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Portables (Games) Entertainment Games

Latest Handheld System Plays Famicom Games 35

Posted by Hemos from the going-truly-retro dept.
roadies writes "Early adopters are sure to import the latest handheld system from overseas. We're not talking about the Sony PSP here fanboys. We are referring to the Pocket Famicom. The pocket famicom has a 2.5" screen. Plug it into a TV and you can play your classics without having dig out your old Nintendo console. It supports standard 60-pin Famicom games, but with a $10 adapter it will play your 72-pin NES games."
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Latest Handheld System Plays Famicom Games More

Latest Handheld System Plays Famicom Games

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  • Seeing as I can use a NES emulator on my Palm, and that the screen size on Palm is over 3", why would I plunk down $90 US (with the NES cartridge adapter) to play games on the road? On top of it, you'd have to bring all those huge cartridges with you.

    The only advantage this toy has over a Palm is a D-pad.

    There's also the issue of weight. How much does this thing weigh when you add an adaptor and a cartridge? Maybe it should be advertised as building arm muscles.
    • - Not everybody has a Palm.
      - What is the cost of a Palm that can run the NES emulator ? Over $90 ?

      (I ask, 'cause I don't know. I'm already surprised that slashdot gets thru the corporate netfilter so no "look-it-up-foo" comments plz.)

      • Re:Nice slashvertisment. (Score:4, Informative)

        by mausmalone ( 594185 ) on Monday January 24, 2005 @08:35AM (#11454632) Homepage Journal
        The cheapest color screen palm I could find on Pricewatch was a Zire 31 for $131. Also, to rebuke the grandparent, Famicom games are about 1/4 the size of NES games. In asia, this product is probably far more practical. It's also aimed at people who already have a lot of cartridges and people interested in the "cool" factor of it.
        • The Zire 31 (160x160) can not even handle the resolution that the Famicom and NES put out (256x240), so if you do emulate on it, you would have to either crop the screen (bad) or somehow down scale the resolution by throwing away rows and columns of pixels in order to fit the Zire 31's screen (also bad). Of course, the Pocket NES or the Gameboy Advance (with resolution 240x160) does this, but only for horizontal rows of pixels... which still looks terrible compared to a real NES.

          So the fact that the Pocke

    • Re:Nice slashvertisment. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by koi88 ( 640490 ) on Monday January 24, 2005 @08:34AM (#11454620)

      why would I plunk down $90 US (with the NES cartridge adapter) to play games on the road?

      • because it allows you to play legally purchased games ;-)
      • does your palm have TV-out?
      • as you said: controls... (esp. important in jump'n'run games)
      • high nerd-factor to have a dedicated device to play 15-year-old games
    • You have got to be kidding me, right? Playing NES games without a D-pad is an absolutely horrible experience! Secondly, the emulators for the Palm don't run every Famicom or NES game accurately and some games do not even run at all! Third, there is a "geek factor" to owning somewhat obscure grey market hardware. There is more. Many people have only played their NES emulator within the past 5 or so years, so they have forgotten what a real NES is like, but your Palm emulator's sound isn't all that accur
    • Oh, I left out one thing. The NES and highend Palms have different resolutions, so on the Palm you are either wasting part of the screen or you are scaling up to the Palm's native resolution which will look really crappy because of aliasing. So you should measure the size of the image displayed on your Palm when emulating the NES, not the size of the entire LCD.
  • Anybody know if there is a Pal Version of this unit..,?
    Or can the US version be hacked to play PAL games..?

    Still think this unit is much cooler and Nerd-y
    http://www.classicgaming.com/nestable/actual_proto type.shtml/ [classicgaming.com]
    http://www.classicgaming.com/nestable/insideout.sh tml/ [classicgaming.com]


    ---------
    "Clutch my testes, bloody squirrel humpers!!" -Happy Noodle Boy

  • Not new, but good nonetheless (Score:4, Informative)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Monday January 24, 2005 @08:31AM (#11454604) Homepage
    I feel compelled to point out that unlicensed portable (and non-portable) systems come out of Hong Kong all of the time. Offhand I can think of Portable NES, SNES, Genesis (before the Nomad), and Dreamcast. There are also unlicensed consoles, usually limited to 8-bit and 16-bit systems. Arguably the 3rd party NES systems were better than the original Nintendo versions: They've lasted a lot longer.

    Good stuff, though. Does anyone know of a listing of unofficial systems manufacturers. Is anyone keeping track of this little piece of gaming history?
    • How have 3rd party NES systems lasted longer? Because they are still manufactured? I own 3 NES systems and one A/V Famicom, all of which still work great! The cheap Hong Kong clones are fun and all, but most don't accurately clone the picture processing and sound processing units inside an official Famicom/NES. So most are subpar compared to the official real thing.
      • Are the three original NES systems that you have all the oldschool tray-loading kind, and not the rare cartridge loading top-down units they released after the SNES? The problems associated with the tray-loading NES systems are legendary. People have all sorts of contortions involving blowing into cartridges, slamming cartridges into their systems, putting cartridges in as little as possible before pushing them down, etc. It's all very reminiscent of the early generation PS1's, which you now see people s
        • The top loading NES and Famicom are not rare at all. The A/V Famicom could be purchased new, mint in box off of Ebay up until a couple years ago. The tray loading NES systems must occassionally be opened and have a connecting pin component cleaned and the pins must be bent slightly to restore the pressure they exert on the cartridges. So as would be expected from a component that has manual force applied to it every time a cartridge is inserted or removed from the system, it must be maintenanced every ha

  • Nothing really new.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Firehawke ( 50498 ) on Monday January 24, 2005 @08:31AM (#11454607) Journal
    There have been handheld Famicom clones for years. For instance the GameAxe [nesworld.com] and TopGuy [nesworld.com]. According to the same source, this system was announced a year ago but only finally made it to the retail shelves. In any case, it's nothing really *new*.
    • Well, the difference between the PocketFami [nesworld.com] and the other two systems that you mention is that there is a really good chance that the PocketFami does not suck. All of the previous portable Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment Systems sucked in some major way. But rumor has it that the PocketFami is finally a portable worth owning. So in a way, it could be something new.
      • Okay, now THAT I'll give you. I've been using a GBA flash cart to satisfy any NES cravings I have-- PocketNES is pretty damn good-- but an actually decent PocketFami would be an interesting change. I'll have to see what the reviews say when it comes in..

  • Expensive? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 )
    At $80, isn't it double the price of the other retro-game units? Yes, it has that nice screen, but at this high price it gets close to the price of a PDA for which you can get emulators for a variety of game systems.
    • what it is, is just another clever hk unofficial(pirate) clone.
    • How is $80 close to $200? Do those emulators run at full speed and support every game? How accurate are the emulators compared to the PocketFami, etc... there are many things to consider with regards to this kind of thing.

  • Not Famicom (Score:3, Informative)

    by zr-rifle ( 677585 ) <{moc.rdez} {ta} {rdez}> on Monday January 24, 2005 @08:37AM (#11454643) Homepage
    actually, it's called Pocket Fami, not Pocket Famicom or Nintendo would sue this handheld and it's creators into oblivion.
  • I got a Chinese bootleg NES cartridge with 42 games on it (later I saw some with 100 or more games). Combining that with this player would be nice. What would be nicer is if someone found an "adapter" which made this thing run off of, say, a 512MB memory card so you can fit as many damn NES games on it as you want.
    • I've been wondering about the possiblity of putting together something like this on a super-miniaturized linux platform for quite a while. I'm envisioning something with a 2-3" screen, Compact Flash, SNES style control pad, TV-out, MAME, SNES, and NES emulators, and a usb port or two for a keyboard add-on. Any EE majors out there looking for a project to impress your advisor, please give this a thought. The biggest problem I've had in trying to spec out the parts is finding a source for the tiny LCD scre

    • I got a Chinese bootleg NES cartridge with 42 games on it (later I saw some with 100 or more games). Combining that with this player would be nice.

      If you really want to be a pirate, then get a Game Boy Advance SP, an EFA flash card, the PocketNES [pocketnes.org] emulator, and some NES ROMs.

  • IMO it would be better just to get a flash2advance cart and run pocketnes on your GBA.
    • What about the resolution issues on the GBA which require the emulator to either crop the top and bottom off of the image or to remove every other column from the image? The PocketFami looks like it supports the Famicom and NES's native resolution. Also, what about all of the games that do not run on pocketnes? What about all of the games that do not run correctly on the pocketnes? Just look at the compatibility list on the pocketnes site for plenty of reasons (games!) why somebody would prefer the Pock
  • If Neo Fami is any indicator on the quality of the Pocket Fami, expect bad sound (way off key) and palettes that are slightly off. I'm not sure if the two are made by the same company, but I would expect ANY nes-on-a-chip clone to not quite reproduce the real thing.

    It looks a little bulky and expensive compared to the Game Theory Admiral. You could probably find one of those for $60, still. If the screen is excellent, then it'd be worth it (if you wanna play your original carts).

    Someone mentioned legal
  • The Gameboy Advance is perfectly capable of playing NES games at full speed, as is the DS.
  • No one has heard of GameAxe [roarvgm.com]
  • And some factory in some Chinese country (PRC, ROC, whichever) has been churning out Game Axes for how long now? Another FamiClone; yay.

    Wake me up when someone releases a new Famicom copier, then I'll get excited. With my Super Wild Card I have all my SNES games on a single Zip disk, and I'd really like to be able to do something similar with my NES library so I can put all those carts into storage and clear some shelf space (without copyright violations, so the internet is not an option).

    Besides, what

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