Boy Advance. I guess it's not the same machine.
"Derp de derp."
http://dl.fileplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?classicgaming/v csp/SNESpRunning.mov
is suffering from TMTOHH syndrome (Too Much Time On His Hands).
Seriously though, it makes me eye my old portable TV with an evil grin... makes my wife worry.
-jhon
I have one of these for my SNES. It is awesome, i have probably about 200 games for it. you just dump the cartridge onto 1 or 2 floppy disks and thats it! Im currently mucking around trying to get rid of the floppy and instead use a HDD but that project died in the arse when I saw the Doctor V64. Hmmmm... N64 cartridge backups? tasty!!
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
Well, you could actually follow the links until you come till the end where it leads to home. Right there on the front page is a high res image of the front of the system with a link to an even HIGHER res image... but I guess that's too much effort for you so just click here.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Here is a picture of the SNESp since you seem to have such a hard time finding it.
--
?
I looked in the artical but I couldn't seem to find out where he got his mini monitors from??(besides the fact that he always seems to have one lying around incase he gets inspired) But really though did he get them from radio shack just like the tube things.
For what it's worth, there have been a few original nintendo (8 bit) handheld systems, here's one example of a famicom version http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/pirate/topguy.html :)
I think these are even cooler than the snes version...Zelda anyone?
- wha-choo talkin' 'bout willis?
Sports games? How about FIGHTING games? In the first Street Fighter II game for the GBA, you have to change the button arrangement in the options when you switch between characters to get the most special moves out of each character, and in the second one, they just plain cut out two of the buttons. :(
A controller with four main buttons and two or more secondary buttons isn't absolutely necessary for a solid gaming system, but it's certainly necessary for ports from a system that had six main buttons.
For europeans, "cold-cathode" simply means "neon".
It got rejected.
Why is it accepted now? Hmm?
Also, I don't know if this guy added a 2nd player port, but if he did, you could just plug in a 2nd controller, no need for a link cable, a second GBA or a second cart. You could even play 5-player Bomberman on it.
...or whatever Spacewar originally ran on.
I was going to post a story on Ben Heckendorn's SNES portable, but I decided to wait until he is finished with something far more interesting.
The Gamecube is already a very much portable unit, considering it's external and internal size, carrying handle, and detachable screen. This is Ben's next un/confirmed project over at his site. I found his comment on this in the forums. While the portable aspect of the Gamecube is nifty, Ben focuses on making consoles into handheld units (so yes it is portable already, but not handheld). The SNES is interesting, but I'm waiting to see how this turns out.
I think it would be easier to get an snes emulator for your CE machine.
Actually he did alter the boards to save energy consumption.. if you read the article you would of seen that.
"Why not just buy a GBA if you want portable games of similar quality"
He did it to prove it could be done, as with all of his other projects.
It was a good job done and I'm interested in what he will make next... perhaps a portable Dreamcast?
Conan O'Brien sure must have a lot of free time on his hands.
The Genesis original [of Toaplan's Zero Wing] is already portable, with the [handheld Genesis-compatible] Nomad.
When Toaplan died, who bought Toaplan's IP? Perhaps they would be willing to license the Zero Wing franchise for a GBA homebrew Special Edition of the game; I'd be more than willing to write much of the code.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The SPC700 was only an 8-bit stereo audio processor. Much like a Soundblaster Pro.
I seem to remember that the SPC700 was a 6502 knockoff with the instruction set rearranged a bit and a few new 16-bit instructions that combined the X and Y registers (as in Z80). However, it connected to a DSP that did support 16-bit stereo output.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I don't understand why this guy had to pick the Super Nintendo to miniaturize. The games for that platform weren't even that engaging. How about creating something truly entertaining and beneficial, like miniaturizing an Apple II GS. Now a portable Bard's Tale would be a thing to have.
Im sure Atari made a tiny portable pc clone (dunno if it was 8088 or 286) called the 'Portfolio' - go watch Terminator 2, they use one early on to hack an ATM machine! of course such a thing is probably considered collectable now so it might take more moola than you had hoped
PICTURES
Some of us don't have a media player at work...
~ now you know
So long as it still had the badly translated introduction, right?
Not only the badly translated introduction, but the entire Flash movie along with it. That would be very doable on GBA; heck, I've done it on an NES cartridge (but couldn't fit anything else on the cartridge).
Will I retire or break 10K?
This guy deserves some sort of award for entertaining us!
/. Awards! Categories will be obvious - I nominate this guy for
'cool but wierd' 2001
Who agrees that Super Mario RPG is the best game for SNES?