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."

Comments

awesome!

[revmoo]

Includes authentic "Blowing in cartridge action", and realistic "oh please good work this time" features.

Sounds great!

NES and Famicom cartridges are not the same

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

Re:NES and Famicom cartridges are not the same

[pecosdave]

I thought they were bigger because of the console design itself. At the time in the US we were suffering from the screw ups of Atari and other older console manufactures. Nintendo wanted something that didn't look like a toy and wanted to go front loading to further diferientiate itself from the competition. The cartridges were made for a front loading system. We obviously didn't have a problem with the smaller Coleco Vision, Atari 2600, or Intelivision cartridges that preceaded the NES. One of my friends in highschool was an immagrant, he had the "Family Computer" system with a ton of mostly pirated games. 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 2600 had bank switching, the pirate carts proved the NES could do it to. With the exceptions of the permanently attached controls and the pointless Mic being built into the controls I like the SNES style layout of the Family Computer much better than the NES.

Re:NES and Famicom cartridges are not the same

[GoRK]

Ah but famicom cartridges CAN be played on a US NES if you have the right adaptor.

I have one I got in Hong Kong a long time ago. It says "HoneyBee" on it and works well.

A solution looking for a problem?

[Sancho]

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.

Re:A solution looking for a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

The manufacturer of this gizmo also make a TV receiver for the GBA. I guess the unit actually contains Famicom hardware (unlicensed and guaranteed to annoy Nintendo) and generates both audio and video that is piped over to the GBA for display. The unit could then also contain some hardware to scale down the picture in a better way than what the emulators do - like the TV De Advance must do.

Re:A solution looking for a problem?

[AndyBusch]

Most likely it does have Famicom hardware in it, like the NES on SNES box did. It'll annoy Nintendo, but seems to be hard for them to squash. It'll probably scale, hopefully just on the vertical, like PocketNES.

Also, the TV de Advance was for connecting your GBA to a TV, the precursor to the GB Player. You're thinking of the AV input carts for GBA that probably also scale.

Re:A solution looking for a problem?

[AndyBusch]

I'd hardly say the text becomes unreadable. NES games used a blocky 8x8 font usually, which looks fine on PocketNES. Maybe playing Dragon Warrior'd get a bit annoying, but most games have so little text that it doesn't matter (Dodongo dislikes smoke. You can suffer through that much squashed text). You do lose a bit at the outside, but Castlevania is the only game I've played where you lose text to the side cropping. All told, a small price to pay.

I'm amazed at how many add-ons there are for the GBA. Is it simply standard enough hardware, or is there something else causing all of this?

Re:A solution looking for a problem?

[Sancho]

But PocketNes doesn't do full scaling. In unscaled mode, there is a lot cut off, but even in scaled mode some of the top and bottom is cut off. See the original link for details. When the guy says that text will be nigh unreadable, he's referring to scaling where the entire resolution is shrunk down to fit within the GBA's screen.

Re:A solution looking for a problem?

[AndyBusch]

I'm well aware of what he's referring to. I do concede you clip a bit at top and bottom too which I had not noticed. But I'm also aware that "nigh unreadable" is subjective, and was noting that I felt that the scaling did not damage the readability of most text in any meaningful way.

Hopefully. . .

[M3wThr33]

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.

Re:Hopefully. . .

[hiroshi912681]

I've actually seen a better nes clone than the game axe, it was released not too recently... called the Game Theory Admiral Famicom... it's shaped like a gameboy advance, and I think it's only about $50. If you can find a site that still sells them, please tell us. check out this article on it: http://www.nesworld.com/gametheo.htm

why not

[chill182]

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.

Re:why not

[M.C. Hampster]

Whenever a neat, legal alternative to ROM's come around, there always has to be one post that talks about "Why not just do it the illegal way?

To answer this post and all the ones that will follow in future threads:

Because some of us like to obey the law.

Re:why not

[Sylver Dragon]

Maybe I'm being stupid here, but...
What, exactly, is illegal about me dumping the ROM's from my old NES games, putting them all on a flash card with an emulator/menu program, and playing them on the GBA hardware (which I purchased legally)? Or did I miss the story about the overturning of Fair Use while I was on vacation?

Re:why not

[M.C. Hampster]

That would be perfectly legal. However, the majority of posts that talk about ROM downloading are talking about downloading ROM's you do not own. Or even downloading a ROM of a game you do own, which is still illegal. You have to rip it off yourself.

The original post only spoke of the flashing of the ROM onto a GBA flash cartridge. Since there was no mention of how the original ROM was picked up, I'm assuming they meant downloading it as 95% of the ROM's our there are obtained.

Re:why not

[NSash]

Um, because not everyone knows how to do that?

Re:why not

[chill182]

What is this 1998? I thought everyone knew by now ROMs are legal if you own the original carts. May I be the first to welcome you to the internet MC Hampster!

Yay!

[Jhonny]

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....

Re: Famicom/NES cartridge adapter

[DiscoSnorlax]

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.

My Question

[Guppy06]

Will I be able to use it to dump Famicom/NES ROMs through a GBA dumper?

ROM shortage was all about price

[yerricde]

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.

I recommend F2A

[yerricde]

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.

PocketNES doesn't slow down in scaled mode

[yerricde]

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).

Re:PocketNES doesn't slow down in scaled mode

[yerricde]

i guess the gba must have some amount of hardware scaling

To put it in simple terms, it's possible to change what address the GBA's screen starts from after each scanline. This is what PocketNES uses.