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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."
"to" wasn't the last word of the article, the real last word was filtered by the Slashcode obscenity filter. You'll have to use your imagination to figure out what it's nice to do to the intro.
Orginally the devices that were used for copying games were also used to play the copied images on the system.
One of the most popular of these devices for the SNES was the Mutli Game Doctor. Try a search for it.
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
Actually the GBA is more powerful than the SNES. And it seems that most of the worth while (and some of the less than worth while) games are being re-released for it.
Of course hacks for hacks sake are just cool.
(Now if the GBA could just be hooked up to a TV, stereo and had a better controller.)
The GBA is actually more powerful than a SNES
Twice the CPU, twice the RAM, twice the graphics, and no more sound I/O lag.
it has pretty much the same gfx capability
Exactly twice as powerful. On Super NES, you could get three layers of 16 colors per tile or one Mode 7 layer of 256 colors per tile, and each line could hold only 256 pixels of sprites. On GBA, you can get four layers of tiles, two layers of tiles + one layer of Mode 7, or two layers of Mode 7. Each GBA scanline can hold more sprite pixels, allowing developers to fake more background layers. GBA sprites can also be 256-color and/or scaled.
worse sound
True, in a way. Super NES sound was 16-bit, with instruments compressed 4 to 1. GBA sound is 8-bit with uncompressed instruments. However, how many times will you be connecting the GBA to a rack system as opposed to a pair of simple headphones? Also, the GBA's ARM7TDMI CPU can see all the sound registers; the "loading" you saw on most Super NES games wasn't a problem with cartridge media but rather with the brain-damaged bus between the main CPU and the sound CPU. This was especially evident on Lord of the Rings, where turning off background music made map changes twice as fast.
it's not just a SNES in a tiny form factor, one has to recode
The Super NES was an enhanced NES, which used a single memory-mapped port for data writes to video RAM. The GBA is a new architecture based on memory-mapped everything, somewhat similar to the old Game Boy.
Recoding shouldn't be a problem; the GBA's ARM7TDMI processor has a decent GCC build available, and this makes coding much easier than it was for the 65c816 and SPC700 processors inside the Super NES, which could only use assembly language because they each had only three semi-general-purpose registers.
However, you'll never see Square games on GBA. Nintendo hates Square and Square hates Nintendo after how each treated the other in the Super Mario RPG project and the early days of the Final Fantasy VII project. On the other hand, what I've played of Golden Sun doesn't suck at all, and you already have the old Dragon Warrior games on GBC.
I would pay big bucks for a port of Zero Wing to GBA.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.