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GBA Movie Player Plays NES Games From CF Card

Posted by timothy on from the simpsons-fix dept.

roadies writes "One-upping the AM3/Nintendo official GBA flash player (as previously discussed), Portagame reports that the 3rd party imported GBA Movie Player has released its second version. In a slimmer profile casing, it still plays movies and music from CF cards. (Not pre-recorded tv shows like the AM3 player either, you record and save your own content.) The best feature of the firmware update: An included NES emulater. You can download your favorite NES games to a CF card and emulate them through the player. Only catch is there is a 192K per game limit. May not be enough for the biggest NES game, but still enough for the true NES classics."

14 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. The South Shall Play Again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny
    The best feature of the firmware update: An included NES emulater.

    One o' them NES emulaters? Yee-ha! I'm-a gonna be playin' all them old classics ag'in, consarnit!

  2. Lik-Sang And Lawyers From The Big N by blueZhift · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hmmm, isn't Lik-Sang just asking to be sued by Nintendo with this update? If you want one of these new players, you'd better hurry because I just don't see how this is going to stay on the market very long. I have to admit though, I like the cool gadgets that Lik-Sang sells, but this player is definitely in a gray zone now!

    "How you decipher homebrew is up to you."

    Hmmm, we'll see!

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    To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
    1. Re:Lik-Sang And Lawyers From The Big N by gl4ss · · Score: 2, Insightful

      how? by adding some kind of protection to the system of course. they don't have any now. make it only run signed stuff or whatever. it's a surprise they didn't do it with gba already and would really be a surprise if they didn't do it with DS.

      because it's not even going to be 'backwards'(as they claim it's not successor to gba) compatible they can just whip anything they want on it.

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      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  3. Hm... by mrgreen4242 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    So am I reading this right when it says you can 'load homebrew' roms you could play backups of real GBA games as well? It would be usefull just to be able to carry around all my games on one 'cart'.

    Furethermore, it'd be worth it just for the MP3 playing, if it's decent quality, can read a good range of bitrates, and has a decent player interface. The GBASP w/o backloght goes for easily 12 hours on a charge and fits in my pocket. What more could I ask of an mp3 player?

    1. Re:Hm... by roadies · · Score: 3, Informative

      no, not GBA games. sorry. Just NES games. I think the manufacturer is being very careful. They put a 192k limit on the games (no limit on movies and music that I know of) and only allow games from the very expired NES system. I wish they'd allow for classic GB games, but since the GBA can play most existing GB cartridges anyway, I doubt we'll see that happen.

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      DS vs.
    2. Re:Hm... by mrgreen4242 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Did a little reading about this, and it sounds like the audio quality isn't very good. Plus, you have to convert your MP3s into another format to play them. Seems pretty useless.

    3. Re:Hm... by AndyBusch · · Score: 4, Informative

      Ok, what this does is load an emulator and rom into the GBA's RAM. It's not a 192k arbitary limit, but a facet of the 64kb emulator and the fact that the GBA has 256kb of RAM.

      If you really want a good NES emulator you're better off just getting a flash cart for the GBA. Life's good with those.

  4. 192 is not enough! by galaxy300 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I was completely ready to buy this until I checked out my NES ROMS folder and realized that only 1/3 of my games were under the limit. SMB 2, SMB 3, Dr. Mario, Punch Out, Castlevania 2 and 2, Megaman 3,4,5,6 - all over the limit. : (

    I do own all of those cartridges, of course. I even bought SMB 2 and 3 for GBA...I just want to play my old games on the go and I still haven't seen one of http://www.famicom-plaza.com/new/pockefamithese on the market yet.

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    seriouslyexcited.net
  5. Pocketnes by Dwedit · · Score: 4, Informative

    It includes a stock version 9.95 of PocketNES, then executes it as a multiboot game. So it gets the crippled multiboot version of pocketnes, with no save features. It is also limited to emulator+game must be 256k.

  6. Opening the software by Deliveranc3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It seems to me so many companies could get market control just by opening their software a little bit.

    Some of the integrations of this stuff are so simple that online programmers can do them by themselves and they add tonnes and tonnes of value.

    Big software just isn't listening someone needs to smack these guys around again, I sense another internet bubble around underused tech like voip, wiMax, voice integration, and free telephony.

  7. Reviews are mixed by Zaphus · · Score: 5, Informative

    The customer reviews for the product at Lik Sang, as well as the review over at ShackNews both talk about scratchy sound quality and low frame-rates. Neither talk about the emulators (since they are reviewing the earlier model, I assume) - but for the price you can't really go wrong can you ? I think this is the actual product homepage, but it isn't much more informative.

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    -- Game Development Blog
  8. Going to bemoan the inability to play my favorite by geminidomino · · Score: 4, Informative
    RPG of all time, Dragon Warrior IV(1MB), until I read this on the product homepage
    Supported NES format file, which is 200k limited. Before you play FC game, do remember to put the Pocketnes.gba file to the root directory of the CF Card. Save function is not supported. Just copy the TXT format file to the CF Card then read it on the GBA/GBA SP.


    Not much good for most of the games I'd play anyway, though maybe some Galaga or Tetris...
  9. Re:Larger size? by Ayaress · · Score: 2, Informative

    GBA ram size, probably. It only has 256k of RAM. Take off 196k (maximum ROM size), and you're left with 60k for the emulator, which is smaller than the high-accuracy emulators, but not much different than some of the old versions of Loopy.

  10. Clarification by David+E.+Smith · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've had one of these devices for a while. Not a bad little toy. I'd love to be able to just put MP3s on the flash card and go, instead of having to convert them to "GBS" (Game Boy Sound?) format, but the GBA doesn't have that much CPU.

    The article text is a bit misleading. You don't have to have one of the new, slimmer Movie Advance units to use the NES emulator feature - just update the firmware on the old one and it'll work just fine.