They meant the best they'd ever had, not the best anyone had ever had. Besides, counterstrike doesn't get 100,000 people in one game; you're talking about 100,000 across all games. There are MMORPGs which do get these kind of numbers, though.
Arguably, some of the networked MUSHes have gotten numbers like this for over a decade, but hey.
Of course, to be a complete spaz about details, Droids wasn't the first either. Droids was the first half-hour-length cartoon to feature Star Wars characters as recurring characters, but various characters made cameos and parody cameos previous to droids, and they had all been in animated commercials.
Why the hell would Sony "transform and restructure" itself? Sony freaking OWNS the console market (maybe expect in North America, but then again they still are #1 there).
They pretty much own the console market here too. What you forget is that the PlayStation 2 has been over one hundred percent of their profits (that's right) for more than two years now. They *need* to restructure because they're losing ground as the untouchables of the consumer electronics market. They're not trying to upgrade their console presence; they're trying to fold their console presence back into a domination of the portable market.
There's a reason Kutaragi has been calling this the Walkman of the future. Music, Video, Games, Portable. If it's what it wants to be, it's five years of automatic Sony dominance, and Nintendo's death knell.
I would be worried that it would get scratched easily.
Use a $0.50 film cover. That's what they're for. (If you owned a Palm Pilot before the Palm 3, you know what I'm talking about.)
My guess is that the directional buttons/pad is/are analog, because I would think that putting an analog stick on a handheld would tend to break off or get damaged.
I remember when people began to say that about the first batch of Dual Shocks, just because the ones on the n64 were flimsy.
There also don't seem to be any shoulder buttons
There are two. Those concept shots aren't the best.
so if they plan to port PS1 games,
Why would they? The thing is a lot closer to the PS2 in power. 2 MIPS R4Ks at 333mHz, 10 meg of ram, dedicated MPEG4 decoding, spline/nurb based graphics, hardware clipping, tesselation, hardware bezier rendering, a nearly 2g disc, a memory stick, and USB2? That ain't no PS. (The PS1 is the earlier semiportable. It's a shame they changed what PSX meant.)
and it being Sony I bet it will have good battery life
Five and one half to six hours on a charge.
(my guess is LithIon).
Nickel Metal Hydride, actually. Did you even look for stats before guessing? That's been public for months.
Wouldn't it be cool if they released a rewriteable disc for the thing
Power requirements would be prohibitive. Besides, Sony has a vested interest in keeping this disc unwritable by the masses.
so that you could "copy" your DVDs to it to watch on the go
Memory sticks are more than big enough. Why not just use those? I mean, besides the cost.
It will never happen, but maybe some 3rd party will do it!
You cannot release a disc which is writable for a read-only drive. There's no way to seperate what a read scan is from what a write scan is. Sorry. You'll need hardware support, and I don't expect that to be forthcoming.
Much more of an issue is the size of the chess playbook. For that, systems which have cartridges - and since SD and so forth are common these days, that does include PDAs - have a big win.
You seem to be agreeing with me. The extra memory available with most PDAs give them an edge.
Nonono. Playbooks can be in ROM. Gameboy carts are bigger than the RAM available in the tungsten t3. You don't need that much RAM do do a depth-first search of a play tree.
As far as computing strength, more important to me than raw ELO is how 'human' the program can become. Few programs on PC make much headway in this category, much less PDA and even less so on the gameboy.
I feel the same way. That said, this is less about the hardware and more about the software; there are a number of kohonen network chess programs which can have things like greed, vengeance and defensiveness tweaked. If that's what you'd like, you're pretty much tied to the PC at the moment.
You also have another clunky gadget to carry around and most adults feel kind of stupid puttering around with a gameboy in public.
This doesn't defend the Zodiac in any way.
Modern PDAs exceed the screen resolution of the GBA
Actually, if you check Palm's current lineup, more than half of them still have the traditional 160x160 screen, which is smaller than the GBA's 240x160. You don't beat that until you get to the midpoint between the AGB and Zodiac's prices.
Arguably, the video card driving the screen is as important as the screen itself. The tapwave has a huge double win here - in my opinion, its only major win. But you can do a *whole* *lot* *more* with the Gameboy's screen than you can with a normal Palm Pilot.
I stand by the statement that PDAs serve this market very well.
I didn't say they didn't fit the specific needs of chess well. In fact, I admitted that they were slightly better. That said, even though the demographic groups are completely different, check the numbers: far more people carry gameboys than PDAs.
Frankly, as an adult, a software engineer, I feel more confortable using a gameboy than a PDA. I don't do anything that I need a PDA for; I can wait until I get back to the office from lunch to work, and I have a computer at home; I don't need to write code while I'm driving. Plane trips are a nice two hour break, and anyone which tries to steal them from me loses, automatically.
All I ever do is play games on my Palm, and that makes me feel pretentious. And besides, the games suck.
GBA is overkill for this market.
That's true. Here's an observation: a real car would be overkill for the market serviced by Power Wheels. If you can find a whole bunch of businessmen which will shell out $300 to play games they can already play on their laptops and palmtops, great. But the ones which won't carry a Gameboy also won't carry a Zodiac; to look at it you wouldn't think it was a PDA, and that's the thing they're worried about.
I retain my doubts that people which would feel stupid holding a gameboy actually play video games, much less frequently enough to duplicate hardware they almost certainly already have if in the purchaser demographic, wasting $300, just to get a better controller layout.
These are all very pretty arguments. When you put them together, you see your sales demographic shrink to zero. I've already come to the same conclusions on these topics that you have.
Well, there's certainly that. If you're about writing freeware games, PDA is possibly a better market than GBA. That said, I honestly wonder if more people use emulators than game on PDAs. I'm involved in development for both, and I see more noise from the GBA camp (and about equivalent noise per person.)
No, 720 line progressive is not higher quality than 1080 line interlaced. And the reason I wasn't talking about 1080p is that the XBox doesn't do it.
33% more screen space in exchange for slower refresh is and always has been a win, or interlacing wouldn't be well known today. Please reserve the snide comments until you've spent a bit of time thinking them through.
The Tapwave has a chance, where the GP32, etc did not. The Zodiac- at $300 and $400 for the 32 MB and 128 MB models respectively- make sense to buy as PDAs.
Well, sure, until you look at what the same prices net you from Sony, or Palm, or Handspring, or Compaq. I mean, yes, in a void, these would be great PDAs for the money. Compared to video game systems, these are excellent PDAs for the money.
And compared to other PDAs, these PDAs are less than lackluster for the money.
Besides, to be brutally frank, I'd prefer a Clie for gaming. It has a keyboard. That's critical to the kind of games I enjoy. Those of us which disagree with me tend to prefer the kind of games that the AGB offers.
Look, when it comes down to it, you can get as much PDA for $200 and you can get way more gaming for $70. Why spend more to fuse them into one case, when the results are disappointing in both ends? Keyboards matter to PDAs and game libraries matter to consoles; the Zodiac has neither.
they've some features that most PalmOS PDAs don't have and a few that no other POS PDA has.
After graphics acceleration, I have a hard time identifying said features. Would you be so kind as to fill me in?
But, if they market it as a PDA that has some very convenient perks- like having real gaming controls, dual SD slots, a big screen, a nice "GPU-" then it could succeed, although within a niche
This is a point we probably diverge on. Palm Pilots are already a niche market, catering largely to CEOs and other power toy people. In my admittedly limited experience, I can think of very few people which belong to both that group and the video game group.
And if I bought a Zodiac, there's only a very small chance I'd buy any Zodiac-specific games
This is a problem. The Clie and Treo are incredibly polished machines. In my opinion, the Zodiac will not be able to compete as a PDA.
Coding, SSH/telnet/VNC, writing papers, web, email, etc.
Without a keyboard? You actually program with graffiti? I have a hard time coding with the little folding *keyboard*.
Out of what I do, I spend the least amount on playing games.
I find that most of the Zodiac partisans are saying this.:(
The good gaming button setup is a perk for someone like me
The real question is whether it's worth your keyboard.
That fact that most people can't figure this out for themselves means that Tapwave isn't doing the marketing right, or that most people haven't owned a PDA. I think both are at fault, especially the latter. This thing shouldn't be compared to the GBA so much as it should to other PDAs in its class.
I disagree. If you're chasing two small markets and don't service either particularly well, and if one is absolutely flooded with devices but the other a virtual monopoly, you go after the monopoly every time. The payoff is much bigger.
Ah, what a surprise, a thief wants a system that facilitates thieving. And this after talking about adulthood. (le sigh)
then i'll watch a movie on it.
I bet you will. Probably five other people in the country too. Did you realize that VCD players have been under $100 at fry's for years? People don't want portable movies like that. They just aren't convenient.
then i'll use it as a PDA.
Wow, you mean you $300 device can do what my $70 and $80 devices do? I don't know what to do.
and i won't be crying when the other kids in your study hall have something different, because i'm not in freaking middleschool.
Ah, yes. And this is why you will never be a successful video game publisher: you don't know your market.
then you will be able to buy it in stores.
They said that about the GP32, the WonderSwan, and the Cybiko. Only the Cybiko ever made it to any store, and then only one non-specialty store, Walmart.
And guess what? That wasn't enough.
Come on, name me one independant video game platform that has ever, ever made it. Just one.
Ah yes, I haven't been hearing this for the last ten years. The nGage feel nice around your neck like that?
Here's a hint. If the most successful ergonomics and usage company on earth can't find a control layout that's good both for gaming and phoning, it probably doesn't exist.
Other slashdot posters point out that the Psion 1 predates the Portfolio. I choose simply to question the size of your palm; if you're big enough, ENIAC was a handheld.
Ever tried to write a letter with a PS2? Or run a database?
Nothing amazes me more than how quickly you forget that the PS2 sells as a licensed linux box, has USB and FireWire, and so on.
No, modding the XBOX to run Linux does not count.
But buying a Sony Linux PS/2 *does*.
But can the GBA store your appointments?
No. Also, my car doesn't wash clothes. Yes, you can use a palm or a PPC to play games. BUt they all suck.
If you want these things that badly, buy a Zire and an AGB. Together they're smaller than an iPaq, and you can lend the kid the gameboy to shut them up.
That's a mighty expensive copy of Snakes you bought. (Nokia now has the gall to call that one of their classic games.) Or bowling. Or whatever the hell else you play with 9 and #.
In the meantime, $185 buys you a gameboy and six games. Go home, chuck, until you make the numbers work. (Also, the screen on your phone sucks. Badly enough that a gameboy enthusiast will point it out.:D )
Ah yes, a Macintosh user trying to tell someone else - anyone else! - that there's a dearth of software on their platform.
Thank you; I needed that. I think there might be more software for the Virtual Boy than there is for the Mawkintush. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised were it that the Game and Watch was a contender.
Psion not old. Ug woke from sleep, found two potato next to cave. Ug find shiny wires, put them between potatos; get shocked. Ug know potential for 1) potato 2) ??? 3) profit, so ug begin to write games for Potato.
In Dreamcast, Sega license potato from Ug and build VMU around it. Ug make lots of $10. Ug rich enough to eat at resteraunt once. Happy.
(Ten points silently awarded to anyone which understands why I chose the VMU.;) )
The original GBA is an entry level machine that's still being sold because the manufacturing for it is already put together. It's more comfortable for big hands, but the not-backlit screen is a *huge* problem. Actually, the screen is the only way in which the SP is superior; I dislike it otherwise. If you're confident, an Afterburner looks better than the SP's backlight does, but voids your warranty, and if you're not careful you might get an air bubble under your screen (ugly, not damaging.) Moreover, there are palette differences in old games which make them look dumb on new hardware; an afterburner can be turned off, or with creative hardware, even just down.
But if it's for someone else, shell out the extra $20. The backlight is very important. The old AGB is kind of hard to see if you're not in the sun or directly under florescent lighting. Penny Arcade had it right.
The interface is superior (a stylus and a touch-screen display)
True.
and I suspect the extra memory and computing power that is typically available on a PDA makes them better suited for chess.
Not really. Those physical boards they sold in the 80s and 90s are based on things not a tenth as powerful as the ARM in the AGB, and they're rated sometimes as high as 2100 or 2200. You need a very clueful programmer to write code for the ARM that'll keep up, but that code *will* keep up.
Much more of an issue is the size of the chess playbook. For that, systems which have cartridges - and since SD and so forth are common these days, that does include PDAs - have a big win. This means that the low end Palms are sort of the shitstick, and the problem is, that's where competition with the gameboy ends.
Besides, the Gameboy is just more *comfortable*.
Not to mention the fairly low graphics requirements which means having enough resolution to effectively display the board in grayscale. My old Visor did a decent job at 160x160 until it stopped working.
Of course, for $70 (or $95 backlit) you could have a color 240x160 screen, a good sound card, and a machine which happens to have an otherwise very strong game library.
The loss of the touchscreen does suck, but not *that* much. I mean, the Apple ][ was great for chess, too...
I think for many people who are looking to be entertained when waiting for a plane, strategy games and puzzles do the trick.
Uh, so get strategy and puzzle games. It's not like they're exactly hard to find for the GBA.
The thing to also remember is that you can get more games for PDAs and PCs. Why? because the cost of entry for game programming on a PDA or PC is lower.
I would contest that the difference is that people don't have a clue just how easy it is to write GBA games. Go here and learn. (or here or here.)
Any joe can get a compiler and write a game for a PC or a PDA.
It took me almost 20 minutes to get PRC-Tools working. VisualHAM was up and running after the installer, which also has good music. DevKitAdvance and the SGADE are similarly easy to use if your'e already used to GCC.
They don't need proprietary development software or testing/emulation systems
The Palm Pilot SDK is CodeWarrior dependant, actually, which is the reason I avoided it for so long.
they don't need to buy and license ROMs from Nintendo
This is only a problem if you live in the fantasy world of making money off of your video games.
What we really need is an open alternative to the Gameboy, something that had a free development environment and connects to the PC with a USB cable to download games, yet remains cheap as a GBA (of course, things like the GBA are usually cheap because it is subsidised but you get the idea). You can even still have the rom slot so commercial game companies can still sell boxed games for it.
Ah, yes. And we see how well that keeps working. Viva la Indrema! I'm sure someone will get it to work soon.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this insightful? The Japan machine isn't the china machine, and this guy asks which is it?
Are the metamoderators asleep?
Good, but not the best
They meant the best they'd ever had, not the best anyone had ever had. Besides, counterstrike doesn't get 100,000 people in one game; you're talking about 100,000 across all games. There are MMORPGs which do get these kind of numbers, though.
Arguably, some of the networked MUSHes have gotten numbers like this for over a decade, but hey.
Of course, to be a complete spaz about details, Droids wasn't the first either. Droids was the first half-hour-length cartoon to feature Star Wars characters as recurring characters, but various characters made cameos and parody cameos previous to droids, and they had all been in animated commercials.
Why the hell would Sony "transform and restructure" itself? Sony freaking OWNS the console market (maybe expect in North America, but then again they still are #1 there).
They pretty much own the console market here too. What you forget is that the PlayStation 2 has been over one hundred percent of their profits (that's right) for more than two years now. They *need* to restructure because they're losing ground as the untouchables of the consumer electronics market. They're not trying to upgrade their console presence; they're trying to fold their console presence back into a domination of the portable market.
There's a reason Kutaragi has been calling this the Walkman of the future. Music, Video, Games, Portable. If it's what it wants to be, it's five years of automatic Sony dominance, and Nintendo's death knell.
An expansion port is needed if the PSP is going to be able to compete with the unique little gizmos that Nintendo can put on GBA cartridges
You mean like the USB port and Memory Stick port?
Next thing you know, it'll need a screen to compete with those wacky TV gizmos.
But 'regional code system'?
Yes, rather like the PSOne, the Saturn, DVDs, and a variety of other things.
Has this honestly ever impacted you in any way?
I would be worried that it would get scratched easily.
Use a $0.50 film cover. That's what they're for. (If you owned a Palm Pilot before the Palm 3, you know what I'm talking about.)
My guess is that the directional buttons/pad is/are analog, because I would think that putting an analog stick on a handheld would tend to break off or get damaged.
I remember when people began to say that about the first batch of Dual Shocks, just because the ones on the n64 were flimsy.
There also don't seem to be any shoulder buttons
There are two. Those concept shots aren't the best.
so if they plan to port PS1 games,
Why would they? The thing is a lot closer to the PS2 in power. 2 MIPS R4Ks at 333mHz, 10 meg of ram, dedicated MPEG4 decoding, spline/nurb based graphics, hardware clipping, tesselation, hardware bezier rendering, a nearly 2g disc, a memory stick, and USB2? That ain't no PS. (The PS1 is the earlier semiportable. It's a shame they changed what PSX meant.)
and it being Sony I bet it will have good battery life
Five and one half to six hours on a charge.
(my guess is LithIon).
Nickel Metal Hydride, actually. Did you even look for stats before guessing? That's been public for months.
Wouldn't it be cool if they released a rewriteable disc for the thing
Power requirements would be prohibitive. Besides, Sony has a vested interest in keeping this disc unwritable by the masses.
so that you could "copy" your DVDs to it to watch on the go
Memory sticks are more than big enough. Why not just use those? I mean, besides the cost.
It will never happen, but maybe some 3rd party will do it!
You cannot release a disc which is writable for a read-only drive. There's no way to seperate what a read scan is from what a write scan is. Sorry. You'll need hardware support, and I don't expect that to be forthcoming.
Much more of an issue is the size of the chess playbook. For that, systems which have cartridges - and since SD and so forth are common these days, that does include PDAs - have a big win.
You seem to be agreeing with me. The extra memory available with most PDAs give them an edge.
Nonono. Playbooks can be in ROM. Gameboy carts are bigger than the RAM available in the tungsten t3. You don't need that much RAM do do a depth-first search of a play tree.
As far as computing strength, more important to me than raw ELO is how 'human' the program can become. Few programs on PC make much headway in this category, much less PDA and even less so on the gameboy.
I feel the same way. That said, this is less about the hardware and more about the software; there are a number of kohonen network chess programs which can have things like greed, vengeance and defensiveness tweaked. If that's what you'd like, you're pretty much tied to the PC at the moment.
You also have another clunky gadget to carry around and most adults feel kind of stupid puttering around with a gameboy in public.
This doesn't defend the Zodiac in any way.
Modern PDAs exceed the screen resolution of the GBA
Actually, if you check Palm's current lineup, more than half of them still have the traditional 160x160 screen, which is smaller than the GBA's 240x160. You don't beat that until you get to the midpoint between the AGB and Zodiac's prices.
Arguably, the video card driving the screen is as important as the screen itself. The tapwave has a huge double win here - in my opinion, its only major win. But you can do a *whole* *lot* *more* with the Gameboy's screen than you can with a normal Palm Pilot.
I stand by the statement that PDAs serve this market very well.
I didn't say they didn't fit the specific needs of chess well. In fact, I admitted that they were slightly better. That said, even though the demographic groups are completely different, check the numbers: far more people carry gameboys than PDAs.
Frankly, as an adult, a software engineer, I feel more confortable using a gameboy than a PDA. I don't do anything that I need a PDA for; I can wait until I get back to the office from lunch to work, and I have a computer at home; I don't need to write code while I'm driving. Plane trips are a nice two hour break, and anyone which tries to steal them from me loses, automatically.
All I ever do is play games on my Palm, and that makes me feel pretentious. And besides, the games suck.
GBA is overkill for this market.
That's true. Here's an observation: a real car would be overkill for the market serviced by Power Wheels. If you can find a whole bunch of businessmen which will shell out $300 to play games they can already play on their laptops and palmtops, great. But the ones which won't carry a Gameboy also won't carry a Zodiac; to look at it you wouldn't think it was a PDA, and that's the thing they're worried about.
I retain my doubts that people which would feel stupid holding a gameboy actually play video games, much less frequently enough to duplicate hardware they almost certainly already have if in the purchaser demographic, wasting $300, just to get a better controller layout.
These are all very pretty arguments. When you put them together, you see your sales demographic shrink to zero. I've already come to the same conclusions on these topics that you have.
In my mind, this is the Zodiac's death knell.
Well, there's certainly that. If you're about writing freeware games, PDA is possibly a better market than GBA. That said, I honestly wonder if more people use emulators than game on PDAs. I'm involved in development for both, and I see more noise from the GBA camp (and about equivalent noise per person.)
That said, you've got a good argument here.
No, 720 line progressive is not higher quality than 1080 line interlaced. And the reason I wasn't talking about 1080p is that the XBox doesn't do it.
33% more screen space in exchange for slower refresh is and always has been a win, or interlacing wouldn't be well known today. Please reserve the snide comments until you've spent a bit of time thinking them through.
The Tapwave has a chance, where the GP32, etc did not. The Zodiac- at $300 and $400 for the 32 MB and 128 MB models respectively- make sense to buy as PDAs.
:(
Well, sure, until you look at what the same prices net you from Sony, or Palm, or Handspring, or Compaq. I mean, yes, in a void, these would be great PDAs for the money. Compared to video game systems, these are excellent PDAs for the money.
And compared to other PDAs, these PDAs are less than lackluster for the money.
Besides, to be brutally frank, I'd prefer a Clie for gaming. It has a keyboard. That's critical to the kind of games I enjoy. Those of us which disagree with me tend to prefer the kind of games that the AGB offers.
Look, when it comes down to it, you can get as much PDA for $200 and you can get way more gaming for $70. Why spend more to fuse them into one case, when the results are disappointing in both ends? Keyboards matter to PDAs and game libraries matter to consoles; the Zodiac has neither.
they've some features that most PalmOS PDAs don't have and a few that no other POS PDA has.
After graphics acceleration, I have a hard time identifying said features. Would you be so kind as to fill me in?
But, if they market it as a PDA that has some very convenient perks- like having real gaming controls, dual SD slots, a big screen, a nice "GPU-" then it could succeed, although within a niche
This is a point we probably diverge on. Palm Pilots are already a niche market, catering largely to CEOs and other power toy people. In my admittedly limited experience, I can think of very few people which belong to both that group and the video game group.
And if I bought a Zodiac, there's only a very small chance I'd buy any Zodiac-specific games
This is a problem. The Clie and Treo are incredibly polished machines. In my opinion, the Zodiac will not be able to compete as a PDA.
Coding, SSH/telnet/VNC, writing papers, web, email, etc.
Without a keyboard? You actually program with graffiti? I have a hard time coding with the little folding *keyboard*.
Out of what I do, I spend the least amount on playing games.
I find that most of the Zodiac partisans are saying this.
The good gaming button setup is a perk for someone like me
The real question is whether it's worth your keyboard.
That fact that most people can't figure this out for themselves means that Tapwave isn't doing the marketing right, or that most people haven't owned a PDA. I think both are at fault, especially the latter. This thing shouldn't be compared to the GBA so much as it should to other PDAs in its class.
I disagree. If you're chasing two small markets and don't service either particularly well, and if one is absolutely flooded with devices but the other a virtual monopoly, you go after the monopoly every time. The payoff is much bigger.
Yes, it can, with its linux distro, or as a hidden game on over a dozen discs.
Nice try, son. Maybe next time try pointing out that a PDA doesn't need a TV or a wall outlet.
i'd rather get this thing and play ROMS
Ah, what a surprise, a thief wants a system that facilitates thieving. And this after talking about adulthood. (le sigh)
then i'll watch a movie on it.
I bet you will. Probably five other people in the country too. Did you realize that VCD players have been under $100 at fry's for years? People don't want portable movies like that. They just aren't convenient.
then i'll use it as a PDA.
Wow, you mean you $300 device can do what my $70 and $80 devices do? I don't know what to do.
and i won't be crying when the other kids in your study hall have something different, because i'm not in freaking middleschool.
Ah, yes. And this is why you will never be a successful video game publisher: you don't know your market.
then you will be able to buy it in stores.
They said that about the GP32, the WonderSwan, and the Cybiko. Only the Cybiko ever made it to any store, and then only one non-specialty store, Walmart.
And guess what? That wasn't enough.
Come on, name me one independant video game platform that has ever, ever made it. Just one.
> plus $500 a year in upgrades ... a Mac.
> That's why I have
(blinkblink)
I'm sorry. It's been so long since MS has charged me for my OS upgrades that I'm almost unable to point out how inverted this is.
Please don't make me stick up for M$. Please? I mean, if you're going to be a zealot, could you at least make things a little harder to shoot down?
Ah yes, I haven't been hearing this for the last ten years. The nGage feel nice around your neck like that?
Here's a hint. If the most successful ergonomics and usage company on earth can't find a control layout that's good both for gaming and phoning, it probably doesn't exist.
Back into the cave for you.
Other slashdot posters point out that the Psion 1 predates the Portfolio. I choose simply to question the size of your palm; if you're big enough, ENIAC was a handheld.
Now, where'd I put that absinthe?
Hmmm, Zodiac anyone?
Nope. Sorry. Just you.
Ever tried to write a letter with a PS2? Or run a database?
Nothing amazes me more than how quickly you forget that the PS2 sells as a licensed linux box, has USB and FireWire, and so on.
No, modding the XBOX to run Linux does not count.
But buying a Sony Linux PS/2 *does*.
But can the GBA store your appointments?
No. Also, my car doesn't wash clothes. Yes, you can use a palm or a PPC to play games. BUt they all suck.
If you want these things that badly, buy a Zire and an AGB. Together they're smaller than an iPaq, and you can lend the kid the gameboy to shut them up.
Also, you can play Zelda instead of Solitaire.
$150 for my cell phone and $35 for a data cable
:D )
That's a mighty expensive copy of Snakes you bought. (Nokia now has the gall to call that one of their classic games.) Or bowling. Or whatever the hell else you play with 9 and #.
In the meantime, $185 buys you a gameboy and six games. Go home, chuck, until you make the numbers work. (Also, the screen on your phone sucks. Badly enough that a gameboy enthusiast will point it out.
Ah yes, a Macintosh user trying to tell someone else - anyone else! - that there's a dearth of software on their platform.
Thank you; I needed that. I think there might be more software for the Virtual Boy than there is for the Mawkintush. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised were it that the Game and Watch was a contender.
Psion not old. Ug woke from sleep, found two potato next to cave. Ug find shiny wires, put them between potatos; get shocked. Ug know potential for 1) potato 2) ??? 3) profit, so ug begin to write games for Potato.
;) )
In Dreamcast, Sega license potato from Ug and build VMU around it. Ug make lots of $10. Ug rich enough to eat at resteraunt once. Happy.
(Ten points silently awarded to anyone which understands why I chose the VMU.
The original GBA is an entry level machine that's still being sold because the manufacturing for it is already put together. It's more comfortable for big hands, but the not-backlit screen is a *huge* problem. Actually, the screen is the only way in which the SP is superior; I dislike it otherwise. If you're confident, an Afterburner looks better than the SP's backlight does, but voids your warranty, and if you're not careful you might get an air bubble under your screen (ugly, not damaging.) Moreover, there are palette differences in old games which make them look dumb on new hardware; an afterburner can be turned off, or with creative hardware, even just down.
But if it's for someone else, shell out the extra $20. The backlight is very important. The old AGB is kind of hard to see if you're not in the sun or directly under florescent lighting. Penny Arcade had it right.
A) I didn't see any game in this article that isn't possible on the GBA.
Of course, such a game isn't hard to come up with. The Civilization series is a good example: a quarter meg of RAM just ain't much.
The interface is superior (a stylus and a touch-screen display)
True.
and I suspect the extra memory and computing power that is typically available on a PDA makes them better suited for chess.
Not really. Those physical boards they sold in the 80s and 90s are based on things not a tenth as powerful as the ARM in the AGB, and they're rated sometimes as high as 2100 or 2200. You need a very clueful programmer to write code for the ARM that'll keep up, but that code *will* keep up.
Much more of an issue is the size of the chess playbook. For that, systems which have cartridges - and since SD and so forth are common these days, that does include PDAs - have a big win. This means that the low end Palms are sort of the shitstick, and the problem is, that's where competition with the gameboy ends.
Besides, the Gameboy is just more *comfortable*.
Not to mention the fairly low graphics requirements which means having enough resolution to effectively display the board in grayscale. My old Visor did a decent job at 160x160 until it stopped working.
Of course, for $70 (or $95 backlit) you could have a color 240x160 screen, a good sound card, and a machine which happens to have an otherwise very strong game library.
The loss of the touchscreen does suck, but not *that* much. I mean, the Apple ][ was great for chess, too...
I think for many people who are looking to be entertained when waiting for a plane, strategy games and puzzles do the trick.
Uh, so get strategy and puzzle games. It's not like they're exactly hard to find for the GBA.
PDAs are more than capable for this segment.
I'm not sure that I agree.
The thing to also remember is that you can get more games for PDAs and PCs. Why? because the cost of entry for game programming on a PDA or PC is lower.
Er. GCC, VisualBoy Advance, (checks wallet) = Free.
I would contest that the difference is that people don't have a clue just how easy it is to write GBA games. Go here and learn. (or here or here.)
Any joe can get a compiler and write a game for a PC or a PDA.
It took me almost 20 minutes to get PRC-Tools working. VisualHAM was up and running after the installer, which also has good music. DevKitAdvance and the SGADE are similarly easy to use if your'e already used to GCC.
They don't need proprietary development software or testing/emulation systems
The Palm Pilot SDK is CodeWarrior dependant, actually, which is the reason I avoided it for so long.
they don't need to buy and license ROMs from Nintendo
This is only a problem if you live in the fantasy world of making money off of your video games.
What we really need is an open alternative to the Gameboy, something that had a free development environment and connects to the PC with a USB cable to download games, yet remains cheap as a GBA (of course, things like the GBA are usually cheap because it is subsidised but you get the idea). You can even still have the rom slot so commercial game companies can still sell boxed games for it.
Ah, yes. And we see how well that keeps working. Viva la Indrema! I'm sure someone will get it to work soon.
(sigh) No I'm not.