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."

Comments

Question to the slashdot community

[Raul654]

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?

Re:Question to the slashdot community

[merlin_jim]

Actually, this is currently possible. Licensing is the big issue.

Get a good NES emulator (Nesticle is fairly good), SNES emulator (ZSNES), Sega emulator (I forget... something like Genocide is what its called)... these are all available for Linux. I have a demonstration system for this; they all run with decent framerates on the VIA Mini-ITX board, which you can fit into a console size system. Throw a CDROM on it, and run all your software from a FLASH card... these are cheap and solid-state, both good things in a console that might need to be banged around a little. Parts are gonna run you $250 - $300. And that's consumer prices. Wholesale might get a little cheaper. You can throw in basic networking ,e-mail, and websurfing for free, though, so people might be willing to pay $300 or so for this system.

The problem is, you have to license it. You MAY need to license the box; IANAL, but it seems to me that emulators are not infringing on any IP laws, with the possible exception of patents, but IIRC none of the systems mentioned except SNES with the special GFX games (StarFox and Zelda are examples) are patented. However, you absolutely have to license every game you sell.

How much does Nintendo value their legacy games? The article mentions $1 - $4. So, put 100 games on a CD and you're talking about quite a large royalty. In addition, how likely is Nintendo to want to license games on a system that can also run Sega games? What if they foresee that one day, you'll have a decent Playstation emulator on the box too?

How likely is Nintendo to want to even start a dialog with you?

Re:Question to the slashdot community

[Anonvmous Coward]

"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?"

I'm sure pricing is a huge issue here. If you have 1,000 games, and they retailed at $50 a piece. It's pretty obvious the price of those games has little to do with the cost of manufacturing. However, you won't be able to sell this disc at $50,000. ($50 per game x 1,000 games) If you sell it for a reasonable price like... oh.. $200, then you're seriously undervaluing the games themselves. That may not matter if they're no longer around, but there may be executive suspicion that it'd hurt the market later.

It's risky. They might be worried about destroying the value of every game ever made. It's interesting, though: Cartridge based cames from the 16-bit era didn't take up much space. I think 32-megabits (4 megabytes) was as big as it got, and the average was around 1 megabyte. You might come seriously close to putting all of SNES's games onto one CD. With compression such as ZIP, that's even more certain.

I haveta say I like what Nintendo's doing, though. Personally, I wish they'd revive some of their old games for me to play somehow. Either via PC or Gamecube or something. Maybe an on-line pay-for-play arcade?

Knocks the wind out of the abandonware argument?

[Rude Turnip]

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.

Where is the data?

[phriedom]

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.

Re:The cards hold 4.4K

[Benley]

Having read the article and also noticed this myself, I'm now wondering if the paper trading cards don't hold the game at all. Perhaps they are all pre-loaded on the e-Reader doohickey, and swiping the card just allows you to play it.

That would be excessively lame, imho, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.

This will be pretty darned cool.

[Typingsux]

It's been done already. Get the emulator here.

Find some roms here and there....(No links)

A little flash reader here....

You got it.

Re:Uh, yeah.

[Fnord]

Technology *has* progressed. The HuCards were rom chips in a card package. Look inside a genesis cart, its mostly air. If they had chosen to they could have put those on "cards". The cards this article is referring to are cardboard trading-card sized cards with an incredibly detailed barcode on one side (so detailed that the individual dots aren't distinguishable by eye). The e-reader actually scans them with a laser and stores the program in flash on the reader and runs it from there. So yeah, yesterdays games which used to be on huge cartridges (these will be original NES games so really huge) are now represented by dots of ink.

Re:Ahh, youth

[shren]

I'd buy that. Every NES game on one CD? Neat idea.