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Handhelds Hardware

Gameboy Emulator For PalmOS 88

Posted by jamie from the helping-eliminate-f2f-interaction dept.
isaac was the first of many to point out: "Gambit Studios has finally released Liberty, a Gameboy emulator for PalmOS." Here's the FAQ; there are reviews and comments on PalmInfocenter and re-Visor.org. Speed appears to be an issue and everyone keeps suggesting Afterburner. And for the impatient, here's the Liberty download page. Update 3 hours later: Gambit says: "It has come to our attention that Liberty is having some problems with a number of devices (and many devices NOT having problems). Due to this we have decided to stop the download of this application until the problem is fully investigated and a solution is found." Oh well; ref. the first noble truth of the Buddha. Update another 3 hours later: OK, it's available again.
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Gameboy Emulator for PalmOS More

Gameboy Emulator for PalmOS

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  • Can we run this sucker on one of those Palm emulators, and if so, what's the performance hit, if any? I think it would be funny to get to the point where we could play Six Degrees of by writing emulators to run inside emulators.
  • Who is going to steal a mere 18 games?

    I expect most would do that in their first day.

    There are hundreds of gameboy games to download from the internet. You act a little differently when you can try something for free than when you have to cough up $25 every time you want a game.

    I don't think it's right to rip off the game producers that way, but I don't think their distribution model is right either.
  • ... does anybody know anything more specific about the problems user ran into?

  • Re:is it just me... (Score:5)

    by kruhftwerk ( 164246 ) on Friday July 07, 2000 @01:24PM (#950147) Homepage
    Well, considering that the gameboy is over ten years old with over a hundred million units out on the market, I think nintendo has made quite a bit back on thier initial hardware development investment. It seems that it takes about 5 years for a company to really start profiting on console hardware and with the number of re-releases of the gameboy plus an extra 5 year lifespan for the console, nintendo is probably making a pretty hefty profit on the hardware sales compared to most consoles.

    Nintendo is not a big fan of emulators (neither is Sony or Sega), but there really isn't anything that they can do to stop them. With the recent settlements/injunctions between Sony and the , there is no way to say that creating an emulator is illegal. Of course, to play the games without the hardware, you need either a cart ripper or to download the ROM images from the 'net. The emulator doesn't do that, the users do that.

    In fact, emulators are a great thing for the game market. It gives programmers an opportunity to work with an almost exact replica of the hardware for nothing. Console development was always a black art because nobody but official developers ever had access to the hardware; emulators change this and allows for an all new generation of programmers to learn like we all did with our C-64's and Apples.

    But, I digress. Yes, coming out with an emulator right after a new console comes out would not be good for sales. Coming out after 4,5 or even 10 years later is not as big as an issue, at least with regards to future console development. Gameboy emulators have been around for years and that hasn't stopped them from developing the Gameboy Advanced (which isn't really a development, just a handheld version of the SNES hardware with a different processor).

    In other words, emulators are a good thing, IMSHO.

  • Ardiri is a stand-up guy. I wouldn't be quick to ascribe ulterior motives.

    Just my $0.02.

  • I didn't mean to imply that it's bad to avoid being slashdotted, I'm just curious as to why you'd want to take it down just because some people were having problems.

    I mean, if it's a DEMO, what the heck. Just attach a note to it saying that it's beta or something. :)

  • but you can type on a qwerty keyboard?

    I think you'll adapt to the monumental 4-button interface. Humans can do that, these days.

  • paikachau!!!1 i SI PALAYING POKEEMANO ON MY PLAM PILTO!!!!1

    BECAAUASE CHMIPSKNWOOBO HWO TO ues teh PLAM PAIloT!!!1 MY HANDSD ARE TO BIGG FRO teh gamebaoy!!!1 TEHY SHUOLD MAEK A "GAMECHIMMP" TAHT SI SPECAILLY DESGNIED FOR CAHIMPS LIEK MEE!!!1

      • woapj dajai idh!?!? oppdkopKQ!! aoaopdokap fokpaokjp oosp my fiNGERAS SPLIPPED!!!1 NO MY PLAM DID AHAHAAHHIOHAAOIAH IT SI INSIED JOEK AND HUMAR!!!!1 CHIMPS SI GODO AT HUMARa!!!1
  • There's finally a reason to get a PocketPC over a Palm, here's an application that needs the speed.

  • and the real question is: can it play textmode quake?

    The predecessor to Wolf3d (the predecessor to Doom (the predecessor to Quake)) is FaceBall for Game Boy. Buy the cartridge, download the ROM to your Palm device, and play away.

  • Not really, when you think about it.

    The gameboy was designed with - guess what - GAMES in mind. Palm was not designed for such. That's why todays middle-of-the-road car can still get it's rear-end kicked by a 60's hot-rod.
  • Game Gear is essentially a portable Sega Master System. Most GG emus also emulate SMS.
  • Most of the time, I play FCI's Panel Action Bingo on my Game Boy. When I want Tetris, I play Tetanus on my laptop. When I want Dr. Mario, I play Vitamins for X or Windows.
  • NES emulator inside a Basic interpreter inside a Java VM inside a Bochs inside a Bochs inside a Bochs...

  • [S]NES off-system hardware (Score:3)

    by yerricde ( 125198 ) on Friday July 07, 2000 @11:08PM (#950160) Homepage Journal
    • MMC3 and MMC5 (among other mappers) had integrated timers that counted down the scanlines (often used to tell the CPU to switch from the playfield to the status bar).
    • E?ROM games for NES(Castlevania 3, several Koei titles) used MMC5 to generate additional color data for tiles.
    • Several Konami games for NES had a sound chip called VRC?.
    • Several Capcom titles for SNES (Mega Man X 2 and 3) used the C4 chip. I don't know what it did.
    • Yoshi's Island, Doom, Vortex, Dirt Trax, Star Fox, and Stunt Race used various iterations of the Super FX chip.
    • Kirby Super Star, Super Mario RPG, etc. used the SA-1 chip.
    • A few games used a compression chip that decompressed data coming out of the ROMs.
    • Nintendo's Super Game Boy accessory implemented a full Game Boy system (sans serial port) inside an SNES cartridge.
    • Only 16 KB of RAM on the Game Boy.
    • Only 4 MHz 8-bit Z80 processor (try emulating a 68K on that one).
    • No touch screen.
    • Copyright restrictions (you'd have to grab the ROM from a real Palm device).
    • How would you put the software onto a Game Boy cartridge? Nintendo has been suing all the companies that have blank Game Boy cartridges.
  • The only games I've tried have been Bomb Jack and Tetris but they seem to play at a reasonable speed.

    I think my main concern if I were to buy the thing would be how well the buttonf would hold up. The date book and address book buttons just don't seem robust enough to take a constant hammering like the Gameboy direction pad.
  • One issue is that a GB Color can run at twice the speed and had considerable hardware changed. It already was a challenge to get a single speed BW Gameboy emulated on the Palm hardware -- pushing it further is almost impossible.
  • I know you were being funny, but the market here isn't people that don't have GameBoys, it people that have them and a library of games, but don't want to carry around an extra device. If this works well, I'll be able to leave my GB and carts behind when I go on business trips, but still have the games around...

    Hmmm, this with a TRGPro and a 340MB microdrive... neat!
  • Ehh... I think the loss is negligable, actually.

    It's pretty much a fact that if you take a general-purpose piece of hardware and write a program for it that simulates what another piece of hardware was specifically designed to do, it's going to end up a) Slower, and b) More expensive. (Unless you wait several years for technology to catch up.)

    Am I really going to wait until 2004 to buy a Pentium-7/3000 so that I can download an emulator that simulates the PSX2 at a reasonable speed? Probably not. By the same token, the Gameboy has essentially reached market saturation by now. If you were going to buy a Gameboy, you probably would have already.

  • There has already been talk of a small joystick attachment that would plug into the serial port on the Palm III-series units, much like the modem attaches now.
  • It would really be news if someone ported Palm OS (or Linux) to a Gameboy. If someone ported FreeBSD, would it be called Flameboy?
  • According to their site they have stopped distributing the program due to technical difficulties. Apparently the thing doesn't work on all Palms. :(

    July 7, 2000
    Stockholm, Sweden
    It has come to our attention that Liberty is having some problems with a number of devices (and many devices NOT having problems). Due to this we have decided to stop the download of this application until the problem is fully investigated and a solution is found.

    // Aaron Ardiri
    // Michael Ethetton
    - the Liberty development team

  • Actually, you can link them up, but I think the IR port would be a wee bit too slow even for gameboy games. :)

    - chris
    - chris@unbeliever.netspam
    - i hate capitals
    - aim:arikel6000 / yahoo:blackrose91

  • 1. Doesn't an equal amount of R&D go into developing an emulator and making it work on multiple platforms? 2. Couldn't they release their own GamingOS software as open source and make all their money off the games?
  • Good point. It is a commercial enterprise, so maybe they're concerned about bad first impressions.
  • Read the article.. It's not a hardware clone, it's a software emulator. Besides, where would we be right now without the original PC cloners?

    Perhaps paying Big Blue for a box that requires one to reinforce their desk (seriously.. I had to move an old IBM AT recently.. the Keyboard weighed 10 lbs, the monitor 75, the CPU 60..)
  • Welp, i figured someone needed to point these things out:

    A) It only works with 32k ROMs(the demo version at least), which are pretty old.

    B) Even 32k ROMs are so slow on it that they are unplayable, you get almost 1 fps.

    C) They recommend AfterBurner, games are still unplayable with it.

    And a few funnies from thier website:

    In the compatibility section:
    0 games tested
    0 games playable

    In the Known Problems section:
    Problem: -blank-
    Solution: Download latest version

  • It seems those suggestions to use Liberty with Afterburner resulted in Gambit Studios offering a "Special Bundle" with Afterburner for an extra six bucks, coming soon. hmm... maybe they read slashdot too... :)

    Mr. Jaggers [fnord.org]
  • have their been any efforts for existing consoles to allow somebody else to legally produce a device that would play their existing games? imagine if the next palm shipped with a port for gameboy games and nintendo actually helped them develop hardware or a good emulator. nintendo sells games rather than people dl'ing roms, the palm gains a nice feature, and i (who have never bought a gameboy - it can't play quake II...) might consider picking one up as pda's are cool, and there would be 1000's of games to choose from for it. what am saying though, if it won't play quake II, do i really want it?

    B1ood

  • Gambit took down their copies, and when I tried to download this baby from the other listed "mirror" from this discussion (palmgear.com), I hit a few "connection refused" messages. Maybe it was just my poor luck, maybe freakish coincidence. Who knows?

    At any rate, I snagged copies and posted 'em here [technopagan.org]. Get 'em while they're hot.

  • I'm not too sure that is entirely correct. Not many of the games that I know of used off system processing, except for the obvious that hyped them (ie. StarFox on the SNES). The hardware is *not* designed so that functionality can be placed in carts, it's more clever designs and hacks by changing certain memory addressed and the functionality of the MCB (memory controller) on a given cart. The SuperFX chip was a simple matrix multipler (IIRC) and although I haven't used one, I'm sure it's operation was not trivial.

    The only thing that is done on a gameboy cart is rumble. That's the only thing that nintendo provides other than added ram. I've never worked on older systems, but I think that adding functionality to the cart was a very special case and it cut a huge chunk into the profit margins for a given game. So unless you're totally in bed with Nintendo, such extras are *not* feasable for the average publisher.

    Not to say that you're wrong, but could you point out any NES/SNES games that did use off system hardware?

  • loser (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    there is a reason it was taken down, we worked on it all afternoon, it would put devices into a reset loop, and require a non-confirmed hard reset, resulting in a loss of data, i hope you are happy, youve provided a link to thedestruction of palms.

    At any rate, aaron and maven have reposted the newest really working version, so o get that at
    www.palmgear.com
    www.ardiri.com and
    www.gambitstudios.com

    delete the older versions. 1.0 1.0a 1.0b

    you have been warned
  • Well, it's been a while I'm playing Zelda on my palm... in color too... wtih a real gamepad, sound and a better screen than the real gameboy color. No, wait, that is not on a wimpy Palm, that is on my Cassiopeia E105 :)

    32 Meg of RAM, a 131 Mhz RISC, a large high-res color screen, stereo sound and an integrated gamepad helps a lot for console emulators !
  • Here's a link to some roms under 65k, so you can see how it performs with actual games.

    http://www.nwnet.co.uk/syko/gb.html [nwnet.co.uk]

    and you can dig up a few here as well:
    http://emulation.zone.ru/gbroms_e.html [emulation.zone.ru]

    From what I've heard, the smaller roms, usualy heavily action based, supposedly perform worse than many of the much larger roms like pokemon.

    It's definately not quite there yet speed wise, but if it were just a *little* bit more optimized and if you could just clock the palm a *little* higher than 32... who knows
  • ...impressing all the foreign grad students with Pokemon on your Palm: Priceless.

    Why not write a Pokémon adventure for the Kyle's Quest engine instead? :-)

  • They are probably doing this "because they can", I seem to remember one of my friends at uni having a version of doom running on his palm. He said it ran like crap, but it was cool becasue he could actually get it.

    And it looks like they are trying to instill the same geek factor that made my friend get doom. not that I mind of course :)


    -
  • Thers is some palm software that does take over the palm buttons. The game Subhunt uses the palm buttons to drop the depth charges and move the ship. I believe at least one adventure game also uses those buttons for directional movement.
    --
  • Well, anyone got a crack for this thing yet or what? I hate to have to play with a crippled program before I give up my money.



    Catch me on AIM: SigningiS
  • Six Degrees of by writing emulators to run inside emulators.

    Would we call that "six degrees of separation?"

    Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
    Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
  • pish posh. in actuality, windows ce has more reported bugs in one version then all releases of the palm os.
  • Yup. With the NES at least, towards the end, quite literally every major cart that was produced used on-cart hardware, and did things that could not run on only the NES hardware. If you want, I'll do some research and give you some real specifics. Mail me.
  • Well, there already is a Virtual PC with Linux for the Mac so ...

    Mac > Virtual PC > Linux > Wine > Windows Palm Emulator > Gameboy Emulator for Palm

    That's six parts, if not six degrees of separation.
  • They make a LOT of money from licensing development rights to other companies. It's not just sales of the consoles.

    -John

  • Like I need more ways to not pay attention in meetings....
  • Can it sync with a desktop version so I can play Mario on my desktop as well as my Palm? Possibly a good suggestion for down the road?

  • Any chance someone has a joystick imput for this?
  • But can it sync to the Palm version (ie if I have almost finished a level) can I save it and take it with me? Thats what I would want.

  • Money (Score:4)

    by falloutboy ( 150069 ) on Friday July 07, 2000 @12:48PM (#950194)
    Lets see.

    Palm IIIc from buy.com: $449
    Gameboy from buy.com: $70
    Gameboy games from buy.com: $25 each

    I only have to steal 17.96 games to make it worth it!!!

    Then again, I've had a Game boy since 1997 and I only ever actually bought Tetris and Spider-Man anyway. And Tetris came with the thing. Hm.

  • Control Issue (Score:3)

    by the_demiurge ( 26115 ) on Friday July 07, 2000 @12:48PM (#950195) Homepage
    I wouldn't think the Palm buttons could be a good substitute for the directional control buttons on a GameBoy. For me, at least, a good game of Tetris or Kirby needs a comfortable and reconizable controls set.

    -- demiurge
    You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!!
    Score one for the downtrodden hacker!
  • There are already plenty of emulators for desktops, so there's really nothing stopping you from playing Mario on your desktop right now.
  • if you take a general-purpose piece of hardware and write a program for it that simulates what another piece of hardware was specifically designed to do, it's going to end up a) Slower, and b) More expensive.

    With regard to point (a), remember that a Palm device is pretty slow to begin with, 'cause it's been optimized for longer battery life, not speed. The Liberty FAQ mentions that you may need an overclocker utility to get decent performance...and the faster you push the processor, the faster you're gonna wear out your batteries. You'd probably get better battery life out of a real GameBoy.

    With regard to point (b), consider that GameBoys are currently going for something like $50 apiece, whereas the least expensive Palm devices (a IIIe or the base-model Visor) are three times that (and they only have about 2Mb of RAM at that, which won't fit very many of the newer games).

    So this emulator is a possibly-interesting toy at best; if you want real GameBoy action, you should probably just cough up the dough for a real one anyway. Somehow I don't think Nintendo is going to lose a lot of sleep over this.

    But I might download Liberty anyway and check it out, just for grins. (Hmm, I wonder if they've implemented, or are planning to implement, 2-player GameLink emulation using the IR port? That would be interesting...)

    Eric
    --

  • Okay, GameBoy came out in '89, making it 11 year old technology. And you have to speed up your Palm's processor to make it play GameBoy games? Granted, there is emulation overhead, but you'd think that in the intervening 10 years, the technological advances in handheld processing would make "overclocking" your Palm unnecessary. Did Nintendo design their hardware that much better?
  • Dissapointing but true. This could be lots of fun for those of us with Visors. I noticed that the module port in the Visor is quite simmilar to the Gameboy. How about a hardware hack to run the actual GB carts in the emulator on a Visor! Could be nice for people that own a bunch of GB games but want to look professional in business meetings.
    Dissenter

  • Re:Emulate an emulator emulating hardware (Score:3)

    by Nonac ( 132029 ) on Friday July 07, 2000 @02:08PM (#950200) Journal
    Run Tetris on a Gameboy emulator running in a Windows Palm emulator running under wine running on a Linux machine running in a vmware window on a Windows box that you are accessing via VNC from a Sun server that you are accessing from a dumb terminal.

  • No Downloads (Score:3)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Friday July 07, 2000 @02:13PM (#950201) Homepage Journal

    More to the point:

    July 7, 2000

    Stockholm, Sweden
    It has come to our attention that Liberty is having some problems with a number of devices (and many devices NOT having problems). Due to this we have decided to stop the download of this application until the problem is fully investigated and a solution is found.

    // Aaron Ardiri
    // Michael Ethetton
    - the Liberty development team

    This seems like funny timing to me. I wonder if it's just an attempt to avoid being slashdotted. I mean, just because it's having problems in some places doesn't mean that you don't want the other people to be able to demo it.

  • Ok, I don't like bad Microsoft products like Win98, MS' SQL server, IIS, etc... but if you guys want a great color gameboy emulator get a Cassiopeia E-115 PocketPC. It runs color gameboy games well, has a directional keypad on the pda and unlike wince 2.11, it actually works... REAL WELL! I can telnet from it, I can get compactflash ethernet cards, I have a 128megs of compactflash for my mp3s, i can voice record meetings, I can play movie files, and I can do everything the palm can do (as fast as the palm can do it now with ce3.0) I hate to say it, but MS is losing this battle with a better product just because of marketshare/marketing... talk about bizzaro-world.
  • Actually, Nintendo tends to design their hardware so that the carts can replace major sections of functionality. Remember how Star Fox for the Super Nintendo was hyped as having the FX chip, an onboard math coprocessor? Well, that's the first time they hyped it, not the first time they did it. In it's heydey, the 8 bit NES, on average, was doing at least half of it's processing on the cart itself, and not in hardware.
  • Run Tetris on a Gameboy emulator running in a Windows Palm emulator running under wine running on a Linux machine running in a vmware window on a Windows box that you are accessing via VNC from a Sun server that you are accessing from a dumb terminal.

    Nuthin' but net.

    Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
    Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
  • Looks like Gambit has removed the demo from their web site citing incompatability with certain kinds of devices.
  • Okay, I'm not just going to repeat the evidence and citations already posted equivocating that it is impossible to actually play anything with this because both a) the games aren't compatible and b) it's painfully slow. That would be (-1, redundant). I'm going to pose the question: "why?" Why are they doing this? The palm is obviously not suited to do this kind of crap. It wasn't made for this kind of load and can't handle it as an incidental. So give it up, guys.

    Unless you're masochists. Then I aplaud you. Masochism's all cool, it's a hell of a lot prettier than taking your problems and wierdnesses out on other people. (picturing people with guns here) So keep at it, dudes, don't let me stop you.

    Oh, and right now I'm thinking maybe it shoulda started with something like a TRS-80 emulator or Atari 2600 emulator, something where all the games are under 32k instead of just the crappy ones.

    Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
    Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?

  • Palm V (Score:1)

    by SEGV ( 1677 )
    I get no sound. Tetris, Asteroids, and JPak are unplayable.

    --
    Marc A. Lepage (aka SEGV)
  • Just don't let it spread to the ti calcs. then we won't have /any/ way to beat back the whiny newbie flamers.

    Newbie: Whaddya mean IT'S NOT A GAME BOY?!?! the web page said you could turn your TI-83+ into a GAME BOY!!! that's the whole reason I bought this PILE of LARD!!! now HELP ME, you lousy SACK of BOLOGNA!!!! I want GAMES, and I WANT them YESTERDAY!!!!
    Me: Uhhhh, that's a TI-85--
    Newbie: SHUT and DO AS I SAY, hear??
    So much for the fallback of saying "you can't expect to turn them on and expect instant games, games games, they aren't gameboys" (unless you know wtf you're doing, hehe). We better not let that happen.

    Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
    Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
  • IIRC, It's a DragonBall EZ 68EZ328, and it's running at 20 MHz. Once again, IIRC - I seem to remember that that's the CPU spec, but I'm not 100% sure.
  • I considered this once... :) My idea wouldn't work however.. But yours is diffrent and should work.

    My idea? (keep in mind people IT DON'T WORK)...

    Commodore 64 emulator running under Unix.... running under... Lunix (Thats Lunix NOT Linux... diffrent systems)....
    For those that don't know... Lunix is a Unix like system for the Commodore 64...

    It won't work.. The C64 dosn't have enough memory to run a c64 emulator and can't run XFree becouse it has NONE of the requirements (Not supported, not enough ram, low end display (TV) etc.. it has a mouse.. thats all)
  • Actually, if anyone knows what exact processor and clock speed are in the Palm V I'd appreciate an email. I haven't been able to find that info anywhere, although I'm sure it's a DragonBall of some sort.

    --
    Marc A. Lepage (aka SEGV)
  • I have an E11 which is just a greyscale older casiopia... but it blows the pants off palm completely! I wish MS would make CE into a desktop OS.. its light weight and fast and I've never crashed it...
  • What kind of speed did you expect out of a Drangonball 30Mhz processor anyway? Those 85Mhz MIPS processors in Windows CE machines aren't even fast enough to emulate a Gameboy at full speed, seesh!
  • ...impressing all the foreign grad students with Pokemon on your Palm: Priceless.
    ---
  • I've dropped the mirror, but only because Gambit has the good stuff back up.

    BTW, if you are in fact a representative of the corp, you really should consider at least getting a non-AC account. Looks all nice and professional and stuff. Definitely worth the 45-second investment.

  • From my experience, the more emulators you run under emulators, the slower the performance and the more likely the system will crash. :(
  • That's what I've been waitin' for. Now if they'd only get some classic NES, or Sega MS emulators, I'd buy a Palm in a heartbeat. But in the meantime, I'd rather just carry a Game Boy. Sharkey
    www.badassmofo.com [badassmofo.com]
    *Redesigned, high in fiber, low in cholesterol*
  • someone goes and does something GREAT like this. No we have access to much much better ways that drug lords and tetris to waste time with our palms......(of course besides the old fashioned way to waste time with your palm.....that causes blindess)

    -Superb0wl
  • At that rate, buy a Gameboy of each color: 7*70 = $490!

    Or just buy 2 Gameboy colors, the printer, a handful of multiplayer games, and 2 batterypacks, and you are *still* ahead of the game.

    Sigh


    -AS
  • ummm... except yes it does... and ummm... no I won't...
  • I couldn't find it...did anyone see if there will be color for Palm IIIc just like for gameboy color?
    I know that games only for gameboy color won't be supported.
  • I know this has been suggested before, but I still think the idea has a great deal of merit. Instead of emulating a GameBoy on a Palm, why not emulate a Palm on a GameBoy? These little machines are colorful, easy to use, have monster battery life, and the older versions are tanks. Those things could survive a bomb blast. Using blank cartridges for storage (or some nifty sorta storage device with that little i/o port usually used for multiplayer), you have infinite storage, and it's cheap. Sure, no graffiti, but I always thought it did more harm than good anyway (I seem to recall an article rendering people unable to write after extended use of graffiti.)
  • Go to www.palmgear.com, they have the zip on their site. Now, to install this thing! --- "Thats it! This planet is HISTORY!" -- Vegeta : DBZ
  • If you haven't read the whole Gambit page, they have it at PalmGear HQ (and they haven't removed it yet). My guess is that they didn't want to get Slashdotted, but who knows maybe they'll remove it from PalmGear as well. Get it quick if you want it!


    Liberty at PalmGear [palmgear.com]


    --SONET
    http://www.hbcsd.12.ca.us/peterson/technology

  • not to mention, the buttons on the Palm do not make for an enjoyable gaming experience.

    if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
  • They have the zip, yes, but there's no program file in there! Just the rom converter and the docs!

    Anyone who got it before it was pulled -- can you post a mirror somewhere?

  • is it just me... (Score:3)

    by vertical-limit ( 207715 ) on Friday July 07, 2000 @01:08PM (#950227)
    ...or are all these emulators really unfair? I mean, Nintendo went to a lot of work to design the Game Boy hardware and all its upgrades (Pocket Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Dolphin), and there's a lot of R&D costs involved in that. Now, when other people start cloning that hardware immediately and producing viable alternatives to Nintendo's hardware, all that R&D is basically "lost". Other companies are making the money from the hardware sales, and Nintendo doesn't get to see any of the rewards. And why would Nintendo want to fund other companies' profit? This is what's known in economics as a "win/lose situation" -- one company loses, and all the other ones win because they ripped the first company off.

    I'm not saying that competition is a bad thing. Of course we want to be able to buy our hardware from different vendors and be able to get the best value for our dollar. But the availability of emulators sure makes it hard for companies to justify any kind of innovation, when they know that everything they do will become available for free anyway. Do you want to be stuck with the same game console for the next 20 years because Nintendo, Sega, et. al. can't justify the costs in developing in a new console?

    Me neither.

  • "Can I run Color GameBoy games on the emulator?

    If the game is designed to run ONLY on a Color GameBoy, you cannot run hat game on the emulator. However, you can run the B&W games on a Color Palm, and select a color palette for some nice variety! " -- Gambit Studios Liberty Emulator FAQ's

    If you meant that you can select a color palette, then yes.
  • According to their website, no. It will run as a black and white game on a color palm, and Color GameBoy roms will not function in liberty.
  • Come on now, folks. Everybody knows that the only games anyone plays on the Gameboy anymore are Tetris and the various Pokemon incarnations. AFAIK, you can't get a pair of palms to link up and exchange data ala networked quake, can you?

    My point is that is they can't play Pokemon, they won't be popular. Sick, isn't it?

  • Re:is it just me... (Score:3)

    by ShavenGoat ( 63696 ) on Friday July 07, 2000 @01:17PM (#950231) Homepage
    I mean, Nintendo went to a lot of work to design the Game Boy hardware and all its upgrades (Pocket Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Dolphin), and there's a lot of R&D costs involved in that

    Sure, there are a lot of R&D costs, but when they sell the hardware on the street I'll bet they either break even or take a loss. The games are where all the money is at, and in the long run th e cost of R&D will be recovered there.

    But the availability of emulators sure makes it hard for companies to justify any kind of innovation, when they know that everything they do will become available for free anyway.

    Two things here, first of all, how many games have you played in emulators? Often times the games have unstable sound, jittery graphics, or don't run at all. Second, the whole point of developing new consoles is to give home users a better gaming environment on dedicated hardware. Sure, you can put games on your PC, but then you have to have a fast enough processor, video, and enough ram to drive the game. At least with a console you know the game will run correctly on your system the first time, no brains needed.

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