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GameBoy Advance 'Time Machine' NES Adapter Trailed
Thanks to Lik-Sang for their report on a third-party 'Time Machine' NES adapter for the GameBoy Advance SP, being developed by a Taiwanese manufacturer and trailed at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair. According to Lik-Sang, who are also showing a promo picture of the device: "The product is supposed to be market-ready within the next couple of weeks, and the primary use is to play your Famicom/NES cartridges on your GBA through the unit. Famicom cartridges are plugged in at the back of the unit, while the system sits underneath the GBA SP."
This is great and of course, as Hong Kong has once again proven: only a matter of time before you are Hax0red
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Now, the only downside; the NES cartridges are large than the GameBoy Advance itself.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Includes authentic "Blowing in cartridge action", and realistic "oh please good work this time" features.
Sounds great!
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
All those pins getting extended like that! Nintendo sure makes it hard to backport stuff like this!
feh
NES cartridges were specially designed to help the large-handed Americans grasp the cartridge. Famicom cartridges are smaller and sleeker and cannot be played in the NES machine.
The article is not clear, however it stands to reason that this adapter may only work with Famicom cartridges and not with the clumsier NES cartridges.
although it might be somewhat more illegal, maybe it would be cooler for a ROM based system. Maybe they could find a way to copy the cartridge contents onto a GBA SP cartridge and thus making the system more portable.
That's not anywhere in the article.
But hey, thanks for playing!
Ok, there's the cool factor of this, but not only would these be unwieldy (even with the smaller Famicom carts, you aren't going to carry these around in your pocket) but also resolution problems. The NES had a resolution of 256x240 while the GBA has 240x160 (http://www.pocketnes.org/faq.html. That means that right from the starta conversion has to be done and/or cropping. In fact, elsewhere on the PocketNES site, the emulator's author explains that scaling down to that resolution actually makes nearly all game text unreadable.
Straight ports are the way to go, although many of my favorite games probably will never see play on a GBA simply because they're too old and weren't released by Nintendo, who seems to be one of the few (if not the only) developers to release their classic games on the handheld.
This will drive down the cost of the Game Axe so I can get one cheaply. Portable NES competition could be a very interesting market.
Blowing in the NES/Cartridge usually was done to correct for bent pins. If this is a new connector, and doesn't use pins in the same way, then very little blowing on the cartridge is required.
Why wouldn't you just buy a GBA flash card and put an NES emulator and roms on it? You can get a few NES games on one cart and it is much more portable.
I was wondering when they were going to do somthing like that. Yeah it will make it a little bulky, but hey, who cares! We can carry megaman and mario on the clasic catridge with us! Hopefully we wont have to rig up books to keep the cartridge down anymore though....
DUKEY!
Buy a rewriteable GBA cart from a place like this. I like the EZ-Flash Advance. Download pocketNES and one of the utilities to build GBA ROMs from pocketNES and a few old NES games. Assemble them together, burn to cart, and knock yourself out. You can fit hundreds of NES games on a 128Mb cart.
Actually, IIRC, certain NES games are actually Famicom games plugged into an adapter and slapped into NES cart housings. At the moment I've fogotten which ones, but I'm sure you could look it up on Google.
But the NES cartridge is practically bigger than the GBA itself.. how would that work..? arrgg.. my brain hurts
Will I be able to use it to dump Famicom/NES ROMs through a GBA dumper?
Wholly shit, are you still around?
Lay low, it is not safe for us here. But it is good to see you alive, brother!
Thats when I knew Nintendo lied to us about saying the amount of ROM space was the main culpret behind not having bigger games.
The NES has had bankswitching since the CNROM days. The limiting factor during the "ROM shortage" was the cost of replicating mask ROMs with larger capacity; at the time, Nintendo didn't want to price Game Paks at 80 USD MSRP. Cost was also the issue in Square's decision to publish Final Fantasy VII for a CD-based system instead of the Nintendo 64; what Square wanted to do with the game couldn't be accomplished in the 128-Mibit (16-MiB) N64 carts that were affordable to replicate.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Correct. IAAGBASD[1], and the Flash2Advance carts are currently the way to go for almost anything you'd want to use a flash cart for.
[1] I am a Game Boy Advance software developer.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Inherent resolution problems create no problem. PocketNES runs 60fps whether in scaled mode (240x160 window on the NES's 256x240 pixel display) or unscaled mode (a fixed 240x213 window of the NES display, shrunk down to 240x160 with GBA hardware assistance).
Will I retire or break 10K?