Listen To Your Game Boy Advance

filmsmith writes "It looks like Nintendo may be interested in using the GBA to enter the PDA market and even considering itself competition for the Apple iPod. It smells of DMCA pandering, though. 'It looks like protection will be in place to ensure that even content recorded by users (through the use of a special adapter) will not be able to be shared with other users.' Planet Gamecube has the article here."

whhhhhaaaaatttt?

[sickboy_macosX]

Notice to Nintendo! Stick with what you know best...gaming consoles, you already are the Apple equivliant in the Game Console Industry. NO PDA's NO MP3 Players! Just stick with ther games!

this is normal for nintendo

[trmj]

They have never been much for sharing, even their old games. They can still profit from them and so still want to sell everything to users.

They currently still sell even their ancient NES games as playable on the GBA through the use of the e-card reader.

Just because nintendo has a great line of games and (in my opinion) a great line of consoles, doesn't mean they are a morally correct company. They have done everything from price fixing to scamming the government. They are the MS of consoles, even while MS is in the console biz,

Audio + Video do not a PDA make

[Mr_Tulip]

I fail to see how this will make the Gameboy Advance into a PDA.. Although I'd love this to happen, coz then I could claim a gameboy as a legitimate Tax Deduction =)

One thing that it lacks is a proper input device. To enter addresses and send emails etc. you need, above all, a quick and accurate way to enter text into this beastie

Re:A Few Concerns

[Anonvmous Coward]

"but who wants to watch 256 color vides?"

Ever hear of Smacker?

256 color videos have been out and acceptable for quite a long time. It's an encoding choice, not like the GBA has to dither it in real time.

propriatary media content?

[MoFoYa]

SO, if I have a large volume of audio/video files already then there is not much point to this because it wont play my current files. Unless, if I understand right, I transfer the files to their 'special' smart media cards with the codec built in.

And, what if I copy something to the device? That media belongs to me now right?
How can i archive this new media to my PC with the rest of my files if there is 'protection' from copying files?

This seems like a pointless attempt to get PDA functionality out of a piece of hardware designed to only play games.

PDA market?

[Chris Canfield]

A: the article in question says that a consortium of 3rd party companies (Toshiba, Imagica, and Bandai), none of which are related to Nintendo, have created essentially an MP3 / media player for the Game Boy Advance.

B: MP3 players for the original Game Boy have been available for many years, and never sold particularly well. This was probably due to the decompression being done in hardware, driving prices up. 40 dollars for an MP3 player isn't bad.

C: The article mentions Museum tours and Manga as potential content to be distributed on this system, none of which compete in any way with the IPod.

D: The article says you will be able to get 5 hours of audio on a 32 MB smartmedia card. Either this means the compression level will be rediculously high and the output quite, quite bad, or they are using MIDI / Mod techniques, or (and this is my personal opinion), Planet GameCube just doesn't have a factchecker on staff.

DMCA Pandering? Competition for the 20GB gee-I-sound-and-look-sleek Ipod? Are people throwing random buzzwords into stories theses days in order to get them posted? What does this even have to do with PDAs?

Come on Filmsmith and Timothy... Justify yourselves. What do you know that we don't?

P.S. The article that this article is based upon can be found, with pictures, here [excite.co.jp].

Re:this is normal for nintendo

[trmj]

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of nintendo and have never owned another console (because all my friends had them and I would use theirs).

However, some quick googling turned up this link [bbc.co.uk] that shows the most recent price fixing by nintendo, occurring just last year. Some more searching will uncover much more.

Re:Expansion Again

[drinkypoo]

A GBA with a bluetooth or 802.11 module and perhaps some IR or something would be an ideal "smart home" controller. It's got a few buttons that can be used to navigate menus in some standard way. You could basically use it as some kind of thin client for custom content, maybe with a little flash player if you wanted to get really froggy.

It would be considerably cheaper than doing it with any other platform I can think of if your desired feature set includes a color screen and ready retail availability (IE, no starting with anything used.) The only problem is the lighting issue, which does raise the price somewhat. The newer lit model may improve on this issue.

It would be nice to have a cart with some flash, fairly high-speed IR, and bluetooth or 802.11. I don't really care which, 802.11 is probably more convenient in that people have them already, moreso than bluetooth gateways.

Re:A Few Concerns

[Anonymous Coward]

True, the speakers are bad, but if you use headphones its a completely different matter.

Gameparks GP32 has it.

[umai]

Well, you can get Gameparks' GP32 then. It has 133Mhz, 320x240@16bit, there is a MP3 Player, a DivX3 Player, Smartmedia slot built in, loads of full speed emulators (SMS, NES, Scumm, Sarien, GB, C64, MSX, C16, ZX), load of nearly full speed emulators being worked on (pcengine, genesis, snes) and even Linux ported to it. Some people work on a GBA emulator even, but that will be hard to do 100% right, although the GP32 has an ARM tdmi9, so they try to execute GBA code directly and use the dma to trap hardware calls. And be reminded that this is a handheld game, it has a microswitch joystick, much better than gba's joypad and way ahead any PDA's unusable directional pad.

What it is really for...

[jesus_watkins]

From the translation of the overview listed on the manufacturer's website [excite.co.jp] it is immediately clear what this device is for. See the quote below.

On printing a popular character on a skeleton body, SmartMedia is again born on a media card with familiarity. By this character SmartMedia, deployment of the limited article with which a media card is connected with a character to contents is created. Moreover, the possibility as a promotion youth of institutional advertising or an event is also investigated.