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GameBoy Web Server
Huma79 writes "Adrian O'Grady has successfully gotten TCP/IP and PPP working on his handheld Gameboy Advance for a web server. Pictures of the server running and a telnet session to it can be found at fivemouse.com."
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Because you can.
The motto of all true engineers.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
If all you can see is he learned about writing web servers for GBA, and you think this is not a very marketable skill, then you are very myopic.
I prefer to look at it this way: the guy probably learned a fair bit about embedded programming (on a very constrained system no less), along with networking.
The Next Big Thing for console games (disclaimer: I work for EA) is going to be to get them online and networked.
Hmmm.... put those two together, and I'll bet even you can figure out where I'm going with this....
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Ok we can explain this easily...
If you wanted to write a comms protocol for the GBA that was a standard (TCP/IP over ppp) to write a game that can play against multiple players you (if you have a brain) use an established and open protocol. now you need to figure out how to write clients and servers... well the easiest thing to write is a http server.
this guy wrote it for learning.. he now has the tools to make something really cool for the GBA.
this is why.. edu-ma-cation and learning and research.
why did we go to the moon? we knew what was there. so why did we kill 3 astronauts, and waste gagillions to do it? we could have just bought a 30 billion dollar telescope to look at it.
understand now?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"If you have to ask why, you're not a member of the intended audience. Please go on about your business and accept my apologies for this distraction."
---Bob Zinbinski, author of TTYQuake
I skimmed some of the posts on this topic and was a little disheartened by some people's reactions to the usefulness of this hack. Let's put a couple of things into perspective:
1.) It's not a product
2.) It looks as though he just wanted to do it for shits and giggles, not seriously trying to solve any probelms other than 'it can be done.'
A lot of things we take for granted today were based on ideas that people questioned the usefulness of. Did anybody think Pong was useful? "Why would I pay $119 for a game that I could play on a pingpong table?"
Consider that usefulness depends on the individual too. You yourself may not care about running a websever on a GBA, but soembody might find an interesting use for it. If I were setting up a brand new network somewhere, I could see the potential of firing up a GBA, getting it on the network, and seeing if I could connect to it. It could be a troubleshooting device, maybe. (Although if it's connected to a Linux machine, that idea seems a little absurd. But if they made the GBA independent of it...)
What of somebody took the code from this project and made the GBA into a VNC client? I think there are sysadmins out there who would find that rather useful. Seeing as how GBA's are $70 nowadays, that could turn into an interesting product. There are some of us out there that would think it was totally cool that I could buy a GBA and get reimbursed from my company with it, heh.
Come to think of it... if the XBOX were a little more open, it could turn into one hell of a sysadmin tool....
"Derp de derp."