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Games Entertainment

Portable N64 129

Posted by Hemos from the excellent-work dept.
Tha_Zanthrax writes "After the portable PlayStation a while ago, now there is a guy who built a Portable Nintendo 64. He already made a portable NES which he is now 'upgrading'. Cool, hacking your own hack."
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Portable N64

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  • So, how long will it be until we see portable PS2s and then an XBOX? That would be cool.
    • Given the HW in the X-Box (Intel PIII CPU, nVidia GPU, IDE HDD, SDRAM, etc.), I'd have to say that a properly configured Dell Inspiron 8000 (GeForce 2 Go, PIII >1 GHz, etc.) could be made into a portable X-Box with SW work.
      • i wont make the mistake of saying "impossible", but i do feel ok about saying "highly fucking unlikely, given the hardware you mention"

        1) the xbox GPU is a GF3 type core with a few extra units that the GF3 doesn't have. In other words, the XBox GPU is a more powerful one than any nVidia product you can get your hands on. A GF2 Go wont cut it. Not at all.

        2) XBox is UMA.

        3) XBox kernel + game code is much much smaller than any mainstream PC OS, and gets to live in kernel mode. Compare that to an emulator running on a host OS.

    • Portable XBOX?
      Can you say laptop?
    • I can make a portable XBox. So can you. Just take a pile of dog shit and put it in a small paper bag.
    • Probably as soon as we can all lift twenty pounds comfortably and hold it in front of our faces for five-ten hours at a time without our arms falling off.
    • that's it, i'm going out right now to make my portable odyssey pong!
      • Actually - that isn't a bad idea - back during the 80's, when everyone and his brother was competing with Atari (it seemed), a lot of small pong systems were developed. In fact, at one time there was a "pong-on-a-chip" made (forget which manufacturer) that required very few external parts. Your idea, in fact, would not be unfeasible - and if built, I bet, would instantly be a "classic hack", at least with the /. crowd...
  • What's so grand about a portable N64? You could just as easily make a portable PS2 or portable X-box or Gamecube or even a Dreamcast. A portable SNES would be better. At least the games on SNES you didn't have to actually 'sit down and play' to have fun with them.
    • There is already a portable SNES. It's called Game Boy Advance.

      Though, I tell ya, I'd rather carry around a 13" TV than try to make out what's going on on that etch-a-sketch screen of the GBA.

      - DDT
    • For one, the new tiny LCD adds a further degree of difficulty to 4-player games!

      And I thought a damn 13" TV was bad enough...
    • They have that already. It's called the Game Boy Advance. (Well, dual SNES/NES, looking at the games they're releasing...)
  • Not really in the spirit of things, are we? Don't you know that no proper Nintendo unit has a backlight?
    • Um, Gameboy light perhaps?
      :)
    • While this is currently true for the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance (it really needs a backlight), Nintendo actually made the Gameboy Pocket Light in 1998, but it was a Japan-only release.

      The Pocket Light had the same size and shape as the later Gameboy Color model, but had a backlight not unlike indiglo watches.

      everyplace [everyplace.net]

  • What's the point? (Score:1, Troll)

    by mosch ( 204 )
    Maybe I'm just dumb, but what's the point of this? That time could've been spent doing something truly useful, instead of making a game-system slightly smaller, and DC powered.

    Why not just use the time to help port Linux to the N64 instead?

    • Think about it, you're sitting on an airplane on a long flight. You could play a game-boy with the small screen and sub-par graphics. Or, you could pull out and N64 and start playing it. You could maybe even do some 2 or 3 player games. How cool would that be?

      I don't think I would ever spend the time to actually make one of these, but it would be cool to have one.
      • the playstation has already been 'portablized' and is soooo much more entertaining, if just because of the selection and the Final Fantasies.


        N64 is a pointless system compared to improving the portable playstation stuff ;o)

    • I would be very suprised if the unit wasn't DC powered the whole time. He is just using a DC source instead of AC with a transformer/rectifier block.

      The real benifit is that after you have a portable version, and linux ported to it you can use it as a linux powered pda :)
    • Because that's hard. He's doing something really easy (comparatively) - Taking things out of cases, rewiring things but making little or no custom logic, repackaging them, and hitting the road. Doing PCB shrinks is non-trivial. Custom logic is moreso. I'm not saying anything to impugn his intelligence, even if I could do that sort of thing myself, I probably wouldn't, if I felt that this was Good Enough(tm). And to me, it looks pretty decent so far.

      Then again, I have a Sega Nomad and don't think it's too big. I'm 6'7", so that might have something to do with it, too.

    • http://www.ix.de/ix/artikel/E/1997/04/036/ [www.ix.de]

      "And, as has happened before, the internet community, strongly committed to free software, put things to work, which were not completed in the commercial field. At the end of last year an Italian programmers' team got hold of the US version of N64 and a SGI Indy, including the N64 card. Thus the team ported Linux/Mips to the play station. Linux/Mips originally had been initiated by the music company Waldorf (see iX 2/96) and, since the beginning of 1996, has been ready-to-run on R4x00 CPUs.

      The main difficulties, according to the Italians, were caused by the port of the X Window System to the N64 I/O hardware. At first they ported the output routines to the dedicated co-processors. Although N64-X11 is not yet really stable, legendary 500000 XStones have been reached so far - running on an ordinary TV set, driven by high frequency signals. Of course, the quality of the picture is much better, if an AV cable and a high-quality monitor are used." (Read the article for the rest..)

  • Looks like he hasn't even really started the project yet.. why not post this story when the portable N64 is actually finished?
  • from the pictures, it looks like all he's managed to do is remove the case, lay the mother/main board next to a flat panel display mounted on some painted black plywood and run games off it.

    *yawn*

  • Seems to me that this article puts its concern in battery life. However, there are a lot of other things to consider as well, which is not mentioned in the homepage (or do I miss anything?) like the dimension and the weight.

    The other thing is the legal side. IANAL, but have you heard about the case that Nintendo sues fan sites by using unauthorized Pokemon pictures. Well, watchout, they could similarly get you with some similar reasons... (eventhough you claim it's just fan site and fair use)... Again, IANAL...


  • Was his review of the XBox after Playing Odd World on it:

    I can't say how much the Xbox sucks!

    It really sucks...

    The Xbox sux it really really sux!!!


    I am really not sure why I enjoyed both hearing that, and they way he said it. I preorded a Game Cube too...

  • ...enough said.
  • Why would a geek like him need this? It's not like he's going to go outside or anything...

    AHHHHHH! The sunshine! It burns my virgin skin!
  • why not make some device based around an atari on a chip or a nes on a chip that used a portable cdrom or compact flash or something and just loaded roms.. that would cut the size of atari and nintendo portables in half since you wouldn't have to allow for the huge cart and you could have a whole lot more games that way..

    • why not make some device based around an atari on a chip or a nes on a chip that used a portable cdrom or compact flash or something and just loaded roms

      A typical NES cartridge contained a program ROM, either a tile ROM or an 8 KB tile RAM, and "mapper" hardware that bankswitched the ROMs and often provided timers. Emulating the different varieties of mappers in an FPGA may be trouble, given that you have to take into account CNROM (for Milon and Tetyais (tengen's tetris clone) plus fallback for old games such as SMB1, Duck Hunt, and one of my favorites, Binary Land), UNROM (for Contra, Ikari, Mega Man 1, and the Codemasters games), MMC1 (for Metroid, Zelda, Tetris, and Dr. Mario), MMC2 (for Punch-Out), MMC3 (for SMB2, SMB3, TMNT2, Mega Man 3-6, etc.), MMC5 (complex monster used in Castlevania 3), and more.

      Learn more about mappers from Firebug's document [parodius.com] at NESdev [parodius.com]

      • The mappers in an NES cartridge are really simple. You can emulate most of them all in the same PIC [microchip.com]. The PIC is fast enough to read from the address buses and update the data busses for both 'ROMs' in one NES clock cycle.

        I have plans drawn up to make an NES game cartridge with a Compact Flash card, a PIC, 2MB of SRAM and some latches. The parts are cost prohibative right now though, so I haven't assembled or tried it yet.
      • Yeah... they contain loads of dust, plus spit from cleaning out the dust!
    • There is a NES emulator [nolag.com] for Gameboy Advance.
      You can use it on the real hardware with a flash card [lik-sang.com].
      Works pretty damn good too!
  • It's possible to make almost anything "portable" like this. However, this is more like a "luggable" (EG the Kaypro CP/M luggables 2-4.) You even have to plug it in, so far, right? Though you could solve that with a motorcycle battery and an inverter, perhaps. Since we're obviously not concerned about weight.
    • You even have to plug it in, so far, right?

      Try reading the page before posting, dumb ass. It makes it very obvious that it uses AA batteries with an OPTIONAL AC adapter.

  • They go through all this trouble just to rack up a huge bandwith bill for being listed on /.
  • There seems to be an awful lot of "why bother" posts on here. Obviously hardware hacking and/or "portablizing" isn't for everyone - so why assume that what you think would be cool is what someone else thinks would be cool? The fact is that this guy decided to take something apart and build a smaller custom cabinet for it, interfacing a few things that aren't supposed to go together. Regardless of what your iBook does, what the XBox could do with a really long extension cord, or what games look better on what system, the point is that some guy took one of his electronic devices, and repackaged it into something smaller and funky looking. It could have been anything - stop thinking about what device he chose (admittedly his contraption is pretty strange) and instead look at what he did - some interesting hardware modifications and some neat "use whatcha got" hardware adaptations. No need to fire off cheap shots of discouragement.
  • This thing is cool, but I want a portable Genesis. It could be small, black, with 6 buttons and a battery pack.

    It could be called something cool... Like Nomad. Yeah!

    Oh wait, why does that sound familiar?

    :)
  • That thing is HUGE! What is the point, othr thatn to devise a portable means of power? The 'portable' unit is not much smaller than the original. I know the motherboard is the main culprit, but jeez....wasn't there some minor componet that could have been eliminated to make it just that much smaller? Now the portable Atari 2600 I can see because the original case was WAY bigger than it really needed to be, but the portable NES does not acquire much of an advantage over the original design as fasr as I can tell from the really quick look I have thus seen.
  • Why not use an emulator on a laptop... VAIO [sony.co.jp] + N64 Emu [google.com] ~= Joy...
  • The NES one has already been done [lik-sang.com]. It's called the Game Axe. There's also a Game Axe Color, and they're both a lot smaller and better than what this guy has made.

    As for the N64 one... it hasn't already been done, but this hack is pretty crappy. Much like the NES "hack", it's just the original system in a new case. in fact, this time it's just the original system outside of its case and hooked up to an LCD screen through regular video cables. If he had left it in the box and hooked it up to an LCD screen, it would've been the same thing.

    This is a crappy hack. The portable PlayStation [slashdot.org] was much more inventive and generally cooler, as was the Atari portable from the same guy.

  • Portable N64 are not unlikely (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Spootnik ( 518145 ) on Thursday October 25, 2001 @12:54AM (#2476341)
    I'm sure that a Nintendo "Portable N64" would have a much better battery life, but that Nintendo still wouldn't do it. This is because, since the Nomad and Game Gear, Nintendo and their technology partners could undoubtably design more energy efficient systems. Also, Nintendo wouldn't use a backlit system, most likely opting for the current screens, which require an external light source, which would provide a comparable savings in power.

    However, Nintendo is unlikely to release a Portable N64. N64 is one of Nintendo's close calls to failure. (Yes, it was successful in it's own right, with 30 Million units sold, but still, compared to the console market share it had with NES and SNES? It's absolutely not a resounding success.) Also, because of one of Nintendo's major mistakes in designing the N64 Using the most expensive parts available on market (ie- remember the Silicon Graphics fiasco?)), it would be technologically unfeasable to create a Portable N64 at an acceptable mass-market price point for handhelds (which is $100, just like the console mass-market price point is $200). People just aren't that likely to buy a handheld, even if it is capable of the N64's power, at more than $100. I'm sure it's feasable, but if Nintendo thought that a Portable N64 had a lick of a chance to be a success, I'm sure they'd be all over that, especially with PSone. But it doesn't. And with GBA coming out, that is capable of having many NES, SNES, and N64 games ported to it, there's no need for Nintendo to waste money on a Portable N64. Any Portable N64 would be yet another "Virtual Boy" scar on Nintendo's back, and right now, they don't need that, especially in the face of Sony PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox.

    • Re:Portable N64 are not unlikely (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The console mass market price is now $299. The Sega Dreamcast was an excellent system with capabilities that still compete well with systems released over a year later (i.e., PS2). Not only that, it had great games and the support of just about every Japanese game developer. However, its $199 price point led people to believe that it was inferior to the $299 PS2 whose release was looming on the horizon.

      If Sega REALLY wanted to compete, they should have raised the price of Dreamcast to $299.

      Just my $0.02.
      Cryptnotic

    • And with GBA coming out, that is capable of having many NES, SNES, and N64 games ported to it [...]

      The
      Game Boy Advance [gameboy.com] has been available in the States since June 11th. No idea where you've been since then, though I must admit to being a bit curious.

  • To all the naysayers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Calle Ballz ( 238584 ) on Thursday October 25, 2001 @03:02AM (#2476549) Homepage
    I have so far seen a lot of posts basically saying "Why would someone do this?" and "Nintendo is never going to come out with that". Phooey to you. This is someone's mod! Someone came out with Linux for the dreamcast, he modded an operating system to make it work with a console.... no purpose or function, just a modification. Everyone seemed to think that was cool. This guy really liked his NES, N64 and PSX enough to take them wherever he went to play with them wherever. I think that's cool, he even shows you how he did it in case you like to do it too. Why are people so pessimistic at such an early hour?
  • That would kick some serious portable butt. Especially if it was running Linux :-)

    Can you imagine running mame on that thing ? It would be videogame nirvana. The best hardware, the best OS, and the best retro-games. Hard to think of anything more cool.

  • The Project has only just begun. Of course you aren't going to carry around that piece of wood with you. if you follow the progress of the portable NES you will see that it to started out laid out on the floor. Making sure all of the electronics and the lcd work before jamming them into a case just plain makes sense.

    As for those of you who are saying "WHY?". I used to teach snowboarding with the guy who is working on this, and if you knew him it would make perfect sense to you why he is doing this.

    -doon
  • Apparently he knows the slashdot crowd and added these comments to his site. I don't know about youu but I am offended. Why would anyone post a discouraging message on an unfinished project that we don't understand? :-)

    This site has seen a huge surge in hits since shashdot has linked ot it. Just so all the visitors from there know, this P64 project is just getting started, is no where near finished, so please hold your discouraging comments till it is finished.

    The only project that is finished it the NESp, which I am working on a version 2 which will have a whole bunch of new features.

    If you have nothing good to say, I don't want to hear it.

  • Gameboy Advance + Flash Advance + PockesNES = ! (Score:3, Informative)

    by toast- ( 72345 ) on Thursday October 25, 2001 @12:05PM (#2478434)
    This equals a Portable NES. Of course, you need roms.

    You can get a flash advance in a lot of import stores, or at http://www.lik-sang.com

    PocketNES is a NES emulator being written. You can get it at http://www.nolag.com Currently it's up to Beta4 and runs many games. PocketNES has the following strengths and weaknesses:

    Pro) You can have 'infinite' amounts of games on 1 cartrige (by appending roms to each other)
    Pro) It's portable =)
    Pro) Batteries last 12 hours approx.
    Pro) Costs $200 for everything
    Pro) Doesn't require any build time

    Con) Not all games are currently compatible
    Con) The GBA resolution is smaller than NES, hence some screens are cropped. The author of the emulator has not written in resolution fix into the EMU.

    Pro) The EMU is in development, and will get better with time.

    Pro) The GBA + (insert favourite system)EMU is bound to come soon, I expect to see Sega master system, Sega genesis, and possibly even SNES emulation to come in the future.

    SO WTF are you waiting for? Go get a GBA, a Flash Advance, and join the portable EMU community!

  • I guess around 4-5 months ago someone ported snes9x to the arm cpu and made it work nicely on the iPAQ. A year ago now, I helped on getting xmame to work nicely on the iPAQ (sound fix ;). xstella works well too (atari 2600). Plus it can ssh or receive ssh sessions for your remote pleasure.

    Read: iPAQ == computer. (and wow, it's portable too!)

  • Couldn't Zanthrax make one that has the size of a penny-whistle? I would certaintly buy one of those...one couldn't make a portable N64 that size, however. At least, one such as myself wouldn't think so.
  • Is it possible to make a portable Beowulf Cluster now?

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