3rd September 2003, 10:23 AM
The GB player if you ask me wouldn't be neccesary IF they made a slight modification to the design of the next portable and next console. First off, whatever kind of link port the controllers use, it should be the same one that the next gameboy uses to link up. Speeds would have to be increased mind you between the two, but I think it's workable to have a multi-speed port there. Second, the console should be designed to detect right from the start if one of the new gameboys is attached (and no game is in the system as well) and automatically go into Gameboy Player mode. Third, the portable should be designed to go into it's own GBP mode, maybe when a button is held down, or maybe it scans the link port before actually running the game to see if the console is trying to go into this mode. Finally, the portable should be designed, when this happens, to send all audio-video data straight across the cable and to the system (possibly also allowing controller input data to be sent back so a console controller can be used for control) and of course the console can do whatever it wants with the data, boxing it in a border, smoothing out the image, whatever. Again, this is a job for a faster data port. If this is designed from the start, the system would have a much cheaper software solution for GBplaying, and it would be using the actual Gameboy itself to play everything so no emulation or creation of identical hardware would be needed.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)