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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."
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?
Why would someone want this? I guess if SNES is more addictive for you than heroin, maybe this'd be up your alley.
I don't know about you, but even though I own some newer systems, the ones I play the most are NES, Atari, and SNES. Who cares if they aren't current, they are FUN.
Also, the games on SNES are a hell of a lot more entertaining than the games on Cellphones. If I wanted to play "Snake", I would load up QBasic on my 486.
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. Myself and those like me would love to have portable NES & SNES systems.
Besides, a system like this is GREAT for buying old games at Flea Markets, etc. You can test to make sure the games work right then & there! That's enough right there to justify having one of these.
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?
I know of a guy who built his own helicopter in his garage. Thing's got a VW engine and a big rubber belt to drive the tail rotor. He actually flies around in the thing.
Gotta tell you, when I heard about that, my first reaction was not "So what? You've been able to buy helicopters for decades now!"
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
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..