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Nintendo Bundles GBA Adaptor With Gamecube
Thanks to a multitude of sites for pointing to a new Nintendo press release announcing they're bundling the Gameboy Player with the Nintendo Gamecube system, starting June 23rd. The Gamecube will keep its US price of $149 for this added-value deal. For those unsure about what the Gameboy Player is, the press release explains it's "..a platform less than an inch thick, which acts as a base for the Nintendo GameCube. By simply inserting Game Boy cartridges [GB/GBC/GBA] into a slot in the Game Boy Player, consumers can use their Nintendo GameCube controller to direct action on the TV screen."
How long before someone finds a way to use them as cheap ROM dumpers?
That is of course if Australia ever sees the bundle.
The Gameboy Advance and the Gameboy Advance SP are the same platform. Just a diffrent form factor. They both play exactly the same games.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Neither.
p layer/
It's the GB Player. It's a little device that plugs into the bottom of the gamecube.
There's picture and an article here:
http://www.gamespy.com/hardware/march03/gb
It lets you play gameboy games on the gamecube, with a gamecube controller.
One great aspect of this is it will allow big-screen, front-room access to wonderful games like Advance Wars and its imminent sequel - games which have far more depth than the majority of PS2/GC/Xbox titles, but don't stand a chance of being released on any of the 'proper' consoles because they're 2D, "old school", blah blah blah. Hell, until its big brother shows up, Mario Kart Advance is flat-out the best 'fun' racer you can play on the current platforms. Yeah, that's like having a SNES in your front room (no bad thing), but a great game is a great game, just like a poor one is a poor one, regardless of poly count and shaders. Truth be told, this will probably lead to my GBA games taking up far more screen time than their GC shelfmates. Bonus.
Nintendo keeps talking about their grand Gamecube/Gameboy intergration plans, but honestly the whole thing is really just too gimmicky for me. Most of the uses that Nintendo has come up for this have seemed really forced - added to the game just to use the connection - rather than well thought out or beneficial to gameplay in any way.
In the new Zelda game, for example, you could use the Gameboy Advance connection to summon up a little flying dude that would drop bombs to uncover secret treasures. But you don't need to do it, and it adds nothing to the game experience.
Actually, to be very technical they are just a tiny tiny bit different. They are different enough that a cart can detect which model gameboy it's in by code (and it's not just some sort of query that returns "gameboy sp" - afaik, that sort of direct determination is not possible) -- some homebrew code is using the detection to slightly alter a game's color pallette to account for differences between the way colors look onscreen between the GBA and the GBA SP.. But other than that, there's no difference between the units and all code is 100% compatible.
The introduction of the GBA SP undoubtadely left Nintendo with an overrun of original GBA product either pre-assembly or pre-shipment. Although I havent seen a site posting the innards of a Gameboy Player unit for the GameCube, I would bet that it contains a repurposed GBA motherboard.
~GoRK
The Game Boy Player is the piece of hardware that is going to be bundled with GameCubes, and it supports Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, and original Game Boy software.
No hacky GB-bridge type thing required.
Come on Nintendo. You know you could do it.
They don't want to make games unplayable without the GBA linkup feature.
However, especially in Animal Crossing, if you have the feature, you're in for even more wicked gameplay. A whole bunch of the connectivity they're showing (GBA as a controller, GBA 4 swords link to Cube, Crystal Chronicles, etc) looks like they thought about the games around the GBAs. Pokemon Collesium's probably going to really take advantage of it, not just as something that's cheaper and more reliable than ye olde N64 transfer pack, but as something that lets you monitor your Pokemon on screen without giving away details and strategies to other trainers.
They're just starting to get into their connectivity stride, the same way MS is just getting into the online stride. Sony's frantically copying both companies (online bundle, camera USB device.. which is funny, since Monster Rancher 3 lets you use Picture Paradise on Sony USB cameras), and might start to lose momentum these next 6 months. We'll see how the summer and fall turn out.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
How long before someone finds a way to use them as cheap ROM dumpers?
They already are. Just connect any GBA, GBA SP (with the light turned off; otherwise you get power issues), or GCN Game Boy Player to a PC with the MBV2 cable (which Nintendo still lets Lik Sang sell even after the lawsuit), and then exercise your Betamax fair use right with mb -1 file.gba -w 300. (Not available in Australia, whose copyright laws consider fair use a much narrower exception.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
but I guess someone could write software to create four separate GBA sessions on a single GC
No. It's not emulated. There is only one piece of GBA hardware in the GB Player accessory.
The proper way to run four-player Mario Kart Super Circuit on TVs is LAN-party style. Get four TVs, four GameCube systems and four GB Player accessories (or four GCN/GB Player bundles), four copies of the game (most games artificially limit what is available with one cartridge), and a 4-player link cable. Then connect the link cable to each GB Player, making sure the short plug is in the GB Player that starts the game.
How do I know this? Anybody who reads Nintendo Power can be as knowledgeable about Nintendo's plans as alleged troll Dr. Samir Gupta claims to be.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If there's anyone out there that could find something that doesn't work with the Game Boy Player, it would have to be you, yerricde :)
;)
I'd feel pretty safe in saying that anyone with just standard, old, and boring official games that are simple cartridges that don't use any special features would work. Of course, fancy things like pinball games with vibrators, tilting games, cameras, printers, third-party keyboards, AM/FM tuners, mp3 players, and other "lesser known" hardware and games may have problems.
The majority people wouldn't hit those problems, though. The people that do have fancy things would most likely have older Game Boy hardware around anyway, and could just use that.
Or yes, they could hack something together to make it work! That's half the fun, afterall!