Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
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)
Not to mention having every one ever made fit onto a single CD, with lots of room to spare...
*cough*
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.
In the old 8-bit nintendo (probably other and later consoles as well) cartridge programmers implemented bank switching to put more data in the cartiridge than the architecture was really designed to handle. They are known as "mappers", and it's what you hear about when you read about NES emulators and whatnot and what "mappers" they support - they're referring to memory addressing schemes used by games that couldn't fit normally.
11*43+456^2
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
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.
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.
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
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!!!
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.
Well, 8 Mb (megabits) doesn't necessarilly = 1 MB (megabyte). When measured in bits, kilo usually means 1000 and mega = 1000^2. When measured in bytes, kilo = 1024 and mega = 1024^2. So, 8 Mb = (8*1000^2)/(8*1024^2) = .9536 MB (or 976.56 KB).
Pedantic, yes, but a helpful thing to remember.
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.
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
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.
I'd buy that. Every NES game on one CD? Neat idea.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)