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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."
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!
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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
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
"but who wants to watch 256 color vides?"
Ever hear of Smacker?
256 color videos have been out and acceptable for quite a long time. It's an encoding choice, not like the GBA has to dither it in real time.
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.
It would be considerably cheaper than doing it with any other platform I can think of if your desired feature set includes a color screen and ready retail availability (IE, no starting with anything used.) The only problem is the lighting issue, which does raise the price somewhat. The newer lit model may improve on this issue.
It would be nice to have a cart with some flash, fairly high-speed IR, and bluetooth or 802.11. I don't really care which, 802.11 is probably more convenient in that people have them already, moreso than bluetooth gateways.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
True, the speakers are bad, but if you use headphones its a completely different matter.
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.