Just what we needed...

[A Black Falcon]

From personal experience, and that is admittedly not a wide enough margin to prove it as fact, my hard disks have outlasted my optical drives by a wide margin. Which is to say, I am STILL sticking my old hard drives into machines I occasionally build for people, but I end up having to buy new optical drives.

Weird... we (that is, the computers we've owned over the years) have had both CD drives and HDDs break. In my comp, both the DVD and HDDs all still work, but in our other ones I think it's been something like one CD drive that failed and three HDDs that have had at least some problems... oh, and a CD burner that never worked quite right. But both have lots of moving parts, so you should expect failures.

I know, I know used game stores sell old Gameboy games. I'm saying I'd rather know it's there, because a lot of the rarer Gameboy games are...well rare.

Having the original cart always better (and I don't think having it in an unoriginal form means it's not "the real thing")? Well, personally I don't really hold that view. So long as the game plays exactly the same as before, it's all I could want. The trouble is making sure it does that. Hence, the reason I want this for DS, not Revolution. I would like the portability to remain. Plus, the added bonus of wireless multiplayer is always nice, if they work that into the emulation (I'm basically imagining a small window you can "freeze" the emulation to get to, wherein you would select which DS within range you want to link up with).

Yes, but at least you get the real cart... and sometimes you find good stuff, like Bionic Commando for GB. :)

I do think that having a solid-state version of what you purchase is better. That's one big problem I have with online distribution... unless it's an online-only game that you can download off the web and requires you to connect to the net to play (or is a free game to download), I want it on real media. I know, if you buy a game from this Nintendo service you'll get a file to put on the card... and that's not awful. I just think it'd be cooler to own the real cartridge than an emulated version of the game on a different platform. The main other concern really is controllers (how do you run the SNES and N64 games? The GC controller cannot emulate the N64 controller (it has two fewer buttons, and not all games can be translated so that you say "the C-Stick can be buttons!"), after all... it could to NES and SNES, though not well because of button positions (with Z as Select), but... you need some better solution than that, I think. And with the new controller supposedly being some really weird thing, I'm wondering how they are going to handle this... I'd far rather use the real controllers the games were designed for, after all.

As for the GB, there is no controller issue, only a storage issue -- what do you keep them on?