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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."
"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
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
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!!!
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
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.
The article says that the games will be stored using dots printed on the card and that the reader will scan in the dots optically. Now *that* sounds pretty cool...much cooler than just using a magnetic stripe.
To have some idea of what the cards will look like, take a look at any UPS package with the dot-coded label that has that bulls-eye in the middle.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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.
(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.
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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.
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.
ALL of the first computer games were on cards... PUNCH CARDS.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
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
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!
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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.
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
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?
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
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.
..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.
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
You feel dated? I remember the Atari 2600 and the NES!
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
"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...
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I didn't think there was another use for it other than the Pokemon E-Card Series...
forget it.
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.
HuCards, actually. Hudson Soft was one of the main companies involved in the system's design, hence the "Hu". They were actually only called HuCards outside of North America, where they were called TurboChips.
J
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.
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.
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.
Except not. The cards actually have an incredibly high detailed barcode that stores 2k per strip (two strips per card) and with four or five cards you can store an original nintendo game.
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!!!
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 :)
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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!
You feel dated? I remember the Atari 2600 and the NES!
YOU feel dated? The 2600 was my SECOND console - our first one was a Fairchild!
-72
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
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.
Interresting idea... I wonder what other people think about this.
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?
I don't know if anyone reads this far down into a Slashdot thread but... The last post was correct. The Turbo Grafx 16 game system (or the PCEngine in Japan) was produced by NEC, with some significant Hudson Soft development effort.
:)
In case anyone cares, Turbo Zone Direct still sells new TG16 hardware and software (This is not a plug, I have no relationship with TZD). There is also a Turbo mailing list still in existence, where people discuss the PCE/TG16, as well as buy/sell/trade games and accessories. There's even a few fan sites left out there.
The Turbo Duo was the American re-release of the original TG16, which included the cartridge (HuCard) port, and integrated CD-ROM unit. The TG16 was also the first game system to utilize as CD-ROM, and the only system to ever have a successful expansion device. Until the Game Boy Advance, the portable Turbo Express was the most powerful handheld gaming system, and it was capable of playing the entire library of games from the parent system, since they were on the extremely portable HuCards.
While most people in the U.S. have never heard of the Turbo Grafx, the system was extremely successful in Japan (as the PCEngine), much more so than the MegaDrive (Sega Genesis). Send me a message if your a fan of the system.
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.
Sandspider wins: FATALITY
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.
You seem to misunderstand. PocketNES is a NES emulator that runs on the Gameboy Advance. Flash cartidges (aka "backup" carts) for the Gameboy Advance are easily purchased over the internet. Lik-sang is a respected source for such GBA flash carts.
Using PocketNES with a 512Mb flash cart would allow you to put basically all of your favorite NES games on one tiny little cart. No carrying around a bulky card swiping device with tons of cards. Just one small cart plugged into your GBA gives you hundreds of classic NES games.
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.
One who hasn't used qmail in a while!
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I was in Kuwait a while back, and picked up a GBA cart that had something like 72 NES games on it, along with Ice Age for the GBA... You can set the scaling so the game looks *almost* right... scale the background to fit the screen, and make the sprites the right resolution, and it usually works out pretty well.
I paid 5 KD, which is about 17 dollars for it.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
the GBA was the second best investment.. the BEST investment was the frontlight I got here: Tritonlabs.com
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
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 -----------------------------------
You're right... Mac does like Snes9x better, but x86 definately works best with Zsnes. I have yet to see a game that ran better on Snes9x.
By now I would have thought the two projects would have completely merged.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I take it you don't have a flash advance card. That would be higher up on the list than a simple light. I personally prefer the Flash 2 Advance to the stuff made by Visoly, but they are harder to find. I heard there are problems with customs seizing these things from some of the larger companies (e.g. Lik-Sang) especially when shipped via UPS, but if you go with a smaller company and ship via EMS Speedpost (assuming it's coming from Hong Kong) there are fewer problems. The place I bought mine from was cool enough to put down that it was a gift worth $30 on the customs form and it was shipped with no mention of a company on the return address.
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?
Wow. Talk about nostalgia. I vaguely remember playing with the Fairchild Channel F (on a tiny black and white tv) when I was a kid.
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?
Oh ya, I have one of those too. (: Playing Final Fantasy 1 on airplane and long car trips is veddy cool. (:
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
I just found this yesterday, actually. pocketNES, an NES emulator for PocketPC systems. Zelda 1 and FF1 both run at full framerate on my iPAQ 3835 (sound is kinda crappy though). There's also an SNES emulator, but I haven't tried it yet.
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