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Games Entertainment

WonderSwan Advance 123

Posted by CmdrTaco from the match-made-in-heaven dept.
pecka writes "There is an article about a guy who took apart his WonderSwan Color and inserted Gameboy Advance motherboard and screen into the WS case so he can play WS games along with GBA's ones. And yeah, it's in French so you better use Babelfish." I'd call that an impressive hack!
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WonderSwan Advance More

WonderSwan Advance

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  • Ignorants (Score:3, Interesting)

    by M3wThr33 ( 310489 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @01:56AM (#2127868) Homepage
    Man... you would think some of you people understand the overseas world of video games. The wonderswan is the brain child and swansong of Gunpei Yokoi, designer of Metroid, Kid Icarus, Game & Watch, the dubious Gameboy and Gameboy Pocket and the Virtual boy. Sadly, after the Virtual Boy he left NCL and went to Bandai to design a handheld called the WonderSwan. Featuring dual joypads serving a similar function as a Lynx's, but could also be additional buttons. It had 16 level grayscale, but held horizontal like a Game Gear. It also had PDA abilites with datebooks and calculators. The main reason it still survives in Japan is the fact their is a color version and it sports the handheld version of Final Fantasy with numerous improvements as background battlegraphics, save ANYWHERE, and the bonus game can be done to give a small amount of money upon completion. I can't recall on the status of the 2 and 3. Unfortunately, Bandai has no plans to bring it here, as Americans are much less prone to accept a new radical handheld device from any company other than the Big N. If you are wondering about the status of the illustrious designer, he passed away a few years ago in a car crash, but his innovation lives on.
    • Ignorance nothing. The big N makes the best handhelds hands down. The reason why other handhelds don't survive is cause they are total crap!!! Well the hardware was superior to the GB, GBP, and GBC......but the games for the other systems plain sucked. However the GBA is the king of portable hardware. The Lynx, Gamegear, Neo Geo Pocket, and NGPC.......games sucked, plain and simple. And I do understand the overseas world of videogames.
    • :-/ OOOPs! Sorry on my part, I spelled "there" wrong. A little anal retentiveness is in me.
  • Couple things to think about. Wonderswan is a pretty good system, especially if you are fluent in Japanese. The first three Final Fantasy games have been released, many games based on anime series, (ie. Gundam, Macross etc) have been released, and the graphics on the system are quite good. Unfortunatly, you'll have to import this one, as it's never making it over here. There is a handheld NES, I'm not sure who makes it or how much, but if you go to http://www.playthegames.com they sometimes sell them and could tell you more. PLus it's a great store to boot.
  • What I wanna know is, when are we gonna see an Amiga advance? I want my A500 handheld, dammnit! ;)
  • What is a WonderSwan??? Are they available in the US?
    • The WonderSwan is an incredibly stupidly named handheld from Bandai. It has remakes of the first few Final Fantasy games on it. This is the only reason anyone would buy one.

      The controls are among the worst I have ever experienced. I have only played Mr Driller on one of these things, and the fact that it has no D-pad, only two sets of four sharp-edged, wiggly buttons, makes even that undemanding game a physical pain to play.

      There are FIGHTING GAMES available for this system. Don't ask me how anyone is supposed to play them.

      Basically, the guy got it bass ackwards. He should be putting the wonderswan guts in the gameboy case. To get away from the horrid controls (granted, the gameboy has fewer buttons...)
  • It's great to see someone being creative with handheld gaming systems. I remember the post from awhile back of the guy who took an Atari 2600 and fit it down to handheld size. Now can someone come up with something for me to do with this Sega Gamegear or this Atari Lynx that I got sitting around?

  • GBA games ONLY (Score:5, Informative)

    by jx100 ( 453615 ) on Sunday August 05, 2001 @05:25PM (#2162481)
    The unit can ONLY play GBA games. The guy just chopped up a GBA motherboard and stuffed it into a Wonderswan case.

  • The WonderSwan FAQ (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://db.gamefaqs.com/portable/wswan/file/wonders wan_a.txt

    For those of us who haven't heard of it before.

  • This is a WonderSwan (Score:5, Informative)

    by CoreyGH ( 246060 ) on Sunday August 05, 2001 @05:31PM (#2162509) Homepage
    Here are some pics of the WonderSwan from their japanese website [channel.or.jp] for those wondering what it is. And this [channel.or.jp] is the hompage for the WonderSwan.

    • Re:This is a WonderSwan (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jonathan ( 5011 )
      What's even more bizzare is that Wizardry:The Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, which more or less invented CRPGs when it was released in 1981 (God, twenty years ago!) for the Apple ][, has been ported to it! (I can't read Japanese, but I followed the Wizardry link)

  • I hope that sounds better in Japanese (Score:5, Funny)

    by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Sunday August 05, 2001 @05:47PM (#2162570) Journal
    WonderSwan? WTH?

    Do they have a companion home console system named SuperDuck or UberSquirrel?

    I can just imagine the games they would make featuring "WonderSwan" and her sidekick "MegaGoose."

    • Oh, that's right. I forgot that Japanese people love the look and sound of English words, but many have no idea what they mean. I learned this from Dave Barry's book "Dave Barry Does Japan" (very funny book, I recommend it) which includes the following actual quotations from T-shirts worn by unsuspecting Japanese citizens:

      I am Plump Mary.
      We're Bone Nob. We're happy our original dance.
      Nurse Mentality
      We hope to always have an open
      A souvenir goods make us happy anytime. Don't you Think So?
      Boneractive Wear

      If you head over to www.engrish.com [engrish.com] you can see more examples of this hilarious stuff.

      • Boy, I thought that kind of racist Japan-bashing went out with Tojo and Yamamoto. Evidently not.
      • As funny as this seems to us, it's often a correct translation. In many asian cultures, advertisements and whatnot are very likely to say "Buy our chips and be maximum lucky and prosperous", and it's perfectly normal there, just like the sad crap we have here, but when it's translated to english and read by a westerner it looks stupid.
        • Yeah, its really just a culture gap, but you might as well get a good laugh from it...
    • Well, I guess someone was still angry from Nintendo that you had to shoot the ducks. I'll bet he's even more pissed now that his last bastion of bird recognition has been melded with his old enemy. This hacked system is the bastardization of all that guy stood for.

      I'm ashamed at the guy who did the hack; the exNinendo guy is probably jumping out a window now.
    • No no... not "SuperDuck", but "Mighty Duck" instead. Reminds me of a certain hockey team (or is it baseball?) ...

      Anyway. Stupid names.

    • Maybe. Darkwing duck was pretty big.

  • names (Score:2, Funny)

    by telstar ( 236404 )
    The Wonder Swan has almost as bad a name as Game Cube or Dreamcast. I mean, I realize that the name of the thing probably sounds like Klink Klank Klong in the native tongue, but Wonder Swan? Come on...

  • Human translation of the first few paragraphs (Score:5, Informative)

    by itarget ( 168249 ) on Sunday August 05, 2001 @07:12PM (#2162828)
    The Wonderswan Advance is a unique machine made with two consoles; the WSC and the GBA.

    It possesses two motherbards. One for connecting the controls of the original wonderswan, and the second as the heart of the unit running the games.

    These 2 boards were soldered onto each other with about 40 solder points. Normally I would have soldered at least 50 points, but techncal problems prevented me from doing so.

    The front face of the wonderswan, as you can see in the pictures, is blue-grey while the back face is transparent. You'll notice that a number of modifications were made to the unit to fit the motherboard of the GBA. The cartridge port as well as a number of components required me to enlarge the cartridge slot and make a number of holes to ensure that everything would fit properly. The final product isn't exactly of the best workmanship, though I must say that I didn't have the steadiest of hands while making it. I'm quite satisfied with the result, however; especially seeing as it's only a prototype.
    Back on the front of the console, you'll notice in the photos that the power, start and sound buttons are missing. Why? It's simply because I had make room for the GBA's screen, which is much thicker than the wonderswan's original screen. I moved the start and sound buttons to the top left directional pad's Y1 and Y2 buttons, while attaching the GBA's L&R button to the remaining two between them. Playability suffers in some games like F-Zero due to the awkward position of the L&R buttons. The game remains playable nonetheless, and I can tell you it's pretty funny seeing F-Zero running on a wonderswan!

    Concerning the plastic viewing window for the wonderswan's screen: I was afraid of losing a lot of the viewing area on the GBA's screen, but as it turns out, I didn't lose any from the sides and only lost three lines on the top and bottom.

    As you know, there's a black border surrounding the screen on the GBA to counter the effect of shadows falling on the screen from along the edges of the screen cavity. The wonderswan doesn't have this. The problem with these shadows is that it becomes hard to tell where the screen ends... but unfortunately a black border wasn't put in the wonderswan to save on screen real-estate. I think I'll add a black border; I'll lose a few more pixels but the shadows will have less of an effect and it'll improve esthetics.

    The unit only lasts a maximum of 7 hours, which is less than either of the original consoles, and that it uses two 1.5v AAA batteries.

    The weight of the unit right now is about the same as a GBC. As I said above, the wonderswan advance is very compact, even though the cartridge sticks out the back 4-5mm.

    (He then goes on to tell how he did it, and why. The short of the why is that he loves the WSC hardware but not bandai's poor support of the system)
  • *In A Deep Movie-Ad-Guy Voice-Over*:

    "By day he is an unassuming nerdy haxor boy.

    But by night he becomes:

    NULLMAN! MASTER OF WARRANTY VOIDAGE!!!"

    :)

  • how about an NES handheld? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jchristopher ( 198929 ) on Sunday August 05, 2001 @07:16PM (#2162838)
    This is not exactly on topic, but I had to throw it in here because it's just so damn cool. Here is a link [lik-sang.com] to a company selling a handheld that plays the original 8bit famicom/NES games. I can play all my games again! (NES consoles long since broken). Crazy thing is it actually takes the full NES cartridge.

    Same place has all sorts of shit imported from Asia - LCDs for your car for DVDs or Playstations, mod chips, all sorts of weird cellular stuff, etc. I don't work there or anything, just thought it was cool.

    • In fact, there is a NES-Emulator for the GBA! Check this out: http://www.nolag.com/code/gbdev/pocketnes/ [nolag.com]

      In order to play games, you need a ROM-writer [lik-sang.com] from lik-sang [lik-sang.com]

    • Since this is already off-topic...

      I got a PS2 box from Lik-Sang. You plug your monitor and speakers into it, then plug it into your PS2, sound card and video card and you can flip your monitor between computer and PS2! It was $40 bucks and was not packaged very well (two of the units were crammed into nothing more than a bubble-envelope) but they survived the trip from Hong Kong ^_^. Both units kinda went on the fritz the first time I played with them, but now they work perfect (?!??).

      Only thing with it is the colors are a little washed out (and the picture is a little blurry if you use the included VGA cable) but I like playing in 640x480. I have wished for a way to play PS2 on my Sony G400 since I got it! Since I have the G-series Sony monitor, I have an extra input and can just toggle between Debian and my PS2 from the front of the monitor itself, damn it's neat. Works great with mp3s too; PC pumps out the tunes via the rear channels and PS2 can be heard (if you want) through the front speakers! Of course it isn't all that technically impressive, it is conveneient as hell; gotta fsck that 40gig or waiting for mozilla to finish compiling? Flip to input-2 and play some PS2 or watch a DVD!

      My favorite thing is the quote that is (literally) on all 6 faces of the box: "This product will situate you in the enjoyment as in dreamland." I guess dreamland _is_ slightly blurry, so it's accurate! I wonder what nutty little phrase they came up for the GameAxe?

      Disclaimer:I don't work for Lik-Sang or anything, but I was quite nervous about ordering from them the first time. I just thought my testimonial may serve to reduce the paranoia of potenial customers. With so much cool shit, I wouldn't have been surprised if it was a scam, but I ordered anyway after reading things from a couple of professional game developers about them getting their GameBoy ROM flashers and dev kits from Lik-Sang.

      rot13 ewyrbaneq@zrpucvybg.pbz if you care, but if you say something I don't like or spam me, I'll sue you for breaking my cap'n crunch code-ring encryption! :P

    • Heh, check it out, 20.63% off if you buy 5.

      I think I'll hold out for 20.64%, personally.

  • English interview. (Score:1, Informative)

    by KingSchlong ( 314483 )
    I thought someone might be interested in this [eagb.net] interview (in English) with the guys who made the Wonderswan Advance. It contains a couple of extra titbits of information.
  • I can't imagine the point of doing this. Cramming a GBA into an original gameboy might be amusing. That handheld 2600 is cool.
    This, on the other hand, is like saying "well, with a lot of effort and some patience with the dremel, I put the motherboard from this Dell into this Compaq case. excuse the big holes and stuff, I'm not really that good at this."

    Anybody else reading Slashdot less and less?
  • This is really a cool idea. The funny thing is that I thought Wonderswan was only sold in Japan? I would love to read the sotry if it was translated in english!

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