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Nintendo Embedding Classic Games on Trading Cards
bacontaco writes "Here's a quick article over at Adrenaline Vault about Nintendo's plan to put out old-school Nintendo games with the use of a e-Reader that plugs into the Game Boy Advance and trading cards that can be swiped with the device. The article flips back and forth on which console's games will be supported, saying either NES or SNES games will be used with the cards. It's kind of eye-opening when you think about how games that seemed so great so long ago can now be fit on something so small as a card."
its not that hard to imagine, because at the tail end of the nintendo legacy turbo graphix 16 had games that fit on cards
I love My GBA. One of the best investments I ever made.
"It's kind of eye-opening when you think about how games that seemed so great so long ago can now be fit on something so small as a card."
:)
Only if you don't remember cartridges!
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Badass, now I can turn into that little ball thingy and kick some ass without stealing the rom!
What is preventing someone from putting out a console capable of running games from all the classic system? Let's say I want to do NES, Sega, SNES, and maybe one or two of the 'lesser console'. Better yet, why not have a cdrom drive so you can fit a thousand of those old games onto a single media. What would be the issues holding this back?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I think so ! :)
fp
Sweet...now I can play Burger Time without having to search for a ROM that works!!!
I'd rather play Mario 1 than the new game personally! Those games are still great today, and this idea seems pretty cool!
One of the main reasons people use to justify trading game ROMs is that the original publisher has "abandoned" them and that they're no longer selling or making money on them. Natually, if a company has gone under and no longer exists, that's a pretty good argument. However, here, we see Nintendo showing just the opposite.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
But is gamecube powerful enough to play these classics? Doubt it :)
db
In other news, Nintendo is post-fixing an 'e' to each game's title in the hopes of jumping ahead of the next revolution in electronic naming.
"People are tired of e-this, and e-that, k-this, g-that. We're leading the next naming revolution with new-age names like Donkey Kong-e, and Mario Brothers-e."
-Adam
Yup you got the first post fool
By swiping a card, these games can't be that small, can they. Or is the real news that they invented same high density magnetic material? Anyway, great idea, combining trading cards with computer games.
There I was, trying to rescue the world, but did it show any gratitude?
Its not amazing that those games would fit on a card... remeber the turbographics 16 console system. those games were cards even back then.
Really makes me wonder how many games used only a fraction of the cartridges total space. On one hand you have a lot of really easy to beat, small games and then you have games like FF3 and ChronoTrigger, which takes a really long time to beat.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Look at how big a CD is, its not much bigger than a trading card. And how much fits on one of those, and they're optical too...
Being younger, I remember when the Snes came out. This is the first time I feel dated, now they fit those games on cards? Makes one wonder what the future holds for computers and consoles, you can only get so small and retain its usefulness.
This ia great, a perfect way to play Zelda in my car for only a few dollars, and I dont have to rig a laptop emu system.
On another note nintendos new game Animal Crossing for the gamecube lets you download NES games to your GBA and play em on the run. Kick ass
I've always thought nintendo should try and make some money off of the classic gaming market by using emulators or something along that line. Instead, they have been fighting the emulation scene tooth and nail.
DRINK DUFF (responsibly) DRINK DUFF (responsibly) DRINK DUFF
I would love to carry around Zelda in my wallet and pull it out whenever I want to play it... seems like a great idea to me... more companies should be doing stuff like this.
It says that the e-reader plugs in and reads an optical dot code on the trading card. I expect that means the actual game data for all the games is already in the e-reader, and the trading card just enables the right game titles. Its probably microprinting too, to defeat photocopies.
It is possible that the game data actually IS on the trading card. If that were true, I would say we have figuratively come full circle back to something very like punch cards.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Nintendo was originally a playing card maker.
(note for some reason the link generates a 404, but if you refresh, it comes up with the page)
ROM sizes are usually 1mb, 2mb, or 4mb.
Sometimes they are bigger, sometimes they are smaller.
The world's greatest emulator
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
"Technology's progressed."
Dude, the HuCard games for my TurboGraphix were on cards. Tiny little things...they liked to pick up legs when my other Turbo friends would come over. And they worked great...never had to blow on them or put them in new carts like genesis and Nintendo games.
What's amazing is that the technology is so CHEAP you can do this with a trading card set.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I suspect that the original NES and SNES games were bigger then 4K so you'll probably only get a stripped down version of a game.
Note that mb is mega bit not mega byte
from what I have read the card based games will be the small mapper 0 games such as baloon fight and soccer. I really wish they would release all the first gen nintendo games (the pixalated cover games) and zelda on a cart for the GBA - I would buy one on the spot...
Those of us who, a couple years ago, swapped ROM files and got all pissed off at nintendo for trying to shut down emulation sites even though they were making no money from new sales of those games anymore are likely all kind of feeling stupid right now.
I still do not feel my trading of those rom files was immoral-- especially because 90% of the roms i downloaded were files that either i owned the cartriges for or were never made available in the U.S. (i still say Ufouria was the greatest NES game ever..).
However, this is the kind of thing that makes the abandonware debate really all screwy. Yeah, the copyright for those games fell into disuse. Yeah, the game companies are gaining no new sales for those games, and yeah, it's unreasonable that it will continue to be illegal to duplicate copies of "ice climber" until long, long after the last physical copy and physical NES system has stopped functioning and started decaying.
But can it really be said that it's right to take away a game company's copyright when it stops using them, given that cool things like what Nintendo just did can eventaully happen?
And can it really be said that this is an efficient copyright system, when 1) there are so many games that will never make it into this new system, 2) there are so many non-nintendo systems where the games are just frozen in metaphorical ice, legally lost to the world forever, and 3) if some system were in place whereby Nintendo would be forced to licence abandonware games to third parties on a RAND basis, we could have seen a system like this possibly years ago?
That said, this is a really neat idea, with the trading cards and all. Nintendo has impressed me once again, in a game industry i view as in a heavy creative slump..
-- super ugly ultraman
"Really makes me wonder how many games used only a fraction of the cartridges total space."
Go to any downloadable rom site. You will see that most the roms range from 50-250k in size.
The occasional game like ff3 will top out at around 4 megs.
There's real information on the e-Reader at Nintendo's official e-Reader site.
You can see it here
From my understanding the games either
A. span multiple cards
B. are built into the eReader and the cards have barcodes to unlock them
Also, the games ARE for the NES.
...are they gonna put Zelda on a card with a little tiny battery to save the game?
As I recall, that was pretty revolutionary in the days of the 8-bit console & cartridge...
SMC is, for the record, Super Nintendo.
ROMs for the original NES are almost never more than 50k in size.
Guys this is an old trick in the toy biz.
The so-called "reader" actually contains the full games, all of them. The cards only store some index to the game, along with some trivial security perhaps.
If you look through the racks of the Gameboy Color, you'll see some NES games that were rereleased for that platform. If you look at the Gameboy Advanced, you see some SNES games (Super Mario Advanced series (NES SMB2 and SNES SMW), and the new Zelda is Zelda3:LttP, for example).
So, now that the market for rereleases NES games ($30-$70 when new) as GBC games ($30-$40) has been exhausted, they are ready to be dumped ($5-$7).
I would expect that the Super Advanced Gameboy, when released in 6 years, will get a lot of ports from the N64, selling at $40, and an e-card reader like device allowing them to dump old SNES games for $5-$7.
That's the real reason that Nintendo can afford to "lose" the console war, they'll make enough money on the NGC to be happy and build a library of games. Then they'll make the real money porting old games to their handheld.
It's a pretty similar strategy to certain genres in Hollywood... you know the internation and video distribution royalties, so you don't care if it tanks at the box office.
Alex
Hey, I've got news for you, buddy .. a lot of those games were great!
Sure, they didn't feature a lot of the CD-quality music and breathtaking FMV and first-person, three-dimensional, high-polygon-count graphics that you'll find in modern games, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're any less fun. I don't know about anybody else, but I probably had more fun playing the original Legend of Zelda than I did playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask. Good graphics and music + glitzy presentation does not necessarily = better games. A lot of today's games are very nicely packaged, but all too many of them are nicely-packaged garbage.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I thought Nintendo was AGAINST emulation? :p No, I know they'd permit it if they were doing it, especially if they had control over it.
And it's not really all that much information. Some games are as small as 40kb (Super Mario Brothers, for example), and even the largest NES games are only 512kb (Megaman 4-6, Castlevania 3), which can be made a lot smaller if they're compressed.
Anyway, what they could do is write a small emulator on the GBA cartridge and have a trading card reader that will enable ROM images already on that cartridge. You can put a lot of info on a GBA cart. I don't know the max capacity of a GBA cart, so that's just speculation.
There's an FAQ on the GBA e-reader here, but that has more to do with Pokemon (and, if you think about it, it would make more sense)
Danish != nationality
Bought an E-Card reader today for my GBA and Animal Crossing (GameCube Game).
The data itself is embedded in the card. It's a printed optical dot code. VERY TINY DOTS. I can't pick one out with my naked eye. I'm sure I could with a magnifying glass though.
I saw somewhere that a long strip (lengthwise) can hold up to 2.2KB of data, and a short strip (width) can hold 1.1. Each card can have only two strips. Presumably so the card can be handled.
Picked up a few ECard games, like Excitebike, Pinball, Etc. Games take 9-10 long strips. The game can the be saved in the reader, so you dont have to swipe again until you save another. Only space for one.
This is easy to use, holds a good amount of data, and has a LOT of possibilities. Kudos to Nintendo/Olympus!
-------------------------------------------------
In this case, abandonware just makes an intermediate step. If there's some old software that I like that suddenly comes out in a new and useful format, of course I'll buy the new version.
The cartridge form-factor may have seemed large, but inside that cart was a small, say 20-pin or so memory chip with an even smaller slice of sillicon in it; This slice of sillicon is probably about 20% or so of the size of a CF card.
I can see it now. you buy a pack of cards and you have ALL but that 1 card to finish the set to play Zelda.
Just like Baseball cards you'll go buying pack after pack in hopes of finding the one
Alright, alot of people didn't look at the article and therefore have some misconceptions about the device.
It's a playing card reader that plugs into the GBA, with a link passthrough that allows a connection to the GameCube with proper cabling. The cards that it reads are not em-based or anything. It uses an optical dot system much in the spirit of the punch card system. Nintendo will be selling packs of classic nintendo games that can be scanned in, but these will mostly be first generation games as there's only like 2k of space on each long edge of the card and less for the other side. Nintendo will also be implimenting this eReader system with it's Pokemon Trading Card Game cards, so you can scan in cards and get stuff like minigames, songs, strategies, information, etc. Gamecube games like Animal Crossing can use the device with Animal Crossing cards, to scan in textures, songs, letters and more in the game. I don't know how else it'll be used, but my curiousity is piqued. Also it looks like it'll be fun for GBA programming contests if we can unravel the programming language.
http://www.somethingpositive.net Funny + bitter = comedy gold
What a great idea.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
A friend showed his to me today.
Imagine a Pokemon card with a thin (3mm or so) stripe of dots up one or more sides. The Pokemon cards he has have dots on one side and one end, you swipe both sets of dots to insert the monster in your Pokemon game.
He has another game, Excitebike, that uses both long edges of 5 cards to hold the game. Scan all ten dot strips, and play the game.
There's also a neat feature in a game called "Animal Crossing," which was released stateside today, in that within the game, you can buy NES games, and play them within the game. These are transferrable to your GBA's flash memory via the GBA/GameCube link. Ever since that Pokemon fad, Ninendo has been thinking of new and tricky ways to make you want to "catch em all." Now I have to catch a GBA to take full advantage of my GameCube... heh.
-agent oranje.
The cards don't actually hold the games, the games are already stored in the Gamecube's disc. The cards simply UNLOCK the ability to play the games.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
is the card just a key to unlock the games already on the reader? that would be lame.
Just because these games are small doesn't diminish their greatness. In my view, which may be a minority view, gameplay is king. You can fit fun in a small space as well as a big one.
I think this is a great idea. Old Nintendo games are sometimes rare, and often still worth playing (Bionic Commando, River City Ransom, Super Dodge Ball, Contra).
I have on more then one occasion hunted down an old great for a friend on his birthday and it's always well received. As time progresses it's getting harder to find working copies (funco land is a great place, though they charge as much as $20 for the rare ones if they have them, and sometimes they don't have much life left in them).
Re-releasing the games is good, and making them small and "tradeable" sounds like fun, assuming they are sufficently cheap and random. I wouldn't mind buying a pack of nintendo cards, getting another copy of Super Spike V-Ball as my rare and trying to trade for my friends Solar Jetman, maybe I'll throw in a Ninja Gaiden. A lot more interesting to me then magic the gathering or baseball cards.
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
Depending on the price of the GBA hardware and the cards, this will be a great way to start a ROM collection. All we need is for somebody to make an interface between the computer and the GBA hardware. This is much easier than previous methods for obtaining ROMs. Nintendo is kindly making it cheaper to emulate your favorite games on your home PC.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
Okay, so let's say someone has the Excitebike rom on his or her computer. The argument is that it's "legal" since Nintendo doesn't sell it anymore.
How many people told you that "Yeah, I'd buy the real game if it was still sold."? I can't wait to see all of them rush to Walmart to buy a GameBoy Advance and an e-Readers so you can play the game.
I'd bet everything I've got that they're still going to play that rom in their basement, and still not give a penny to Nintendo.
I hate statements like the last line in said story.
It shows no thought whatsoever. Besides, since the age of nintendo, games have been coming to usin the form of... a card. The TurboGraphix 16, all it's games came on cards.
The Sega master system which came out only a year after the nes, also used cards to deliver game. I had about 10 of them. They were really good games too, like Spy vs Spy. Not stupid little crappy games, but full games just like on the carts. Though they were usually a little bit smaller in data size. (as well as physical).
Also don't forget about those awesome card-cds, that are basically a cd cut down to the size of a card and can be put in the cd player.
very cool stuff.
"It's kind of eye-opening when you think about how games that seemed so great so long ago can now be fit on something so small as a card."
Uh, not really. The Sega Master System (and TG16) used cards for some of their games.
I'm actually surprised that more smart-card type games haven't been developed. They hold, what 128MB? 256MB? Old Master System games were 1-4Mb (~125-500K). You could just about fit the entire library on just one card.
How large were the files for a classic NES game? A 2-D Barcode can hold around 4MB of data, and most roms are around 2-3MB.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
Hi, nice to meet you, here's my shareware. ;)
----
"Those who quote others are more likely to one day be quoted" -Tom Planter
It's kind of eye-opening when you think about how games that seemed so great so long ago can now be fit on something so small as a card."
Do you guys not remember this platform? Those games were better than the SNES (on a technical level) and came on credit-card sized cartridges. In 1989. You remember 1989? A full two years before the SNES came out, if I recall.
Granted TurboGraphix 16 used 2x8bit processors and a 16 bit graphics processor, so what does that make it, one and a half 16 bit? Unfortunately most the games for TG16 were Japanese based or horrible fucking American-cheezy games.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I dunno, man, I had a great time playing Ocarina and my wife had fun watching (and playing too... when I gave up the controller!)
Infact, that's what I like about modern games-
The old ones were a heck of a lot of fun. The good new ones just have better graphics.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Why not use something like PocketNES http://nes.pocketheaven.com/ and run all of the game?
Zoid.com
no he didn't. you fat nanookian bitch.
Take a look at the picture on http://www.nintendo.com/news/news_articles.jsp?art icleID=7318
Maybe it is the angle, but that e-reader looks about as big as the Gameboy Advanced itself.
Neat idea but I'm not so sure about the execution.
Have you ever heard of a little thing called Pokemon?
Guess who makes it? Yeah, nintendo.
They never left the playing card arena. Just cause you never owned a pack of Nintendo 'playing' cards doesn't mean that they stop making them.
..on my GBA for over a year. A Flash Advance card from these people running this is one of the best investments I ever made.
IIRC, the original Zelda ROM is 32K. That's both quests, all the music, stages, text, etc. That's some leet hacking that even Mel the Real Programmer could admire.
This isn't going to run SNES games. The cards have a total capacity of around 3K: 2K for a strip along the side, and 1K for along the bottom. I'm not sure, but they might also be able to make them with strips along both sides (4k), or all around the edge of the card (6k... maybe closer to 7k).
The reader itself has a meg of flash memory, so it can do some more interesting things than just read and play one game card in isolation.
I think it's less about games, and more about add-ons for games. What a great idea. I would have loved video games in the price range of comic books when I was a kid.
It's been out in Japan for a while. I wonder what their licensing system is like...
Find some roms here and there....(No links)
A little flash reader here....
You got it.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
"It's kind of eye-opening when you think about how games that seemed so great so long ago can now be fit on something so small as a card."
And it's kind of eye-opening to realize that this is the exact reason they are against ROMs, for those wondering why they'd care about such ancient games. It's not the games themselves they stand to make money off of, but the nostalgia they create and the more access the average gamer has to that nostalgia- aka ROMs -the less nostalgistic there will be when it comes time for Nintendo to release them and the less of a marketshare they'll have. And Nintendo likes marketshare. A lot. My theory at any rate. Time to go play some Battlefield: 1942...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I didn't think there was another use for it other than the Pokemon E-Card Series...
forget it.
that there's a demand for NES play still. Even with all the great new systems out, NES games can still be as much, if not more fun, and very few new games (except notably Devil May Cry for PS2) are truly 'Nintendo Hard.'
Secondly, there's Animal Crossing, which is a Gamecube game similar to The Sims. In the game, you can acquire NES games that you play on your Gamecube *OR* by downloading it to your GBA. Eventually there will be Animal Crossing eCards that will unlock things in the game.
Hope this helps.
Some clarfication is needed...
First, the TurboGrafix 16 used (electronic)
ROM cards that, yes, were the size of credit
cards but they were significantly thicker. If you ever cracked a game open you'd find that they were just essentially a plastic-sealed circuit board. So, they were essentially the same things as the SNES games at the time, but instead of using DIP ROM chips soldered to a circuit board and then put in a plastic case, they were pure ROM silicon wired and coated in plastic without all that extra "packaging". If you've ever opened a Tamagotchi, a digital watch, or calculator you've probobably seen tiny microchips that are coated with a blob of plastic.
Basically, the turbografx is not that impressive, because while the packaging for the games was probably way more expensive to manufacture, you must remember that the actual silicon in electronic products is pretty small - most of it is packaging to enable easy design and construction of circuit boards. For high volume items that never need to be upgraded or serviced and need to be small, especially if they are simple like a data ROM you can through them all in a single chip. Think of the TurboGrafx game as a "chip".
Now, what Nintendo is doing now is something very different. They are actually printing the "data" for the game on a small card. Think of it like a really complicated barcode, because that is esentially what it is. These games probably won't be easily copied because they will beyond the resolution of a copy machine. Also, recall that NES games were quite small. A few K is all you need.
Damn, now I wish I had logged in BEFORE posting that...
Slow down people. Just because nitnedno is releasing their 8bit games on card doesn't mean all the NES games are going to be released. Nintendo develoepd those games (excitebike, metroid etc) however 3rdparty develoeprs made other games so it will likely depend on the 3rd parties.
Don't support any use of copyrights. Copyright is an evil. Especially for old games where the stupid lawyers enforce copyrights when you can't even buy it.
The actual unit is fair sized. And has a passthrough for the GBA link port.
The unit comes with roughly 10 sample cards:
1 Animal Crossing card that when used with Animal Crossing on the Gamecube let you swipe the card in the attaced GBA and have a special email sent to you.
1 Game & Watch card with a complete Game and watch game (2 strips one on the top and bottom of the card)
3 Pokemon cards (Mine was Machop and his evolutions) each card was fully setup for the Pokemon card game. They each had a strip on the bottom edge with a fancy display of info on that pokemon both in terms of pokemon info and card playing strategies. On the left edge of each card was a mini game. You had to scan all three cards to load up the mini game. Machop's workday had GBA quality graphics, but was just a mini game.
5 Cards for NES Pinball. 9 Strips lengthwise along the cards with 2 strips on each card except the last one.
These strips are an even more refined form of the 2-d UPS dot codes, a strip is only half a centimeter wide. And I certainly believe all the necessary info is on the code ready to be loaded into the ram of the dot code scanner.
All the partial games would indicate what was scanned and what parts still needed to be scanned. And the one with 9 scans, pinball, actually let me save the scanned info to the scanner's memory so I wouldn't have to rescan it until I ousted it.
Now on one hand it may seem hokey to scan 9 strips to play NES pinball (And does seem like it would be hard to recreate a full SNES game) but on the other hand, media costs are so neglible neglible. I may have to revist things once I can actually pick up some of the collector's packs, but it is very neat.
NES games were quite small. I'm not exactly sure but its likely that they were about 16k-32k or so. That means they could easily fit on an average of 5 of these cards. That seems to be consistent with what Nintendo is advertising. Each card holds 4.4k it seems.
SNES games could get to be a lot larger - like up to a couple of megabytes (remember they were measured in megabits though). There is no way to fit a SNES game on a paper card that can hold only 4.4k.
Chrono Trigger, one of the best games of ALL TIME, takes up 4 MB on my hard drive. ;)
Switching to the NES... I think the entire library of games for the thing would fit on one CD-ROM.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
If I read correctly, the data is already on the card-reader & swiping the card simply unlocks it.
If this is the case I may be busting out my barcode printing software.
Postfix - n. A suffix.
Besides, the symmetry works better, pre- to post-.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
Imagine a cross between Harvest Moon and The Sims. The player controls a small, cartoonish character and basically lives their life. You begin by getting a mortgage on a house, which you then have to pay off by performing tasks for the other villagers in town. There are also Pokemon-like collection aspects to Animal Crossing in that it features over 40 species of insects, dozens of fossils to discover (which you can sell for profit or donate to the museum), and also tons of fruit to collect and sell (or consume). You are also given a rating on your house, depending on how good your Feng Shui is. Actions affect how other villagers react to you. If you dig up their gardens, they'll stop being curteous to you, and eventually run the other way when you come around.
But the game is about communication. You can visit other people's villages by inserting both your and your friend's memory card in the Gamecube. Items can then be traded with each other and collections can be completed. Don't have friends? You can also trade over the Internet by providing passwords that are keyed to the player name and the village name. There is already at least one good community for trading.
Finally, the game runs in real time, based off of the Gamecube's internal clock. If you can only play after work, then the villagers will begin to make fun of you for being a night owl. Holidays occur on their specific days, and special things happen (presents exchanged on Christmas, girlfriends on Valentine's Day, etc). Also, you will receive presents on your own birthday (set at the start of the game). Seasons change, and snow or leaves fall according to the season. Sales happen during specific hours, and if you miss it, you miss the sale. And don't try to reset the clock - if you do, a character named Resetti will be coming after you and bother you with text for a full 5 minutes.
How does this relate to the story at Slashdot? One of the things to collect are first party NES games. Donkey Kong, Pinball, Ice Climbers, Balloon Brothers, and dozens more are available. All of them can either be played in-game or downloaded to the Gameboy Advance for play on the road (until the power is switched off, it's stored in RAM).
I advise anybody who's into addictive, play-for-30-minutes-a-day-everyday games to buy it. You won't be disappointed. Now if you'll excuse me, Tanooki is having a sale on coconuts in an hour and I don't wanna miss it.
Master System already had a card reader.
Except now Nintendo won't be able to sell as many games since a certain portion of potential buyers will say, "Why should I buy this thing when I can get an NES emulator for my GB advance?" I agree with abandonware, when it is really abandonware. If you're giving away something as abandonware, and the company isn't complaining, then it's abandonware, but Nintendo has made it clear that they don't want folks distributing their games, even the old ones. NES roms aren't abandonware.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
Donkey Kong is 24k in size.
Hot Seat Harry is 1023 bytes in size. (It's padded to 16 KB with zeroes because the iNES file format supports only 16K chunks for code.) Find it here.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So, they say each card can hold 4.4k of data.
Lets assume the cards are about 8 square inches or so. Maybe 4" by 2" or something.
4.4kilobytes is 35.2 kilobits... lets assume no error correction, just to simplify things (though I am sure they use some). Thats about 36,000 dots for 8 square inches, or at least 4500 DPI. ok, guys, your 300dpi scanner can't read that and your copy machine is not going to make a readable copy of that.
It looks like Nintendo won't have to worry about piracy.
Besides who would go for that effort to pirate a 3 dollar game?
For the record: They are not embedding games onto cards. The cards just provide a key into the hardware of the eReader, which already has the contents of the games contained in it. This has been going on in Japan for some time now. The 'eye-opening' technology discussed here is the same as that used in grocery-store UPCs.
The specific use for this technology is a tie-in with the game 'Animal Crossing' for the GameCube. IGN's preview for the game discusses the full list of games available.
The cards have 2 stripes, one on the long edge and one on the short edge of the card. The short one holds 1.1KB and the long one holds 2.2KB. With compression, 4 or 5 cards is definitely enough to hold a complete game of that era. They fit in 8KB or 16KB of ROM in their coin-op or NES incarnations, after all.
However, the e-Reader has 8MB of masked ROM and 128KB of flash RAM. The contents of the ROM is not disclosed but I would imagine it contains several things, namely:
Graphics for more sophisticated games
Sound samples (simulating the old sound hardware is nontrivial, it may be easier to use canned samples)
Canned content unlocked through single cards (eg. promotional Pokemon cards which show a simple animation)
Note that if the data for all these games was already in the e-Reader ROM there would be no need for multiple cards or multiple stripes.
I do think this is a pretty cool little device and it would be fun to write something to be printed onto the cards. They're also a great promo tool for unlocking demos or extra content because they can be distributed with magazines or given away at retail.
Graham
The more I learn of this scheme, the more I think it is a clever way to tie into the "collector" thing that has made so much money for Nintendo and Wizards of the Coast, primarily related to Pokemon. Furthermore, if any Nintendo execs or marketing types are reading slashdot, they must be jumping up and down with joy because Mike says:"...having a little box of scancards with my GBA holder just seems cool."
Cool=pure gold, baby.
I still think its funny we are figuratively back to punch cards.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
It's kind of eye-opening when you think about how games that seemed so great so long ago can now be fit on something so small as a card
Anyone know how many NES ROM's one can zip onto a floppy? Quite a few actually. A few CD's and you've got the entire collection of everything made for SNES, NES, and GB (original). The first NES emulator I used was called "nesticle", and had a very interesting icon. Mind you, if they're being made publicly available again, I'd probably just rather own them and have the card.
8 bit pixellated wonders - phorm
IIRC, the original Zelda ROM is 32K
Metroid and The Legend of Zelda were each 128 KB. Super Mario Bros. was 40 KB. The maps on those early games were highly compressed.
Will I retire or break 10K?
They've been printing games on trading cards for ages. You all played Solitare on Windows before? There's a game just like that, it was printed on 52 cards. You could even get them out of order and still be able to play!!
As a matter of fact, I think Majong (sp?) has been ported to trading cards as well. Hell, Nintendo probably produced these cards as that was their previous business model before making video games.
So get with the program guys, porting computer games to cards isn't new!!!
snes9x, of course, blows zsnes out of the water.
I picked up my e-Reader today and it is an interesting idea. It came with Donkey Kong Jr and it needs 5 cards to store that game. There are two bars per card for a total of 10 swipes for this one game. I believe that each bar can be either 1024bytes or 2058bytes each and no more. So SNES games are basically out the window since most where about 512K to 1M (I know I don't want to swip a card over 100 times!). But old NES games are all that Nintendo is using this for. there are also cards for the new game Animal Crossing that contain special songs and items that can only be gotten via the cards and their are new Pokemon cards for the up coming GBA pokemon as well. So it looks like Nintendo has a new cash cow on the way :)
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Exactly, which means that Nintendo "gets" it. That means its time to go out and show your support by buying those classic games instead of searching for the ROMs. Abandonware/Emulation is good for reviving the dead, but when a company brings the past back to life for us with their professional flare, we should support them with our dollars.
Furthermore, the GBA re-releases of the Mario games and other classics are another good sign of the good 'ol games of yesteryear coming back for an encore. Good deal!
I remember like 4 years ago I went to a local tech show and a company had credit card size 486 computers that had a small plug in the side that was an extension to plug in devices, was quite cool. So having a video game as a card shouldnt be that hard.
Would having the cards then make the ROM on your computer legal?
Only if somebody figures out how to use a scanner and image processing software to turn the cards into ROM files. Then you're the "owner of a copy" according to the backup law. You have to rip your own copy of a cartridge or an e-card; you can't just download them from Romz-R-Us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"No! Don't spill Coke on that! Auuuugh you just wiped out all of World 5!!!!"
Really though, if the games were printed on cardboard with dots so small you can't see them with the naked eye, wouldn't that mean that the slightest bend or fold in the cardboard would destroy the game?
Why not use something like PocketNES http://nes.pocketheaven.com/ and run all of the game?
Because NES cartridge backup devices are very hard to come by. The only one I've seen is Kevin Horton's CopyNES.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's kind of eye-opening when you think about how games that seemed so great so long ago can now be fit on something so small as a card.
Remember the atari? You can fit the code and data from an atari cartridge on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper in human-readable form. With mnemonics, not hex.
Ditto the works of the 4k demo crowd from years ago. I really should look those up again.
Please point out how the parent post is redundant. Its parent did not contain that link. The story did not have that link. The link in the story did not have the link.
"/me still wonders why Nintendo never released an NES converter for the SNES"
Most likely because they wanted people to buy games for the Super Nintendo, and not buy games for the original.
Besides, picking up a NES would have been cheaper then buying an official converter.
4.4kilobytes is 35.2 kilobits... lets assume no error correction, just to simplify things (though I am sure they use some). Thats about 36,000 dots for 8 square inches, or at least 4500 DPI. ok, guys, your 300dpi scanner can't read that
Are you sure? 300 dpi is 90,000 dots per square inch.
Each card has about five linear inches of data. Assuming that the strip is 1/8" wide (a guess based on the photos), each card holds 0.625 square inches of data. A 300 dpi scanner would be able to extract 300 x 300 x 0.625 = 56250 bits of data. At 10 bits per byte (taking into account error correction), that's about 4.4 KB. Then upgrade to a 600 dpi scanner for a better margin of error.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What if I really do own that game? the cart is sitting RIGHT here. There was no EULA (I know I kept all that crap too) that said I couldnt use the game in that way. Why should I pay for it again? For about 20 bucks you can get 10-20 GOOD used NES games. For about another 15 you can get a used NES if you gave yours up for some reason.
If they have found a way to charge 10-20 bucks for something I can get for 2 more power to them. But I think I will give that a skip. The screen of the GBA is smaller than NTSC or PAL. So it will chop crap off. I bought a copy of the SMB remake on the GBA and it is impossible to play. Yet I can still sit down on the orig and finish it. They either made it harder or Im missing something...
...one nation, under God, indivisible...
RE your sig, there is no comma after "nation" in the pledge. Posting as AC 'cause I like my karma, but I'm GlassUser. And no that doesn't refer to any habits.
If you really think there's no added value in trading card versions of classic games then the abandonware movement is not the problem. People who just want stuff without paying for it are the problem. People who work on abandonware projects with the original spirit actually value the old stuff and don't want to see it lost. As a classic games collector, I don't care if I've managed to score the ROM for some of these titles, or even if I've got the originals somewhere (possible, since I have many hundreds of original carts and CDs) I'd still be interested in this new card-based classic gaming system. Just like I've bought one of every re-released Nintendo Game And Watch "Miniclassic" that I've found.
I had an oppertunity to see/test these cards today, and i noticed some perticuar things.
They are clearly trying to curcimvent piracy via photocopiers or printers etc..), by not using barcodes, but instead, they've used what appears to be, a sequence of Grain/Static, for lack of the proper term. I'm assuming that the e-reader will change this into data, which obviously, is where the game comes from... My question however, is how long will these cards last? I have enough trouble getting a magnetic strip on my bank card, that lasts longer than 3 months, let alone a cheaply produced trading card, that is printed in this ultrafine code. Has anyone stress tested these cards yet, or know if replacements can be found, should your's be worn out?
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Atari Lynx (released 1989) games were on small cards. Look at an Athlon XP processor w/o the fan and notice how small the actually processor is.
it is pretty lame, but its not dots per square inch, but dots along a line... so yes, you are right, its 300 squared...
Snes9x is a well engineered emulator, that was written to be portable. Because of this, it is avalable for many more CPU architectures.
Zsnes, on the other hand, is virtually x86 only.
I know that OS X likes Snes9x a hell of a lot more, that's for sure...
You mean, like the hidden NES games in Animal Crossing?
Or perhaps the re-released Game and Watch and Super Mario games on the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance?
Yeah, Nintendo don't re-release any of their own games...
I want a gameboy advance now, those games are the best :D
Sig: I stole this sig.
Does anyone here remember that episode of Beyond 2000 in which they talk someone coming up with a method of printing out files and programs on your printer to make something like a whole-page bar code. You could then (snail-)mail the page(s) to someone who could then scan them in and recreate the digital file.
Sounds like the same thing!
I can already see what Nintendo really wants to do with this.
:)
Buy the new Pokemon XYZ game. To get a new creature, you ONLY have to buy a card, swipe it, and there you go, you have a new pet to play with. Of course, you can COLLECT thoses cards, and trade them with friend.
Nintendo is smart. This is a realy money making machine
In 1985 my dad founded Data-Flex in Sunnyvale, CA. I was only 6 or so, so these are my recollections. He built a "cardette reader" which read bits from a 2"x3" piece of clear plastic. The bits were printed on the card with a laser printer and took up most of the card. He had it hooked up to a Vic-20 and an Atari 2600. You just inserted the card and pressed the button, and it sucked it in, read it into memory, and spit it back out. Due to mismanagement, the company went broke.. not before a lot of people ("potential investors") had seen the device, but before anything was patented.
Later on... about '88, he built an updated model with a higher capacity. It was a lot smaller, more like the size of a cigar box, and it was connected to the Commodore 64. Instead of a motorized feed device, you just swiped the cardette through a slot. Since laser printers weren't very common, you had to encode your program into a graphic and have it printed onto plastic by a print shop. I don't remember the exact capacity of the cardettes.
Anyway, another 80's technology rises again.
I think that the reason that Nintendo is releasing their stuff this way is that it would be a lot more profitable then making a Nes collection GBA series. The price range is nice, you get $1.95 to $4.95 each, and is below the $25-40 range that some GBA games run for. I also bet they will be going the collector's card rout, make only X amount of cards for a popular game like the origional Zelda for example(if it is possable, I kind of have doubts about it).
I would love just buy a GBA game with a collection of NES games already built in, and not have to bother with the hassle of cards and the amount of memory the reader has. I know I could get one of the pirate carts that allow this and use emulators, but I would like to what is legal, as well as support Nintendo so that they will start doing this more. Companies like Namco have been doing this with their classic games for quite some time. I really enjoyed the Museum series even though the selection of games they give is kind of low.
I also remember hearing a while back that they where planing to release a GameCube Kirby tilt and tumble game with a cart that would allow you to download games to it. I haven't heard anything after that, and I haven't been paying much attention to it either. I would guess the main reason Nintendo hasn't done this is due to their concerns of piracy and how easy it would be hack and download stuff to it.. I guess they figured that no one would buy anymore classic NES collections or games when one can just hack the cart they provide and download these games for free.
A smart marketer would work out:
Trading Cards=$$ Games!=$$$
Therefore:
Increase trading cards by decreasing Games
Put a half a game on a swipe card - if you swipe all of the cards - you get the game.
Or put a level/player a game.. ie. if you want the Yoshi player - you need the Yoshi SET!
You want the XXX colect the whole set and you will get it!
Rather than making us stoop to pokemonesque consumerism, why don't they take advantage of these new technologies, with acronyms CD and DVD, and just give us all the games at once. They could even release it for their own gamecube and charge probably as much as 100 dollars for it.
Oh wait a minute, those mediums would probably last too long - at least this way I'll be forced to buy another megaman 1 card when my first one no longer swipes.
f******
Every time you read this, I am going against my principles.
When I do that, though, I always win.
If that's in violation of IP, they can come and get me.
So I guess we might soon see CmdrTaco's wife chopping her lines of VA-bought blow with a copy of Double Dragon II?
One who hasn't used qmail in a while!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You've all been talking about the resolution of the printed cards, but what about the screen resolution?
GBA has a 240x160 screen, NES has a 256x240 display... While it's usually okay to lose a few pixels on each side (16 total, to be exact) you're gonna lose 80 pixels vertically... that's pretty significant... how will that work out?
[screenres.gif] for a comparison of many different screen resolutions for all sorts of platforms...
Kid 1: "Dude, check out this game!"
Kid 2: "What is it?"
Kid 1: "It's called Goats-e."
Kid 2: "OMFG! What IS that man doing to his ass?!?!?"
You've all been talking about the resolution of the printed cards, but what about the screen resolution?
GBA has a 240x160 screen, NES has a 256x240 display... While it's usually okay to lose a few pixels on each side (16 total, to be exact) you're gonna lose 80 pixels vertically... that's pretty significant... how will that work out?
screenres.gif for a comparison of many different screen resolutions for all sorts of platforms...
PocketNES is a NES emulator that runs on the Gameboy Advance.
I knew that. I was making a comment on how hard it is to obtain legitimate ROM dumps.
Considering that classic NES games can be purchased for under $10 from Ebay or used game stores... you can legally own and use the roms with PocketNES as long as you own the original cart.
Except how is a fellow going to copy the games he bought from his Game Paks to his PC in order to put them in a PocketNES package? One needs an NES cart reader for that, as well as the GBA flash hardware.
Will I retire or break 10K?
How many times do you want to buy copies of Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, and Ms. Pac-Man?
Also, Nintendo isn't immortal - a couple bad years could decimate their bottom line. Sooner or later, the games WILL be abandoned. The earlier they are ripped and archived for posterity, the better.
It's the basic right-to-copy problem again. It's very hard to find a balance between the public good and fairness to the creator.
Kudos to Nintendo to doing something very cool. PS2's edge is that it is backwards compatible, which opens up the game liabrary.
It would be even more interesting if they turned the cards into a trading card game like magic or (shudders) overpower. Personally i'd pay 20 bucks(cdn) again to play chrono trigger on my GBA.
with those business card sized cd's.
That's even more fun than SCANNING BARCODES! I hope it COMES with a STICK OF GUM!
You're right, of course, Starflight, the original was a great game, because it unfolded like a novel - the goal of the game turns out to not be the one stated in the docs...
I played it on my 4.77mhz dual 5 1/4 floppy disk system. Disk 1 in the first drive, disk 2 in the second...
Awesome game, nice forerunner of Star Control - why are most games of this type set in a d&d universe?!?
I've been looking for a game like this to work on a simple system, like a color gameboy perhaps...any ideas, anyone?
Why is this person amazed all that data can fit onto a card? I mean really, didn't the original (NES) cartridges weigh about the same as an average card? Plus the cartridges had all that extra plastic to give it size and shape. Seems like going to a card is little more than trivial.
I want to see all the NES/SEGA games put onto one device (maybe using emulation?) like my TI-89 calculator or something. YEAH, mindless 8-bit games to waste my time on.
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
then, um...*plays his original nintendo instead*
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
> I bought a copy of the SMB remake on the GBA
When did they release Samba for the Game Boy?
So, according to you the emulator of the NES has to fit into the 256K limit of the NES. That doesn't make sense on account of the fact that the emulator is merely recreating the envionment of the NES for the sake of the ROM. The emulator itself does not have to be visible to the ROM.
The sega master system - which was released before the nintendo - had games on cards. This is early 80's technology people.
I read that as Super Monkey Ball.
Wait... Super Monkey Ball's been released for GBA?
You almost blew the straw man right over.
Resurrection of games has happened before and it will happen before. However, abandonware still exists and will always exist, for which emulators play an important role.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Could these be the first video games to be pirated using a photocopier?
!!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
The fact that some games have the "-e" suffix and some don't makes me think that maybe they aren't the full versions of the original NES games. Perhaps Nintendo is trying to deal with space limitations of these cards?
Because the post's older-brother comment immediately above it, timestamped a full 14 minutes earlier, contained the exact same link, within a sentence containing the same content.
I'd like to ask you about the stock market sometime. I read somewhere about this thing that would let you buy something online. Do you think I should buy that stock?
All the US games would just barely fit on one CD, but if you include all the Japanese ones it's more like three. There were A LOT of games for the NES. And then there are all the unlicensed ones - homebrews, translations, etc.
For purposes of comparison, all the black and white GB games do fit on one CD, but only the US GBC ones do. And only the first 120 or so GBA games fit on one disc, and you can only get 15 or 20 N64 games on a CD.
Posted anonymously for hopefully obvious reasons.
I have a cd with 2400 NES roms and a Dreamcast NES emulator with complete menu system...
I'm sure that the card reader version of excitebike will greatly beat out my punchcard version of tic-tac-toe that no human can beat.
When I was your age we didn't have music file sharing utilities. We had to go out to a store and shoplift the CD.
The bottom line with abandonware is:
If I can't buy a piece of software [reasonably] because I want to use it, then getting a free copy from someone who has that software is ethical.
I don't care if the company who made it and sold it before is complaining today -- if they don't want to take the trouble to publish it TODAY, then TOUGH! If they take the trouble to publish it for a reasonable price today (don't publish a 15-20 year old title for $50, obviously), then the software in question no longer fits the definition of abandonware.
The portable tg16 was not the most powerful, that would be the sega nomad, which played all sega genesis games, could be hooked to a second controller and an external televison.
No it isn't ethical. Sorry.
When an artist (whatever kind of artist) sells some of his work, he hasn't given up the right to distribute it the way he wants.
Every heard of limited edition prints? The artist wants to keep the value of his artwork high and so only releases a select number of prints of his work. You're saying that just because you were a lind a copy because they're SOLD OUT, you should be able to make your own copy for free? WRONG.
Just because you "want to use it", doesn't mean that I have to give you a copy or you have the right to get one. If an artist sells me ONE copy of his work, that doesn't give me the right distribute it all over the place if the original artist decides not to sell any more copies.
Now, of course, if for historical reasons, you want to keep a copy, and the copyright holder isn't telling you not to and ignoring copyright violations, then fine. The copyright holder has basically said, "I don't really care what you do with this stuff, and I'm not planning on do anything with." But this is not the case with NES roms, which this annoucement clearly shows. They are still deriving value from the work they did those many years ago, which is what copyright does and should be doing.
And guess what, no matter how much they charge for it, if they're still publishing it, then it is unethical to copy it. I don't care if they're selling pong for $5000 a pop. If you don't want to pay that much, then TOO BAD. You don't get it.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
Okay, as much as I like the sound of this as the next guy, let's take a realistic look at this:
...The graphic and sound quality of the data from Card-Es isn't amazing by any means...the data strip can only hold 2K of memory on the horizontal strip, 1K on the vertical...
:)
Your average NES game is between ~25k (very small game), and ~500k (only a few this big), with most clocking in around 128K of rom data.
Now, how much data do you reckon you can get from one of these cards?.. well, according to Pocket IGN
So, you're talking 3K per card. For a 25K game, (say, Tennis, or Donkey Kong) that's 9 cards (well, 8-and-a-third).. and if you want to play Kirby's Adventure - a whopping (by NES standards) 768K, then be prepared to scan in 256 cards!
Now maybe if they could find a way to use the WHOLE card, and both sides, at that, instead of just little strips across the edges - maybe then you'd get decent storage.. my guess is that way 25K-per-card should be easily achievable.. but as it stands now, the only NES related games you'll get are horribly stripped down subgame-esque versions.
However, there IS hope. Take a look at the GP32. Neat piece of handheld kit, more powerful (in many ways, less in others, but on the whole more..) than the GBA, it's aimed at homebrew developers - you can write your OWN code for it without any kind of dumbass linker setup, it uses smartmedia or CF (can't remember which) cards.. hell, there's even a DOOM port, a DivX player, and a NES emulator for it. What more d'ya want?
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
could'ves. i invented the energy saving monitor 3 years before there ever was one. my step father invented the minivan. do i live in a mansion or drive a porsche? nope. guess this is where that 'patenting for the little people' article comes in, huh? =)
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
But I really ment that they didn't have to make crappy games just so that they could fit in the smaller carts, some were just as good as the full size ones. Though generally the crappier games ended up on the smaller format because well good games usually want more space.