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Microsoft to Introduce GBA-competitor?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the xbox-in-the-palm-of-your-hand dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Nintendo will have a competition in the handheld market soon. ZDnet has an article that says Microsoft's plan to introduce a 'Media Pad' which includes among other things 'serve as a portable game player in conjunction with Microsoft's Xbox video game console.' So I guess the news I heard regarding their interest in the portable industry will soon come true, the question is, can they take the crown from Nintendo?"

2 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. StrongARM is Intel by johnjones · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Intel got exclusive rights to StrongARM

    since GBA is just a ARM7 + custom sound off the APB then it would not be hard to do the same sort of thing

    differant enough that nitendo cant sue and developers have to recompile

    but easy enought that you could have a compiler switch do all the work (except the sound and that could be redone easy enough)

    really its just a way for intel to push StrongARM and StronARM2 aka Xscale

    regards

    john jones

  2. Unhappy developers by damieng · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While Nintendo currently have the hand-held crown it stopped accepting developers for the GBA a long time ago claiming that 400 was enough. From the handful of decent titles I'd guess it isn't.

    Microsoft will at least get those developers wanting to do handheld games but blocked-out by Nintendo.

    Like the GBA it would almost certainly use an ARM chip as that's the only supported processor for Windows 'CE' 2002.

    --
    [)amien