New Nintendo Hardware Announced

Xs writes "SPOnG.com has an article on two new pieces of hardware coming out of Nintendo today. One of which is a new e-Reader, the e-Reader Plus, that can store data while the GBA is off. And the other is a Gamecube memory card that can read Panasonic SD generic media storage cards. Not only does this increase the maximum storage capacity per Gamecube slot, but this also opens up the ability to trade save game files online via a PC!" I've yet to buy an e-Reader, and this makes me think I should hold off for a while longer.

Comments

Trading saves is nice...

[analog_line]

...but the E-Reader still just doesn't look like anything but a complete gimmick to me. I can understand kids going gaga for it, 'cause it's like trading cards and what not, but I haven't seen anything actually interesting and usable come out of it. Putting old NES games out in E-Reader format is pretty cool, but in practice it's horrendously tiresome. That, and the E-Reader is a bulky, ugly looking thing hanging off the top of the GBA.

Now, the Game Boy Player...that I'm waiting for. If Metroid, Mario Sunshine, and Zelda didn't get me to get a GameCube already, that certainly would've tipped the balance. Can't wait to play Golden Sun and Circle of the Moon with a real controller.

Re:Trading saves is nice...

[wcbarksdale]

There are a few applications of the E-Reader that strike me as interesting:

The trading cards for Animal Crossing, which allow you to receive items in the game when you scan a card. People seem to be fairly receptive of these, because they bend the rules of the game (letting you acquire certain items more easily) without breaking them outright (i.e. you buy an Action Replay and edit every item in the game into your inventory).

The card game Mario Party-e, which is mostly a fairly simple card game, but has certain cards which tell you to scan them into the e-reader and play a minigame to determine what happens.

The apparently fairly low cost of manufacturing the cards relative to other forms of media. It's the kind of thing you can stick in the bottom of a box of cereal.

Finally, there's just something innately cool about an object carrying data in addition to its usual function.

But can it cope with more than 128 save files?

[Westley]

One of the problems with large memory GC cards at the moment is that they're still limited to 128 save files. Presumably the file system such as it is has a fixed size FAT of some kind, which would explain why the MC59 and MC251 are both 5 blocks short of a power of 2 - presumably the FAT is 5 blocks.

Now, the real question is whether that just happens to be how all the memory cards so far have worked (including 3rd party ones with over 1000 blocks) or whether it's something which is hard-coded into the GameCube itself.

One possibility is that it's hard-coded, but the SD adapter comes with a way of selecting which virtual memory card to show to the rest of the Cube, much as some 3rd party PlayStation memory cards did.

It'll be interesting to see how games use large amounts of space though - I'd imagine that few games would wish to alienate those still using MC59/MC251 by storing thousand-block files, for instance... and if games *don't* use it, the SD adapter becomes limited in its use. My MC251 is still only half full, despite a reasonable collection of games.

A media storage card can do more than store media.

[Mr Deckchairs]

but this also opens up the ability to trade save game files online via a PC

The Playstation 2 has a similair device available for it, a 'Sharkport' (though a quick Google seems to reveal that they've renamed it to an 'Xport'). Taking the save files from the cartridge, it turns them into small-ish binary (200kb) files that can be transferred over the net, and stored for backups.

But there is a much more interesting thing you can do with them, assuming the Gamecube Panasonic Media Storage Card is at least similar in operation. Opening up the save files in a hex-editor and editing what you find does allow cheating and manipulatipn of the game that would normally be impossible. I've seen some hacked PS2 saves do things which not even a memory editor like an Action Replay/Gameshark was capable of. E.g. In 'Soul Reaver 2', the game would save the name and location of a dropped weapon in the save file, a little hex editing lets the player change the weapon to anything, any model stored in the games data, from a background scenery model to the last boss.

Unless the gamecube savefiles are encoded in some way that makes editing hex variables difficult ((say for example some form of compression (I'd liken it as trying to hex edit a *.ZIP file to change one of the files inside accurately)), Gamecube owners might want to get excited about the new cheating and manipulating potential for their games. I can say that, at least in the case of PS2 games, it does increase their lastability.