9th June 2005, 7:09 PM
Quote:(A side note, as far as storage space I was thinking an SD card would do the trick, or some sort of memory card if, in fact, SD cards aren't compatible with the DS cart slot (I'm still not sure about that one, I don't have any SD cards). So, a memory card would be the method, and since they are GB and GBC games, maxing out at 4MB, that would be plenty of space, and I don't think the emulator would take up much either.)
SD cards are not compatible with the DS cardslot. The Play-Yan movie player (in Japan) runs on SD cards and it's a GBA cart with an SD slot... now you could say 'that's to make it GBA compatible too', which is probably true, but I think it's also true that the DS cardslot is not SD card compatible.
Quote:Well I will say that having an immutable version of a game means no accidental deletion or anything. That is an advantage. Also, they may use a system like XBox does where all downloaded content has to be validated online before use, as a copyright protection mechanism. This means that, unlike the original game, I now require an online connection, if only for a few seconds in the background, in order to play single player games. That's certainly a valid weakness.
There will be some kind of file on your disk, though... but yeah, we don't know any details like these. Could be.
Quote:(long paragraph)
NES is easy... Select? You can put it anywhere. Sure, it wouldn't be in the 'right' place, but it's not THAT bad... and anyway, Select is probably the least-used button. It'd work just like it does for Mega Man Anniversary, the GB Player, Metroid 1 in Prime, etc.
SNES? Yeah, Z is Select. The layout is bad because of the face-button positioning and analog shoulder buttons (if you had to fully click them in every time to activate L or R it'd be a big pain...)... but at least both consoles are 8-button systems, so it's doable, even if it'd be quite a bit less well laid out for the way the games are designed.
Quote:and also the weird arrangement of buttons won't work for every SNES game...
What do you mean by this?
Oh, you never got to the N64 you know... :) (that is, you said 'the SNES would be the biggest problem' while I would definitely say no, the N64 is a bigger problem. After all, the GC and SNES are both 8-button systems. The N64 has ten buttons. Ouch. All you can do is map something to C, and for many games that would not work AT ALL.
N64 emulation is only possible on the GC pad for those very few titles that do not map C to buttons but instead use it for camera controls, all as the "jump" button (SSB), or like Zelda only let you use one of those buttons at a time ingame anyway. But for everything else... yeah, the GC pad quite simply cannot emulate an N64 controller in a way that leaves the game playable. There just aren't enough buttons.
Or in short: I agree, we need a pad that restores those two face buttons Nintendo cut out to make the GC pad. :) And clickable control sticks. As for Select, though... I don't know. Does it need to be a 12-button pad? I'm not so sure... 10 or 11 seems like enough, really. Select would only really be useful for NES/SNES games... I mean, how often are the Select (or whatever they call them) buttons used on the PSX/2/XBox? For a function that needs to be there that is... I wouldn't imagine it's all that much.
Anyway, what I'd REALLY hope for is this: First, we know that the GC controller will be different in some way. If it's different but still is conventional enough to be a 10-plus button pad (with at least one analog stick and at least one dpad), then great, you could make it work for all three of those older consoles. But if it's something weird, you'd better release some kind of specialized "controller just for the classics", like a wireless Revolution SNES controller and a wireless Revolution N64 controller if you want people to really be able to play them, because that GC controller backwards compatibility won't help you enough there.