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MP3 for Gameboy
sluggo140 writes: "Cnet has an article regarding a new startup called SongPro that is devloping an add-on for Gameboy and Gameboy Advance. The add-on will play various music formats including MP3."
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To play this MP3, you must complete Bonza Land level 3 or get 350 gold coins.
I see two and a half proprietary file formats in there and zero non-proprietary (read: Ogg Vorbis) formats there. Not to carp on xiph.org or any other developers or marketers for Ogg Vorbis, but this is the kind of platform and opportunity that could help to make a free-as-in-beer, open source audio codec like Ogg Vorbis a player in the portable audio world.
Hey, it's not like it isn't possible. This thing can do multiple file formats. Why not another with Ogg Vorbis?
... such announces are made. I remember such an product being announced for the Neogeo Pocket Color. Does anybody know if the maker of this one has a significant financial backing? Do they have a chance of making a well-distributed product, or will this just be offered on some catalogs and bought by geeks?
It's going to do the same thing as MP3 players for Palm units I'd imagine. All the processing and hardware will be offboard and the only thing the gameboy will provide is the interface.
I can't see that it's any great advantage over a standalone MP3 player - the majority of the price point of portable players seems to be the amount of memory included which is hard to work around, no matter which platform you're on.
Small standalone players like the Samsung YEPP are tiny, can run for hours on one AAA battery, and are slowly decreasing in price.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
As long as it doesn't display ads on my own music I rip, I think this is a very good idea. A way to get free music to listen to while "paying" for it at the same time. Just hope that format is of decent quality.
------
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Has anyone seen any of these reputed SongPro stations?
:wq
Hmm...
:)
Run this under GameBoy Advance - then run the Gameboy Advance Emulator under Windows - then run Windows under VMWare - hmmm......
It's a hall of mirrors!!
-Rick
First you convert music to digital information that is an approximation of the original sound and you say "No, it's still good!" Then compress and stream the music and it's like "No, it's still good!" Now you are playing Digital Compressed Music through Gameboy speakers? What's the point? This is like taking a painting and then running a guassian blur filter on it.
Whoopdie dooo.
Here's a better option:
Amazon has the SP90 player at $85 - $5 coupon CHNKBKAMZNLT - $20 rebate = $60 shipped. There's a simple way to hack it and upgrade the firmware.
As it has its own output jack, it would appear the sound hardware is in the SongPro itself.
It even claims that you might want to connect it to your "home entertainment system."
Bold.
:wq
I was in Fry's Electronics and I saw that they have a radio addon for the GBA. It plugs into the device and lets you play the radio while the game is playing and uses the battery of the GBA. Neat, but not that amazing. But unlike this, you can pick it up at Fry's tonight!
This seems to me to have the potential to be HUGE in Japan. From what they're saying it'll allow the ability to display lyrics on screen, presumably in synch with the music. From what I've read, the Japanese are nuts about Karaoke, and also about Gameboys. There could be a huge market for this thing over there, probably less so in the US.
That said, how does one go about loading the songs on the unit, and what will it's capacity be? Those are the key things I consider in a portable MP3 player. So far, I've found nothing rivaling the iPod (pause for Nomad and Rio users to chime in). At the $99 price point I'm guessing there's not much storage there.
Uhmm... Yeah. The Gamebody has a Z80 clone processor, IIRC. Here are some specs I dug up:
CPU: 8-bit (Similar to the Z80 processor.)
Main RAM: 8K Byte
Video RAM: 8K Byte
Screen Size 2.6"
Resolution: 160x144 (20x18 tiles)
Max # of sprites: 40
Max # sprites/line: 10
Max sprite size: 8x16
Min sprite size: 8x8
Clock Speed: 4.194304 MHz (4.295454 MHz for Super GB)
Horiz Sync: 9198 KHz (9420 KHz for Super GB)
Vert Sync: 59.73 Hz (61.17 Hz for Super GB)
Sound: 4 channels with stereo sound
Power: DC6V 0.7W (DC3V 0.7W for GB Pocket)
So, basically, any mp3 player for gameboy will be doing all the processing, storage, and DSP *in the cartridge* while using the Gameboy's integrated controls and speakers for playback.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Am I missing the point? They want 99 bucks for the device, on top of the 99 (or whatever the current price is) for the Game Boy Advance, plus the cost of a memory card. Hmmmm, or I can just spend 99 bucks a get a Rio or other MP3 player that gets better battery mileage then my GBA.
I'm all for geeking out my GBA (I have it painted black and dark red, with the internal light from Tritonlabs.com, and have a 256 MBit cart filled with NES games to play... but I don't need yet another device to play MP3s. My watch (Casio Wrist Audio Player), my Rio 300, portable MP3-CD player, and MP3 CD car stereo do that just fine. This device has very little use to me.
The most expensive part of it's manufacture will be the memory cards that it uses, and the batteries it will chug through. It has a headphone jack, and I *assume* that it will be where the best music quality will be piped through, with it also downgraded out to the system speaker, if you really want to listen to it that way. But if you're going to use headphones anyways, get something that was MADE for playing MP3s, and don't waste the resources of the GBA like that...
Now what might be cooler is if you could plug a regular game boy cart into the Song Pro, and listen to your favorite music while playing Tactics Ogre or something....
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Better yet, buy a used Rio-PMP300. It uses the same flash memory cards, runs for days on one AA and is even smaller than the iPod.
There was this product awhile back that was kind of an integrated low-level sound synth and sequencer/drum machine for the normal, 4-color gameboy. It was only available in europe, and you could make these REALLY funky tiny little techno tunes on it. Very aphexy. Does anyone remember the name of this, or have a link?
:) I still have no idea if that's POSSIBLE, but by all accounts the iPod has an ARM chip, a 4-color lcd screen and some buttons. I'm not certain that reverse-engineering the iPod's firmware would be more difficult than designing a system that stores 512 MB of mp3s in the backslot of a Game Boy :) Is this relevant? Is this? Anyway, if you could get it to work, that would be way more expensive than gameboy+songpro, but a MUCH nicer form factor than this lumpy songpro thing :)
I would probably have more fun with a sequel to that, than this... but that's just me. That being said, this soundpro thing is an absolutely amazing work of engineering. I mean, LOOK at that thing.. it's tiny, it has a 512 MB upper ceiling, it's mac-compatible, and it's CHEAP. And this part really impresses me:
Besides playing songs in the standard MP3 and Windows Media Audio formats, the SongPro device will also play a proprietary SongPro Audio, or SPA, format that will use the Game Boy's screen to display lyrics and pictures.
That makes me happy.. it's always cool when people try to push a device like the Game Boy to the limit of its abilities, rather than just saying "well, we have an mp3 player in it, that's impressive enough on its own, lets stop here". -_-
I wonder how hard it would be to create a gameboy version of Vib Ribbon and then stuff it inside the SongPro II along with the mp3 player? ^_^ Eh, that's probably pushing it.
That being said, I dunno. If you just want a handheld thingy that plays mp3s and games, i still say-- i've said this on slashdot before-- it might be worth a shot to try to hack the iPod to have a first-gen gameboy emulator on it
Busterman will rise again
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Richmond said the screen will also be used for advertising, meaning that some content could actually be offered with a free, ad-supported model.
Of course, we'll need a metal retainer to keep the screen situated eight inches away from your eyes while the advertisement is playing, but that's being worked on, and as soon as it's finished, the record companies are ready to sign on!
Remember, you're not just bound by a contract to watch all advertising... now you'll also be bound by a handy metal strap!
My flat mate Matt has allready got the game boy to play Amiga MOD files using only 3% CPU time in this demo.
He is now working on a MP3 player along with other demos.
When he makes it ill slap him about and release te code.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
And we all know how well the "free, ad supported" model worked for the internet, right?
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
dont forget to take your viagra and prozac!
I understand the Prozac since he's a nut case. But the Viagra has me puzzled. Are you trying to make him into a fucking nut case?
I did have an idea once of getting eBooks on gameboys. That would be neat for people who can't afford PDA's and convinent - cartridge based.
Been done.
--
"Sounds kinda neat. But the "screen for advertising" angle makes me wonder about exploitation. The latest Korn and Doritos Munching Game anyone?"
Yeah, but you got the game name wrong. It will be called Korn-nuts.
Nintendo is the only portable system around because they have a monopoly on it. Period. They have crushed every other attempt at creating a portable gaming platform. ... dead. ... dead. ... oh yeah, like Atari had a chance.
Neo Geo Pocket
Sega Game gear
Tiger Game.com?... what?
Lynx?
Nintendo has ruthlessly demolished every other portable gaming platform. Not that this is a bad thing, the system is great and the games are fun. The reason that they have had such a monopoly is the backwards compatability.
Did you know that the last Zelda game(s) (Oracle and Seasons) had special features that you could only unlock if you play them on GBA? They are both GBColor games, but have special shops that you can only get to on GBA. They are all about encouraging you to upgrade.
The SongPro for GameBoy has been around since late 2000. It was originally called the SongBoy, but Nintendo sued for trademark infringement and they changed the name.
This is the same company, and pretty much the same product, only in a version for the GameBoy Advance. I would expect to see similiar market penetration for the GBA model as there was for the original. Which was negligible, in case everyone's lack of knowledge of the earlier product hasn't made that point.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
then run the Gameboy Advance Emulator under Windows [and run that under several extra layers of emulation]
A video game emulator has to emulate cartridge hardware such as mappers on NES, superfx/sa1/dsp on Super NES, etc. The SongPro cartridge contains an MP3 decoder. If a GBA emulator were to emulate SongPro, it would probably just embed Windows Media Player or something.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, it uses SmartMedia, MMC, or Secure Digital cards. Not CompactFlash.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I guess that I should fill in my theroy of why the GB is so damn popular.
The main reason I think is that it has had the best games, year in and year out. Since the original GB, it has always had good games.
But the second reason that it's so popular is that it doesn't require any batteries compared to any other portable. The new GBA only needs 2 AA. The original GB needed 4 AA. With the newer models of GB only neededing 2 AAA.
Third reason is that they have kept the price of the platform down, the price of the GB is much lower then many other systems. This help because if you break it (dropping it , spilling something on it,etc...), it's cheap to get another. Which is a big thing, all the other platforms were much more expensive then the GB ever was.
Lastly, the backwards compatability helps people upgrade. If it weren't for that, I think that the adoption rate for the GBA (and GBC) would be much lower since many people still have an old copy of tetris or mario for the GB they want to play. And don't forget the MASSIVE popularity of the Pokemon games. They still haven't ported over all the Pokemon stuff yet to the GBA. (gotta catch them all, right?)
The cart must have its own MP3 decoder chip in it. Not everything need be done by software, you know...
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
uh, that is why this is HARDWARE UPGRADE and not just a ROM cartridge with mp3s.
RTFA, and moderators, *5*!, mod parent down.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
This product was first announced at least two years ago. It was to be called Song-Boy or MP3-Boy or something-Boy and Nintendo smacked it down. It never recovered. It's vapour.
console giant Nintendo takes on the RIAA in a multi-million dollar lawsuite claiming that the Nintendo Gameboy and Gameboy Advance is in violation of muisc copy rights...
As a GBA developer I can tell you that the GBA can at best do 8bit 16khz music, perhaps slightly more with a custom hardware assist, far from the 16/44.1khz cd standard. If you regularly listen to music through a fuzzy telephone, you may like the GBA's sound. And don't even think about the original GB. The GP32 is the only handheld game platform at the moment that comes close to cd quality.
They made an MP3 Player like any Rio or what-have-you except it fits in the back of the gameboy, takes up the gameboy's battery, and listens to the gameboy telling it what buttons were pressed.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Everyone is trying to target the youth demographic with pagers, cell phones and what not. I think this demographic is best served by using the gameboy as a staring platform