The Portable Gamecube

I will buy one, or maybe even a few; Portable GameCubes. Just miniaturize the GC and add a nice high quality widescreen LCD. Have a slot to plug in the regular GC controller, and use the existing Memory Card format and size.
 
It looks like someone took a portable DVD player and added the GC things. No way it would ever be easy to control, but does look nice.
 
[quote name='epobirs']Naw, if you look at the other pic of the lid closed you'll see just a latch button. Assuming the hoaxer thought it through I'd expect the GBA slot to be around the backside. Which raises the sproblem of GBA games on that screen. You'd have to implement a good scaler. If it only mapped to an area of the screen equivalent to GBA resolution it would be exceedingly difficult to use on a screen that small intended to display GC content. Does the GameBoy Player have such an option?[/QUOTE]
Yeah....with the GBPlayer, you can stretch the pic to one of two sizes. One that fills up most of the horizonal screen, with borders on the top and bottom, and another that takes up about ~65-70% of the horizontal screen. Both look fine, considering that these are sub-3-inch images blown up to multiple feet, in most cases. So, I don't think that the scaling of Gameboy games would be a problem at all with something like this.

But it really doesn't matter...cause this thing is still fake. But, I guess were just getting into arbitrary hypothetics about how this thing would work, now.


So, all of the following is just hypothetical discussion...about a fake portable Gamecube...so don't take it too seriously.

Now then.

[quote name='Grave_Addiction']It looks like there's a GBA slot underneath where the disc goes.[/QUOTE]
I don't think that's what the hoaxer had in mind. Let's look at the pictures.

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A Gamecube disc is 3 inches wide. Looking at this image, you can use this given to figure out that, proportionally, this unit would be about 5 to 5.5 inches wide. Now, you also need to know that a GBA cartridge is about 2.5 inches wide (a little more, I think). That means that a slot for GBA games would be nearly half the width of this unit, which the slot in the picture clearly isn't. It is then obvious that the hoaxer meant for this to be the slot for the memory cards.


Back to epobirs' concern about scaling the image. The Cube can display images at any number of resolutions, though on a standard TV, it is typically displaying at the maximum resolution of 480i (480 x ~360). The GBA runs at 240 x 160. So, this means that if the GBA image were stretched to it's maximum horizontal size in the Cube's native resolution of ~480 x ~360, with borders at the top and bottom (the ratio of the GBA screen is wider than the 3:4 of a standard TV), it would only need to be scaled to 2 times it's original size. But that's in terms of pixils.

Looking at the screen in the render, it'd be between 5.5 to 6 inches from corner to corner. So, in terms of physical scaling, the GBA image, which is nearly 3" inches from corner to corner, would only need to be made 200% larger to horizontally fill the screen, just the same as if we were talking in pixils. Scaling of this small magnitude is very easily accomplished, with rather simple algorithms.

So, in conclusion...it'd scale the GBA images just fine. ;)

Note: If I botched any of those TV/Gamecube resolution figures, then...I guess I'll look silly?
 
[quote name='epobirs']OTOH, nintendo has a history of shying away from categories that haven't been firmly established by competitors. One prominent example is their abandoning of the SNES-CD add-on after seeing Sega have great difficulty with their own CD-ROM add-on for the Genesis. This was despite the fact that Nintendo's approach was going to be much less expensive and far superior as a platform in terms of color palette (major issue when trying to do FMV) and 3D functionality. Since it remains to be seen whether Sony can sustain the PSP's momentum post-launch I'd be surprised to see Nintendo entering that price range without evidence of a real market. The DS was a far lower risk and still needs time to mature before acquiring a big brother to divide the market's attention further still.[/QUOTE]

Well, we can always rely on you to eloquently dampen our hopes. ;)

I'm curious, though, if what you're describing in the paragraph above is a business concept which would include the innovation that Nintendo's known for (which, if it is under this category, pretty much negates your argument). Virtual Boy, 64DD, Game Boy, Nintendo DS, and even the Revolution Controller (contingent upon rumors, of course) all were/are radical new concepts in terms of gaming. They did shy away from the SNES CD, but their history otherwise seems to show that the only thing they shy away from is churning out mediocre first-party titles (with few exceptions). Perhaps you can enlighten us to other remarkable Nintendo hesitations?

myke.
 
[quote name='mykevermin']Well, we can always rely on you to eloquently dampen our hopes. ;)

I'm curious, though, if what you're describing in the paragraph above is a business concept which would include the innovation that Nintendo's known for (which, if it is under this category, pretty much negates your argument). Virtual Boy, 64DD, Game Boy, Nintendo DS, and even the Revolution Controller (contingent upon rumors, of course) all were/are radical new concepts in terms of gaming. They did shy away from the SNES CD, but their history otherwise seems to show that the only thing they shy away from is churning out mediocre first-party titles (with few exceptions). Perhaps you can enlighten us to other remarkable Nintendo hesitations?

myke.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, we sure bought a lot of those 64DD drives here in the US, didn't we? Oh wait, I remember now. After years of work they ended up only shipping small number in Japan and nowhere else. Nintendo's big mistake there was talking up the product before they really knew what it would be or whether it would be at all. Once they mentioned it publicly it became an albatross they couldn't gracefully abandon with taking a PR beating. The US market also bought up a bunch of those floppy drive equipped 8-bit systems, too. Oh wait... But we loved Satellview, didn't we? Oh...

A lot of video game failures are like the Las Vegas PR line: What fails in Japan stays in Japan. Numerous products that didn't meet expectations or met with a resounding WTF? were never offered outside the home market. nintendo is hardly alone in this respect. Sony sold a fair number of PocketStations to counter the Dreamcast's memory units with standalone functions but didn't see fit to make it a US product once they saw Sega faltering and removing the perceived need for the item. It apparently only qualified its existence by trumping Sega and not on its own virtues.

Virtual Boy was DOA as far as Nintendo support goes. Almost every unannounced game was killed before the system launch. Only those that already had catalog listing were carried through to completion. They seemed to realize the terrible problems it presented too close to launch and were content to let it die quickly with much of the world never noticing its existence. All of the issues were made plain in testing but certain excutives were so in love with the idea it couldn't be stopped before it became a public embarrassment.

The GameBoy was hardly a radical product. There had been handheld game products since the late 70's in various forms and even a few programmable ones that didn't limit you to the built-in games. The GameBoy would have been just another one of those if not for the Tetris license and bundling that moved a zillion units to yuppies early on and were soon passed on to their kids. Getting that installed base was the critical difference between a major product and an overgrown Game & Watch.

DS is hardly a radical move. Much of the gameplay using the touchscreen had been pioneered on PDAs for over a decade. I played touchscreen driven games on an Apple Newton in the mid 90's. Nintendo's big idea was bringing that into the dedicated game system space and targeting a higher price point after Sony had made a big commitment to targeting an even higher price point while presenting the first real challenge to handheld supremacy in many years. I like the DS but gamers viewing it as radical only betray their conservative nature and narrow experience.

The Revolution controller? Let us discuss that again when it is an actual product with wide market acceptance rather than a hype campaign.

Failed products are not a mortal sin so long as they don't ruin the company's finances or reputation. It gets tiresome though to see so much attributed to Nintendo that is undeserved. The most important thing they ever did was create a viable business model for game systems. When you consider that the entire dedicated game hardware industry is driven by this model, every other thing Nintendo has done, success or failure is dwarfed by that. It can be likened to the regard given to Henry Ford. He didn't just create an immense company. If Ford the company had folded in the 70's it would still remain that Ford the man set the standard for how factory production is designed and conducted.

Nintendo by and large is a very conservative company. They've had their moments of whimsy but in general they play it safe and stick to what they know. Which, except for the severe problems with third party support on the console side that negated their price of entry advantage, has worked out pretty well. They've paid a penalty on staying with mask ROMs for the N64 and being MIA with online in this generation but those are survivable. Choosing to cut their losses on 64DD and Virtual Boy were for the best. The only mistakes there was not doing it sooner.

In the meantime the strength of their handheld business has afforded them the time to watch the competition try things and see whether they work. They get to pick and choose what things Sony and Microsoft brought to the market that Nintendo believes it can match or do better. They also get to observe the failures like Sony's gross mishandling of the PS2 hard drive. Hopefully though, they'll won't arbitrarily assume the failure was solely the product's fault and assume they couldn't get it right as they did with the SNES-CD. The GameCube's poor market performance is the result of Nintendo's resistance to change and not-invented-here mindset. They'll have to overcome that lest it overshadow whatever remarkable things the Revolution is supposed to bring to the market. It would be pretty sad if they failed to counter the new ruler Sony and set up the new machine to be nicknamed Bay of Pigs.
 
I'm not sure how you can blow off the 64DD due to sales, yet use the Apple Newton (if *Mac Geeks* hate something from Apple, you know it's bad) as a means of suggesting the DS was not revolutionary. Not too many Newtons were sold, thus it is irrelevant, continuing your rationale.

Did it have an influence? Maybe. Did PDAs have an influence? Almost certainly. However, the market for PDAs and the market for console games are remarkably different in terms of demographics. I expect that to change in the future (I don't think that generations will abandon games as they age, thus enlarging the age gap market for games).

I was simply trying to point out products that, failed or successful, were *ahem* revolutionary for Nintendo, and contrary to the perception of them as conservative. We simply don't agree, I suppose. I can't fathom the idea of a company letting the Virtual Boy go to market being labeled as 'conservative' in business terms. Such is life, I suppose.

myke.
...I listed the Game Boy due to its ability to play literally thousands of games, which made it far more unique a concept than Game & Watch (and who really cared about the "watch" part anyway?). What existed between G&W and GB that played multiple titles?
 
[quote name='epobirs']

The GameBoy was hardly a radical product. There had been handheld game products since the late 70's in various forms and even a few programmable ones that didn't limit you to the built-in games. The GameBoy would have been just another one of those if not for the Tetris license and bundling that moved a zillion units to yuppies early on and were soon passed on to their kids. Getting that installed base was the critical difference between a major product and an overgrown Game & Watch.

[/QUOTE]

To lump the gameboy in with any handheld before it is a pretty silly comment. Programmable or not, nothing came close to the Gameboy. A graphic calculator could be programmed it doesn't exactly make it a gaming system. The real difference was the games were something more than ugly looking blips moving across the screen. They had the life of early NES games and could be interchanged without a user having to program them in. Not to mention they had the Nintendo brand (which was hugely popular at this point) backing them up.
 
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