Slashdot Mirror
Listen To Your Game Boy Advance
filmsmith writes "It looks like Nintendo may be interested in using the GBA to enter the PDA market and even considering itself competition for the Apple iPod. It smells of DMCA pandering, though. 'It looks like protection will be in place to ensure that even content recorded by users (through the use of a special adapter) will not be able to be shared with other users.' Planet Gamecube has the article here."
Think what we could do with a beowulf cluster of those (sorry, i couldn't resist)
:)
Seriously though, it looks interesting -- the GBA is a nice little piece of hardware
My Brother was experimenting with this a few years ago, he tried changing the processor and he monkeyed around with getting linux to run, but then he got a job and put it aside. I dont know what happened with that but this could be something interesting if they can make it work.
Stupid Humans.....
Notice to Nintendo! Stick with what you know best...gaming consoles, you already are the Apple equivliant in the Game Console Industry. NO PDA's NO MP3 Players! Just stick with ther games!
---
I know it makes for good headlines, but nowhere does it say Nintendo is endorsing this.
"Eventually, the company hopes that this technology can be used for study aids, advertisements, museum guides, or digital comic books..."
If they market the thing along those lines, I bet we'll be looking back next year saying 'What was that stupid game boy trick they were trying to pass off on us last year...?'
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
> 'It looks like protection will be in place to ensure that even content recorded by users (through the use of a special adapter) will not be able to be shared with other users.'
I give it less than a month if the release this before some smart hacker figures out how to bypass that special adapter....
1. Does it run Linux
2. Does it play OGG?
what kind of world do we live in where protecting the property rights granted by the constitution to content creators is "pandering to the DMCA"? if you ever created anything worth copyrighting and selling, you would think differently about every Tom Dick and Nigel shitting all over your livelyhood.
I don't care if my PS2 can run Linux, or my Xbox can be turned into some media center. I don't care that my Gameboy Advance will soon try to take the place of my iPod.
I just want games. I am a gamer. MAME for Xbox, or DreamSNES or other emulators for Dreamcast (play NES/SNES/Genesis games on your Dreamcast), or the new e-card reader for the Gameboy Advance I know some people would rather do the opposite of what I just said, but I only care about the games. Smash Bros, Panzer Dragoon, Radiant Silvergun, Gunstar Heroes, Super Mario Bros, Final Fantasy Tactics...not Red Hat, MPlayer, X server, Xvid, ogg....
Besides, I have my computer for all that other stuff. My 19" CRT is a much better choice for video due to the better clarity compared to my 20" JVC from 1995.
They have never been much for sharing, even their old games. They can still profit from them and so still want to sell everything to users.
They currently still sell even their ancient NES games as playable on the GBA through the use of the e-card reader.
Just because nintendo has a great line of games and (in my opinion) a great line of consoles, doesn't mean they are a morally correct company. They have done everything from price fixing to scamming the government. They are the MS of consoles, even while MS is in the console biz,
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
My concerns are with the quality. The first is with the Audio...the DSP that is built into the GBA isn't going to be playing my favorite bands in any form of high quality. My second concern with with video. 240x160x16bit color basically can't be done in full motion on the GBA (just can't make enough memory writes before VBLANK ends). 240x160x8bit is though...but who wants to watch 256 color vides?
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Didn't something like this try and come out for the old game boy and were sued by nintendo it seems to be the same thing. I can smell a law suit.
I'm a geek deal wit it
from the article -
"32MB SmartMedia card can hold up to 24 minutes of video, and 5 hours of audio."
That's some pretty low quality.
Aww.. kickass.. Now I can listen to a Zelda remix.... while I play the Zelda remake...
I think if anything PDA's with decent games will sell. My logic is thus: Only serious people want PDA's => People walk into a shop and don't want to hear 'gameboy' or 'playboy'!!! kids walk into a shop and here the word PDA and say whats this. The kid soon discovers the game boy is not the simple devide he wanted and buys a Game Cube instead.........The rest rights itself
..but I meant to say that MAME for Xbox, DreamSNES/et cetera, and the e-card reader from Nintendo are GOOD(tm) things for a gamer whose SNES collection is being killed off by nephews with juice and controllers falling to pieces.
"...content recorded by users (through the use of a special adapter) will not be able to be shared with other users."
:)
Ah yes, the 'cone of silence'...how unique
One thing that it lacks is a proper input device. To enter addresses and send emails etc. you need, above all, a quick and accurate way to enter text into this beastie
"A 32MB SmartMedia card can hold up to 24 minutes of video, and 5 hours of audio."
Holy God, compression are they using? On the audio side, a 128 kbps mp3 runs at about 1 MB/min, and that sounds like crap to the discerning ear. I guess on the Gameboy speakers it won't really matter: all you'll hear are pops and cracks.
As for the video, 24 minutes? I guess if the screen is small and the resolution bad, but who wants to watch porn on their Gameboy anyway? I never dreamed of the day I'd see GameBoy Pocket Pool.
link to the original article directly? Planet Gamecube's just point to that link with rubblish abstract.
SO, if I have a large volume of audio/video files already then there is not much point to this because it wont play my current files. Unless, if I understand right, I transfer the files to their 'special' smart media cards with the codec built in.
And, what if I copy something to the device? That media belongs to me now right?
How can i archive this new media to my PC with the rest of my files if there is 'protection' from copying files?
This seems like a pointless attempt to get PDA functionality out of a piece of hardware designed to only play games.
B: MP3 players for the original Game Boy have been available for many years, and never sold particularly well. This was probably due to the decompression being done in hardware, driving prices up. 40 dollars for an MP3 player isn't bad.
C: The article mentions Museum tours and Manga as potential content to be distributed on this system, none of which compete in any way with the IPod.
D: The article says you will be able to get 5 hours of audio on a 32 MB smartmedia card. Either this means the compression level will be rediculously high and the output quite, quite bad, or they are using MIDI / Mod techniques, or (and this is my personal opinion), Planet GameCube just doesn't have a factchecker on staff.
DMCA Pandering? Competition for the 20GB gee-I-sound-and-look-sleek Ipod? Are people throwing random buzzwords into stories theses days in order to get them posted? What does this even have to do with PDAs?
Come on Filmsmith and Timothy... Justify yourselves. What do you know that we don't?
P.S. The article that this article is based upon can be found, with pictures, here.
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
The Game Boy Advance SP won't even have a headphone jack.
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
Nobody talks about MP3/CD players. My new iRiver SlimX 400 has about 11 and a half hours at 128kbps, with full track titles, 23 hour battery life, and even an FM tuner. Plus if you get bored, you can play snake (nibbles, etc.) on the smart remote it comes with. It's thinner than a AA battery on the side, and looks like 5 CDs stacked on top of one another. Not to mention I don't have to worry about taking an hour of my favorite music, I just burn 700mb at a time and take what I want, where I want. Plus iRiver actually puts a lot of support behind their products, and if you check out the firmware site, they update around every couple months, adding new features, and even increasing batterylife by use of intelligent buffering techniques. Oh... did I mention there's 6 minutes of anti-shock? Hah... GBA audio lame... Overpriced mp3 harddrive players lame... Expensive smart media/flash mp3 players lame...
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
There was a company a looong while back that wanted to turn the *original* GameBoy into a PDA of sorts. They created a keyboard module that came with the cartridge.
Not a bad idea.
What would really get my attention is a 802.11 wireless pack for the GBA. It'd probably be a little nicer than what affordable web-enabled cell phones can offer, and far more bandwidth (even at low-power modes).
It'd be quite a challenge, but very rewarding. Not many people can afford to grab a PDA just for surfing the web wireless, but I certainly wouldn't mind a GBA solution if the price was right.
The only big inconvenience might be typing. Maybe a stand and a keyboard attachment?
Needless to say, this is a historic achievement.
Digital comic Books? you mean like this? Josh Baskins Strikes Again!!!
Instead of spending $150 for a low-end Clie, or spending $50 on a clearance-sale Visor Deluxe (thanks for the boxing day sale, Staples! :) ), someone will go right out and spend $100 for a GBA, plus $40 for the adaptor so that they can use a substandard PDA.
I know by the time I press "Submit" everyone else will have made the same point, but it had to be said.
It looks like Nintendo may be interested in using the GBA to enter the PDA market
And how many other successful PDA's can you name that have no touchscreen or keyboard (other than the control pad and a couple buttons). Or are they going to come out with the GBA keyboard? Seriously now, the thing isn't even backlit!
These accessories are entirely third party. bah!
Maybe Slashdot does not link to it because it is in Japanese? It seemed obvious to me.
'It looks like protection will be in place to ensure that even content recorded by users (through the use of a special adapter) will not be able to be shared with other users.'
Ok, someone correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't this take away a great deal of it's usefulness? For example, if I want to record some lecture notes (i.e. audio) I will not be able to share those notes with my peers? Seems like there are plenty of more flexible alternatives already out there.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
...that the device will be inaudible without a 3rd-party hack (AfterBurner Audio?). Seems to be Nintendo's modus operandi as of late.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Given the current competition to Nintendo in the handheld market, Cell Phones and PDA's, this would make sense in a move to position themselves in the market's future. That's what all companies have to do to be successful. In fact, Nintendo has already been burned for being behind the curve (PSX taking their console crown, for example).
However, with Nintendo's hard stance of having all control of content and copy-protection, they would have a hard time surviving in this business. What I would invision is more of the closed model in this area, not so much a PDA but rather a Cell Phone with PDA-functions and game capability. Tie it to an account, and prevent a lot of the transfers without using the minutes, etc.
I wouldn't say that this is a bad place for Nintendo. In fact, I would say this is where it needs to go. However... I have a problem imagining them having the success in this market that they would with the GBA and handhelds. Could you really look at a Nintendo PDA and think of it as a business tool, or a toy.
However, the GBA and the GameCube are both shining examples of compact technology integration, and the ability to play old nintendo games without special equipment would be rather cool...
There's another article about this in Gamepro. A sharp-eyed Miyazaki fan noticed that Future Boy Conan, an early Miyazaki TV series, appears on one of the cards in one of the lower pictures.
Funny...in the Niven et al book Fallen Angels (the book that makes notable references to RMS), one of the methods used to get around the totalitarian anti-literature government is to retrofit regular gameboys to serve as covert e-book devices. Looks like life's imitating art.
Speaking of the iPod, I've heard a rumor that the next one will have sixty gigs of storage and a touch-sensitive screen, and be Apple's entry into the fully-functional PDA market. No idea if it's true, but it sure would be neat if it were.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
looks like protection will be in place to ensure that even content recorded by users (through the use of a special adapter) will not be able to be shared with other users.'
Is this Nintendo's idea of making a popular product???
WHO would by something like this??? No wonder nintento is a dieing company...
I'm afraid to listen to my GBA for what it would have to say to me. I listened to my Rice Kripies once and I distincly heard them say "Snap, Crackle, Fuck you!"
This looks to be a good solution for something better than the iPod.
It has the potential to make the GBA superior in all ways to the current iPod. What if it could run Linux too? There we'd have everything we need
A better form factor, interface, and color screen. Not to mention audio in and out.
Also given that Apple are a traditonally legal-happy company we don't want to go hoo-haa over the iPod when there's a better solution
One not wrapped up in legal rangles.
I'd say that $199 is overpriced for a CD-MP3 player. I'd rather just fork out the extra $100 and get a nice 5 gig iPod, complete with near-instantaneous (esp. compared to CD burning) file transfer and complete integration with my music software. That, or there are plenty of other jukeboxes available right in your price range.
Your mom is free, but nobody wants her.
It seems like more a portable video player than an Ipod.
Here is the link
http://mb.vgdirectory.com/game020403d.htm
"AM3 announced they will release a Smart Media Adaptor for GameBoy Advance and GameBoy Advance SP in October, which allows you to download multimedia contents and play on the GameBoy Advance. The AM3 Smart Media Adaptor will retail for 2800 yen, and the AM3 32M Smart Media Cards will retail for 2000 yen each. Downloadable contents such as e-Books, animated cartoon will retail between 200 - 500 yen each. AM3 is also planning to install kiosk terminals in convenient stores for customers to purchase contents."
it doesn't say anywhere that the addon allows you to play games while listening to mp3s, my guess is it wouldn't be because it would need its own decoder and standalone machines like this are already all over the market.
/. crew (or not) is the SDK available from the website that includes a C compiler. oh, it is also somewhat cheaper than a gba+$40 addon.
it seems like a better idea would be to use a cybiko. these things also have memory expansion capability, you can download a software mp3 decoder, i believe it has some multitasking ability so that you can do other stuff while listening to mp3s such as play games and whatnot, it has wireless network capability (it attempts to create a network with all of the available cybikos around it), and something that should especially appeal to
fine, it isn't a gba still, so buy that am3 thing then. am3? am2? shenmue?
this spam brought to you by anonymous coward.
Midi.
blah, blah, etc, stupid filter time wait thing etc, etc
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Is seems they plan on distrubuting content through kiosks and the internet, as well as selling smartcards with content already on it.
/ am3_13.htm
w s05.html / am3.htm
They plan on selling music, videos, comics, e-books, and photographs.
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20030204
The product's price seems resonable at 2800yen ($28.46US) for the device. The 32MB Smartcard will be 2,000yen ($16.75), and individual content will cost 200yen ($1.68).
Another interesting thing is that since Palm uses Arm7 processors and SDs that content will probably be compatible with Palm devices at a later date.
Links: (In Japanese)
Gamspot Japan
http://www.zdnet.co.jp/gamespot/gsnews/0302/04/ne
Watch Impress
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20030204
Offical Page
http://www.am3.co.jp/
Here's another media player for the GBA. It
looks like this one is shipping.
Songpro (annoying website warning)
jeff
If the GBA has enough CPU power to decode lossy audio, It would be rather cool to buy a cartridge with SmartMedia (or XD, whatever) that would let me listen to MP3's on it. Or maybe even -- God forbid -- Ogg Vorbis!
It wouldn't even matter if the thing cost about the same as a standalone player... I'd buy it. Having one machine as a music player and gaming device just means one less device to carry around, and I could even look just a little less nerdy in the process.
No, wait. I'll be carrying a GameBoy with an MP3 hack. Forget what I said about looking less nerdy.
Listen to your Game Boy Advance...
It's trying to tell you something...
Listen closely and you can hear it...
It's saying:
"You were actually stupid enough to buy an MP3 player addon for your gameboy? Hah!"
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Back in the early nineties there was a "game" called workboy for the original gameboy which was basically a PDA. It even came with a keyboard.
Of course, that was a flop at the time. But I think that one of the big problems with game consoles today (as opposed to before) is that you can get pretty enough throughput (which is the most important feature of graphical applications) with a general purpose CPU as you can with a gaming CPU.
So perhaps branching into the markets of their general use counterparts may allow them to be justified (well, I could get a PDA to use at work which plays games sometimes, or a gameboy...).
I know that I have pretty much decided that the age of the console is over. For me it's PC and PDA games from now on.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Does anyone remember the songboy ?
Meat is murder, I eat chicken.
Noone's going to buy a GBA then buy the addon just to use it as a PDA. It's a friggin GAME BOY ADVANCED, it's made to play games. The PDA (or mp3-player) functionality is just a bonus. Nothing wrong with the ability to 'do more' with an already fantastic product =)
-Berj
Anyway, i fail to see how $199 is over-priced for an MP3/CD player. My brother has a 10-gig iPod, and it's really really nice, but you have to look at a couple of things when considering an iPod:
01.) No CD support. -- That means you can't just pop in one of your friends' audio CDs when, say, you're in the car. It also means that when you get tired of what's on your iPod, you have to hook it up to the computer, delete stuff from it, and then transfer stuff to it; whereas with the MP3/CD player, you could carry a CD booklet in your bookbag or car or whatever, and just switch between 700 megs of MP3s whenever you want.
02.) It's expensive. -- No matter what size of an iPod you get (unless you get a used one off eBay or something), the iPod costs, like you said, $100 more than any MP3/CD player out there today. And add $100 each time you go to a higher size.
03.) Requires FireWire. -- I guess you're all set if you have a newer Mac (and if you do, you can probably afford a 20-gig iPod anyway :p ), but if you don't, there's a very good chance that you're going to have to buy a $40 FireWire PCI card when you order your iPod. This raises the actual price of your iPod, and it depends on you having an extra PCI slot.
Really, the only thing you need for an MP3/CD player is a CD burner, and pretty much any computer you buy today will have one, or will have an option. I can't imagine buying a new computer without at least a CD-RW drive. Then again, you don't really even need that. You could just play regular CDDA if you wanted, heh.
What i'm really looking for is an Ogg/CD player. That would own.
Consider this from the article:
"The compression/decompression algorithms are stored on the media, not in the adapter, and will take up some of the space on the cards."
And how long will it take a crafty GBA coder to write a fake codec that will kill the audio loader and load up a homebrewed rom off of a SmartMedia card? If you're exposing the loading process to a very easily writable media, then those are the risks.
Other interesting applications exist that don't right now on the GBA for things like photo albums and the like, because of the removable media.
It'll be interesting to see what exactly is used (if any) for "copy protection", especially considering the media. It won't ever be a great PDA (limitedness of input, etc), but it might be a fun gadget for a different market.
--[jaybonci]
Well, you can get Gameparks' GP32 then. It has 133Mhz, 320x240@16bit, there is a MP3 Player, a DivX3 Player, Smartmedia slot built in, loads of full speed emulators (SMS, NES, Scumm, Sarien, GB, C64, MSX, C16, ZX), load of nearly full speed emulators being worked on (pcengine, genesis, snes) and even Linux ported to it. Some people work on a GBA emulator even, but that will be hard to do 100% right, although the GP32 has an ARM tdmi9, so they try to execute GBA code directly and use the dma to trap hardware calls. And be reminded that this is a handheld game, it has a microswitch joystick, much better than gba's joypad and way ahead any PDA's unusable directional pad.
This may be a UK thing but they do very nice CD/MP3 players for about $100US. My $120 one (and that was 2 years ago now) even plays VCDs via a little composite out.
Overpriced MP3 harddrive players? When the 20GB Archos Jukebox can be had for 200 dollars, the same as this dinky little 600 MB thing? Compact Flash MP3 players lame? When they can be used in constant vibration situations like jogging, mountain biking, or tennis? No X minutes antishock, just complete shock ambivalence. Why mention the antishock anyway? 6 minutes is about minimum for MP3 hard drive systems. I believe you meant 16 minutes, which isn't bad, but the Archos Jukebox takes about 2 seconds to spin up, 1 second to fill the 8 mb buffer with data, and 2 seconds to spin down. The MP3CD players all have to spin up a much larger disk, skim data at much slower rates, and spin the disk back down, or have constant spinning rates. HD players are therefore quite, quite skip resistant under adverse conditions.
23 hour battery life must be for listening to the radio. If they are anything like other MP3 CD players, it gets 4 hours from a standard set of batteries, which isn't any better than a Hard Drive system. So, for 200 dollars (which is outrageously high for an MP3 CD player, BTW), you less capacity than a hard-disk based drive, less upgradability, similar anti-shock, and the same battery life, and the benifit of having to burn a new disk everytime you want to listen to something different, rather than just having your entire MP3 collection with you at any time.
This is why MP3 CD players are relegated to the low end of the MP3 spectrum. They can't beat hard disk systems on convienience, but they can do so on price. This one, oddly, doesn't. So they get tagged onto inexpensive portable CD players, and everyone forgets that they were once cool. How can that create buzz when someone whips out a little brick with a lifetime supply of music?
Who modded this insightful? They must have meant inciteful.
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
Wonder if this has anything to do with Nokia's N-Gage which is supposed to compete with Game Boy Advance?
While Nokia has been trying to turn their phone (which has many PDA-like thingies and much multimedia-capabilities) into something more GBA-ish, Nintendo is turning it's GBA into something more multimediaish. (I know. That word doesn't exist.) Nokia will (hopefully..) have better multiplayer-capabilities. It also has an already existing big brand which might make it somewhat scary for Nintendo.
Just wondering...
Where have your banknotes been?!
iNewton!
What about a headset where i can make phone calls with? What about a build-in backlight and stereo speakers? What about a camera? What about GPS? What about Internet? OGG? TV tuner? SVIDEO-in? That's all feasible today.. just MP3 is pretty lame crap...
I have a 20GB Archos Jukebox. After rebate, it can be had for roughly the same ballpark as your player ($199 v.s. $220).
I had a discman-style MP3 player in the past and found sorting my gigabytes of music out onto CDR's to be a pain in the butt, plus having to change CD's, etc.
Even if the capacity is higher, that is why I gave up CD's in the first place!
Battery life is excellent, although I have never bothered to actually benchmark it. The batteries are rechargable and it gets plugged into power in my car enough to keep it topped off, anyway.
With 20GB, I can store my entire collection, and with USB 2.0, keeping it synced with the MP3 partition on my PC is plenty easy and quick.
Oh, and did I mention it also functions as a voice recorder?
It's destined to join the Gameboy camera in the worse than fucking useless pantheon of add-ons for the Gameboy.
PDA (click bottom link, they check referrers)-like utilities and audio players have existed for years. This isn't exactly killer app territory.
(Yes, that WB pic is a horridly fake-looking mockup, but it's the best I can do without going 2 hours from here, digging through old NPs, and scanning the -official- fake-looking mockup.)
"...protection will be in place to ensure that even content recorded by users (through the use of a special adapter) will not be able to be shared with other users."
User recordings; the one thing that's 98% guaranteed not to be copyrighted. Sometimes I think these people don't think these things through...
1p}{ 1 sp34k |33+ +|-|e|\| p30p13 \/\/il| 8e i/\/\pr3553|)
I read the artical... but I don't remember seeing "PDA" there anywhere.... ...now if you had said "MP3" market I could understand....
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
the article clearly states it is a 3rd party add-on.
:P
nintendo has never had plans to enter any kind of pda market, they just want to make games and game consoles.
sheesh read the article next time
So I have to carry around tons of cards? This is supposed to be better than or even compete with iPod? You are joking right? For video playback? I'll take 5, 10 or 20 gigs over 32 meg "smart" cards any day.
... me bringing the gameboy back into the meeting room. After last time, I don't think the fact that it can do PDA functions is going to keep him from flying off the handle.
I'll just have to stick with playing games on my PDA... he think's I'm sooo productive then.
Snooze and you lose your sushi.
And it took that long to happen. They did it because of rampant pirates taking over sales in countries and they had to compensate somehow..
Nintendo has never released a Gamecube game that REQUIRES the GBA to be played. Pokemon will not REQUIRE it to be played. Yes, it offers extra features with some games, but that's like complaining that Splinter Cell REQUIRES XBoxLive to play all the levels (New levels downloadable only with xbox). Same with PS2. Geesh.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The compression/decompression algorithms are stored on the media, not in the adapter,...
They're putting executable code on the media? This sounds like a promising virus propagation vector.
Considering the Archos Jukebox Studio 20GB runs for $130(with rebate)-$160 if you watch the sales, and $225 even at Amazon, I think $199 is definitely overpriced. And it's USB, so it plugs into just about every machine available (not just the occaisonal firewire box) and mounts as a standard USB storage device. Heck, for $200, it's almost worth it just as a portable HDD.
I find this all very intersting that Nintendo is trying to turn the GBA into a PDA when someone else has already done it.
,but that was all he would mention. If some research is done, recall that in a previous life, this device was called the Songboy and Nintendo sued. With the help of jesse jackson they were able to get out of this jam and market a wonderful product. IT may not be a full PDA, but it is cheap and will turn the GBA into a cheap IPOD with a large enough Sandisk.
Enter, the Songpro
It was released a few years ago on the original Gameboy and piggy backed off of the unit to play MP3s and display song titles and lyrics on the screen, but an improved version has come out on the GBA. I have listened to one of these units, they use Sandisk media and will accomodate up to the full 512mb cards.
I attended an African American Technology fair and was able to try out one of these units. I witnessed FMV on the GBA, MP3 music and lyrics, an odd form of e-book that contained biblical scriptures, and a digital stamp collection. The engineers behind this tech were light on details when I questioned them, but he did mention that the unit has its own DSP for sound and some video, and that some of the the work is done by the GBA's own processor. It apparently is written in ARM C
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
dood! did anyone here actually read the short writeup? nowhere in there does it mention PDAs, MP3s, etc. i could see something like this totally replacing those crappy walkietalkie/giant 1-way cell phone things that the smithsonian has been using for decades. wouldn't it be nice to have a little fact sheet come up when yer staring at some work of art while listening to a short monologue on the piece? or shit, if they made a GRE practice test for the thing i'd rather use that then the crappy prog the GRE folks have available on their website...learn to think of other uses, rather than the ones that you already know of...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
I'll be that 3 months after release you'll be able to put rom on the sd cards and use the am3 as a flash-linker type device.
I understand the desire to hack your devices and do other things with them... even seeing if you can get linux to run on it. But other than tinkering... what do you hope to get out of it? It wont do anything any better than a regular MP3 player. I'd rather drop 60 bucks on a NOMAD MP3 player and keep the GBA for games. Right tool for the right job.
MadOgre.com
If it displays e-books, which the article suggests it will, count me in. A $40 e-book reader? Even if it did nothing else it'd be worth it for some of us who have GBAs, but haven't gotten a PDA yet.
Unfortunately I'll probably have to wait until at least 2005 before having any chance of buying one.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
Wow, and a 128 meg card is $45 at costco. The small cards are over twice the price per meg. I've been watching the diffrence in price of less than 10 dollars between the 64 Meg card (largest my camera takes) and the 128 Meg card. I've been trying to get a better deal per meg for my camera. My next camera will not be limited by the size of the media it will accept. Hopefully I can find a good one where I can use any size of CF card.
The truth shall set you free!
but that's like complaining that Splinter Cell REQUIRES XBoxLive to play all the levels
Square's Final Fantasy XI for the PlayStation 2 console will REQUIRE the Linux kit.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Pokemon [for GameCube] will not REQUIRE [a GBA, a GCN/GBA cable, and Pokemon for GBA] to be played.
Are you claiming that this page, this page (which directly quotes a Nintendo press release), and this page are all inaccurate?
Will I retire or break 10K?
i thought that nintendo already entered the PDA market with the GBA. You can buy a personal organizer thing for the GBA. This is old news, /.
kaens.blogspot.com
Anyway, that's not to put down the CD player, it has legitimate uses. However, it's hemmed in on the low end by flashcard players, and on the high end by hard drive players. You call them overpriced, but a 5 gig iPod is only $300 MSRP, versus $200 for your iRiver. So if you can deal with moving parts (ie, you're not going to be running with it on a daily basis), then for just a little more money you can septuple your capacity with an iPod (which can fit in a standard pants pocket). So the market segment that wants an mp3 player with more than 256 megs of space, doesn't mind a device with a large diameter, doesn't mind having moving parts, and yet isn't willing to shell out the extra $100 for an iPod is just not very large.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD