Sweater Fish Deluxe

That would be pretty complicated. Basically you'd have to take the entire Game Gear system and turn it into a cartridge that plugs into the Onestation, receiving controller input from it and passing back video and audio and has a cart port of its own to accept Game Gear games as well. Such a thing owuld obviously be huge if it were based on the original Game Gear architecture. However, there is the SMS-on-a-chip which is used in that handheld system from Coleco/Playpal discussed elsewhere on this forum. That thing might in fact be a Game Gear-on-a-chip since there's two Game Gear games on those system which never had Master System versions to my knowledge. If it is a Game Gear, you could use that chip in this project and it would make your Game Gear adapter cartridge for the Onestation a lot smaller and more useful. There's also the matter of the OneStation screen, though. It may require digital RGB inputs, whic would make building your own OneStation cartridge prohibitively complicated. But actually, I think the screen on the OneStation takes analog RGB inputs. I haven't actually tested it out myself, but I only see five lines going to the screen, which isn't enough for digital RGB I don't think and is exactly how many you'd expect from analog RGB. Of course, unless the screen also takes composite video (or the SMS/GG-on-a-chip outputs RGB), you'd have to convert the video to RGB, which would be another complication. Basically, the OneStation is not at all what you're looking for. I'd recommend an original Game Gear (which has a really shitty screen and is not fun to play for that reason, in my opinion) or emulation on a GP2X or PSP or something. I'd love to be able to build my own OneStation cartridges, but a Game Gear adapter is not where I'd start. I think just taking the Coleco handheld unit and turning it into a cartridge along with its built in games would be a more viable project. That or a TV-Boy. ...word is bondage...

Check out DealExtreme.com http://www.dealextreme.com/products.dx/category.112 This is the same site that used to be The Fifth Unit, which is where I got my OneStation, so I can confirm that they're reliable. They also have free shipping on most of the games which sure as hell beats the ridiculous shipping prices other Hong Kong based sites have. They also now have the best selection of games. When I ordered from them, they didn't have any games available, so I had to get my system from them (because they have the cooler design that no one else carries) and games from SuperUFO.com, which is why I ended up paying so much for my system including shipping. If you can get everything you want from DealExtreme, the system is definitely a great deal. They have a ton of new Genesis multicarts that I haven't really looked over in any detail, but I noticed titles like Gunstar Heroes, Alien Soldier, Steel Empire, Power Drive Rally, Shinobi 3, etc. Very nice selection. ON the other hand, they don't seem to have any of the cartridges with JungleTac's original 8- or 16-bit games, but I don't htink most people are interested in those. ...word is bondage...

Sorry, I haven't been around of late so I missed this topic. Yes, I got a Onestation. It's a pretty cool system, I think. The hardware itself is very nice, especially the screen, which is one of the best screens I've ever seen on a handheld. It's similar to the one on the VG Pocket systems, but much higher resolution. Overall the system has a very impressive build quality for what's essentially a pirate device. As you've probably heard if you've looked into the system, the main unit itself doesn't house any actual chips or system architecture at all. It's just a housing for the controls and screen and such, while the systems are on the cartridges along with the ROMs. That's a pretty cool design and makes the system unique enough that I felt I had to have one. The available cartridges are multicarts that contain either NES games, Jungletac's original 8-bit games which have appeared on their other systems (these use the NES hardware, too), Jungletac origina games that use an unknown 16-bit architecture (not Genesis) and Genesis games. The Genesis games require an adapter, I assume because Jungletac considered it too expensive to have to build the Genesis-on-a-chip into each Genesis game collection. Hoewever, you're limited to just the game titles Jungletac has decided to put out on their proprietary multicarts. I think they've put some pretty nice games on the carts--NES as well as Genesis and I even like some of their original games though most people don't--but that's definitely a big limitation when you compare the Onestation to something like the GP2X. At first it might seem like price would be in the favor of the Onestation since the unit itself is only like $30 and the carts are usually about $10, but when you start adding everything up and throw in the Mega drive adapter and of course the shipping form Hong Kong, you're likeley to end up spending as much as you would on a GP2X and not getting nearly as much flexibility. Of course, if it's something very odd and unique you're after, the Onestation may still seem like a good option. When the system was released, Jungletac made it sound like it would have all sorts of expansions including not only extra game cartridges and additional supported systems (the GBC was mentioned and I personally also hoped for SMS and Atari 2600 since those have the kind of on-a-chip technologies needed to make Onestation cartridges), but even things like multimedia players, digital camera, GPS and so on. However as time goes it on it's sort of becmonig obvious that none of that stuff will happen. I didn't get my hopes up to begin with, but it's still a little disappointing since a lot of interesting stuff could have been done with the system, but like pretty much everything else from Hong Kong, it' has received zero long term support. So, given those two problems--the lack of choice in software and the lack of support in the present and future--if the system still seems interesting to you given what's currently availabe for it, I'd say go for it and you probably won't be disappointed. It's certainly unique and obscure and that counts for a lot with gamers like us, eh? One thing I'd advise being wary of, though, is whether the cartridges you're getting are PAL or NTSC format. The Onestation itself will display either format, but if you want to take advantage of the TV-out function (which is awfully cool in my opinion, though again, something that the GP2X can do as well), it will matter. I haven't seen NES or original Jungletac game carts in anything but NTSC format--though they may exist--but the MD-adapter I got was PAL so I con only play MD games on the Onestation itself or in B&W on my TV. When I play Genesis games, they have a bit of an odd wavy effect on the Onestation screen, I don't know if this is because my adapter is PAL or if it's always like that for some reason (NES games don't look like that). Also, the A and B buttons are reversed from what they would be on the NES, which can be annoying in some games like Lode runner and Super Mario Bros. That's about it. I use my DS flash cart a hell of a lot more, but I'm sort of glad I got the Onestation. If the shipping hadn't been so expensive, thereby making the system as a whole about $60 cheaper, I think I'd feel a lot better about the purchase, but there you have it. ...word is bondage...

I see thiese things every year around Christmas time, I don't think Nintendo has ever been successful in "shutting them down," if only because there's no clear "them" to shut down. The malls? Not gonna shut them down. The individual vendors? Sure, you can shut them down, but there's dozens of other people who'll take their place next year or next month. The import/export companies that handle these sorts of things (and most consumer exports from China as far as I can tell) are not involved in production and probably have no legal liability for the products they handle and they're as numerous the the guys who set up the kiosks anyway, so there's no way to stop the things coming into the country. And after the the level of the iimport/export company the trail runs cold because you're just dealing with a Chinese front company that doesn't even exist. The Famiclones I was seeing last year looked pretty cool. They were joystick units instead of joypads like most of the other ones I see and they had a retro arcade styling similar to the Jakks Namco joysticks. Unfortunately, they were total garbage as far as quality. The N64 pad ones are actualy pretty good quality in my opinion, but these joystick ones werepretty much unusable. Too bad since they looked cool otherwise. My favorite of these Famiclone systems is still the ones I have that's built into a Dreamcast look-alike controller. It has 128 actual games built in (pretty much every mapper 0 game, I think) and has a cartridge slot on the top that's actually usable unlike the ones on the N64 pad clones. Having a while system with games built into a controller is just cool. Of course now there's things like the OneStation which are full portables with screens and everything as well as having TV out. I wonder if any mall kiosks have those this year? If I was an enterprising capitalist, I'd open up my own kiosk in some mall and sell them. You'd easily out-compete someone still selling the Power Player systems even if they had the ones that look like penguins. ...word is bondage...

Yes, there's definitely different iterations of the Nintendo-on-a-chip. Like Mr. Littlefield, I've compared different versions directly and seen games not working on one work just fine on another. Maybe there's only two versions, but I have the feeling there's more. Actually, there must be at least three since the NOAC used in JungleTac's VG Pocket and OneStation systems has RGB output instead of composite. I don't know what the compatibility of that chip is like, though, since neither system I've used it in has a cartridge port. It'd be nice to hack a cart connector onto it and see. In fact, if the compatibility is good, it'd be nice to replace the NOAC used in the FC Twin with the JungleTac one, then you'd have an NES/SNES combined system with RGB output. Nobody would be able to claim that wasn't cool. ...word is bondage...

Apparently, for you there's no point in securing one, so don't worry about it. However, a lot of pople have neither a top-loading NES or a SNES Jr. You have them and good for you, but maybe some other people would prefer this. You recommend patience and maybe (maybe) they'll find them at a thrift shop for $10, but patient buyers will also be seeing the price of the FC Twin go down, I expect it'll be a snap to pick one up for $30 in less than a year and enterprising hunters will be able to find them for much less than that. You also underestimate how much some people like odd stuff like this A lot of gamers have a hard-on for pirate stuff. A lot of gamers also like multi-compatible consoles like this. ...word is bondage...

The original Gameboy ran at 60fps probably so that developers used to coding for standard 60fps vblank systems would still feel at home, not because Nintendo ever planned a TV out adapter for it. 60fps isn't surprising. The fact that it supposedly uses some sort of interlaced display is, though. I mean, it's a dot matrix screen. Interlacing a dot matrix screen seems totally pointless...assuming it's even possible. Does anyone know more about what this means exactly. The Gameboy Color and Advance are definitley interlaced, though, this can be seen when you turn them off and only the last set of lines persists. The DS doesn't seem to do that, but that's probably a sign that Nintendo changed the power down function rather than being a sign that the DS screen output isn't interlaced. ...word is bondage...

Sound issues with cloned hardware are particularly hard to review because everyone seems to hear them differently. It's not like a graphical issue where garbled tiles will appear that no one can miss. If a particular sound is garbled or mis-timed or something it can be hard to tell for some people. With Fami-on-a-chip systems, which have sound issues that some people complain about bitterly, I usually don't notice any problems, though sometimes I do. People should just know that if they're audio perfectionists, systems like these probably won't be good enough to satisfy them because sound hardware is difficult reproduce 100% accurately. Same goes for the more subtle video problems like washed out colors or shimmer that some people have complained about with the FC Twin, but that madhatter didn't even mention. It comes down to individual perceptions and expectations. As for actual game compatibility, that should be a more objective thing, though if games seem to be working for the first few minutes of testing, but then crash eventually that would be harder to test, wouldn't it? You can't expect someone to test out dozens of games for xx hours each just to put everyone's minds at ease. Someone who's interested in system like the FC Twin, but concerned with compatibility or accuracy, probably shouldn't take anyone else's word for it and ought to just try the system out themselves. If you're not satisfied with it could probably make most of their money back by reselling the system and at least then they'd know for sure rather than trying to suss things out from the comments of other people who've tried it. Of course, some people just aren't interested in systems like these; they're purists who will never be happy with clone hardware. People like that need step out of conversations like this and accept the fact that not everyone is extreme as they are when it comes to stuff like this. As for the GameStation system that Jagasian is talking about, wasn't that the one that loaded games off of CD into RAM and played them from there? That is quite a different situation even if the cloned SNES hardware is identical which it may not be. I wouldn't try to extrapolate anything about the FC Twin from that hardware. Are there similar compatibility issues with the SNES2 clones, which are more recent than the GameStation and load games directly from the cartridge like the FC Twin. I think that would be a better system to compare, though it'd obviously be better still to just to get an FC Twin and test it yourself if you're concerned. What's the Zelda incompatibility with Fami-on-a-chip systems, by the way? I've never heard of that one and I used to play Zelda on a Famiclone system all the time. ...word is bondage...

The Neo Geo has an extremely minimal amount of RAM, actually. Less than 128kB I'm sure. Cartridge based systems don't need much RAM because reading data from the cart is just about as fast as reading from internal memory. It's only when your data is on a CD or hard drive or other slow to read media that you need to worry about system RAM. The Neo Geo system itself was expensive simply because the architecture wasn't designed for the average consumer market. It was designed for the arcade market, where $500 is actually relatively cheap. The cartridges were also really expensive which was the double damnation for the Neo Geo. They were expensive because they were so huge. Again, this is standard for the arcade market, where games generally don't use any kind of compression techniques or other programming techniques to cut down size. I think Neo Geo games were probably even bigger than the average arcade game (and therefore more expensive for the consumer) simply because the size of the games became one of SNK's main marketing points for the system. ...word is bondage...

Duct tape. ...word is bondage...

Are you sure that's a fact? Or isn't it possible that it is instead just a sort of vague assumption you've formed in your own mind based on little snatches of things you've heard from U.S. government officials (or were those private think tank pundits?) that you think might have been about Muqtada al-Sadr (or some other Muslim at least) and ominous fear-mongering portrayals on the cover of Newsweek or on Dateline? Al-Sadr has shown no signs of "hating the West" any more than anyone else in the world and it's a ridiculous stretch to say that he's anything like the most dangeous man in Iraq. But go ahead and decide for yourself who is dangerous, just don't let people and organizations who have dangerous agendas of their own make the decision for you. ...word is bondage...

I'm surprised that only one person has mentioned the Gameboy Light. Even though I don't have one myself, it's alwasy seemed like the Cadillac of B&W Gameboys and the ntural choice for anyone who wants the best experience of the B&W games. For myself, though, I mostly use Goomba on my DS when I want to play original Gameboy games. It's real nice having the entire history of Nintendo's portables right there in one nice little white glossy package. My only complaint is that Goomba doesn't have an option for the original color palette of dark blue on light green. It has black on light green, but that's just not authentic enough! I want blue and green! ...word is bondage...

There was a couple good threads about this system on Digital Press before it was released (which was indeed sometime in November), but Digital Press forums are down for the time being it seems. I'm glad to hear that SNES compatibility is good. That was my main worry. People complain about the compatibility of NES-on-a-chip systems, but >10 out of fix or seven hundred is very good compatibility in my opinion. If the SNES portion of this system is anywhere near that good, I'd be more than happy. The only other SNES clone I have is the Tristar 64 which is similar to this system, actually, except that it's not stand alone, it plugs into the N64. It has horrible horrible compatibility with SNES games. More like 1 in 5 than 1 in 100, though my SNES collection was always a little heavy on first party games and those are the ones that tend to have special chips and whatnot. On the Tristar 64, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario RPG, Mario All-Stars + World, Kirby's Dreamland 3, Megaman X games and many many more didn't work fully (often you'd be able to play up to a certain point and then the game would invariably freeze). Some of those games use special chips and so it's not a surprise that they didn't work, but even many games that didn't use special chips had problems. Even F-Zero would freeze after a couple races. If you want games to test, try those. If they work, I'd say that the SNES component of the FC Twin is pretty respectable. However, there's also the question of the sound chip. It's very hard to accurately reproduce any custom sound chip and the one in the SNES is pretty special anyway, so I'd be surprised if the FC Twin captures it accurately. But if it's even as close a the NES-on-a-chip is--which is to say not horribly off in most games to most people's ears--I think that's plenty good enough. ...word is bondage...

Jeff Rovin wrote a ton of how to win at video game books. His frist one was published in the early '80s called How To Win At Every Video Game In The Galaxy. Whats was really interesting about that book was how deep it got into theories of gameplay and scoring. It didn't just give advice on where to place your ship in Galaxian or describe the movements of the ghosts in Pacman, it got into some really abstract descriptions of how to do well in video games generally. There were even sections dealing with finger dexterity training and stuff. Probably all that stuff was just filler to make what would otherwise have been a really tiny book seem a little more substantial, but somehow the filler seemed more interesting than the actual concrete strategies. To me at least. Other books by Jeff Rovin include How To Win At Gameboy Games and How To Win At Sega Genesis Games and probably some tohers I haven't ever seen. And in answer to the original question of where to find the How To Beat Home Video Games videos for sale, check the top link in the "Similar Topics" section at the bottom of this page, though those are just burned copies it's probably the best you'll do at least at a reasonable price. ...word is bondage...

I only wish that all the companies making these plug'n'play and handheld systems had someone with the foresight, dedication and ears to the community that Curt has shown. ...word is bondage...

So, one question that no one's brought up yet is whether there'll be any sort of paddle controller. There sure are an awful lot of great paddle game and it seems like there's plenty of waya that some sort of one-axis analog dial could be incorporated well into a small design. I guess if the system has the ability to be hacked for external controllers like Curt mentioned, a built in paddle wouldn't be absolutely necessary, but it would still be nice since a lot of us aren't gonna want to go to all the work of putting in a controller port ourselves. Also, how about a two player link port? All you'd need to do is pass controller signals from system B to system A and at the same time pass video/audio form system A to system B. If the screen is digital, that might be too many signals, but there's screens available these days that just take regular RGB or even composite I think thanks to embedded DACs. If the system had such a link port it could also double as the prime target for the controller mod. ...word is bondage...

Oh, hell no. No, I'm referring to the small joysticks on a ball. The ball rotates only on one axis. The part where the joystick is mounted rotates inside the ball on the other axis. In that way, the stick moves along both axes. This design is often used on portable joysticks because it's simple to build, has a good feel, and can be made very small. It's usually recessed a bit into the unit so that the stick doesn't protrude much. This looks about right here: The difference is that the ball is probably locked in place for a remote control car. Here's a controller that works exactly as I'm describing, except that the aesthetics are different: A digital joystick wouldn't need to be quite as sophisticated as the unit above. Does that clarify a bit? I don't think something like that would be very good for digital control. Too much throw in the stick. A regular joystick, but just smaller than the original 2600 stick would work better. I can imagine a design where you would actually hold the system somewhat like a regular 2600 joystick rather than like an modern controller or handheld. That might work well, though I think I would personally rather just have a dpad and hold the system like other handhelds. If you wanted to go the really deluxe route, they could look into putting a clicky thumbstick in it like the ones SNK used in the Neo Geo Pocket and Neo Geo CD controller; those are incredibly wonderful sticks with absolutely perfect control, I'd like to have controllers for all my systems that clicky sticks instead of dpads or digital joysticks. I even like them better than arcade joysticks. ...word is bondage...

I don't know about you guys, but I'm stocking up on sealed copies of Miss Spider's Harvest Time Hop & Fly and Elf Bowling 1 & 2. I'll be a millionaire one day! ...word is bondage...

What the hell? They don't even go so far as to say which of the "best games" you'll get for your $700? Hey, sign me up! ...word is bondage...

As someone who passed on the Flashback 2 as well as the original Flashback, I'd be very interested in this Portable Flashback, sounds absolutely great. I really hope it comes through. I second the request for including the TV out as well. Most of the other handheld units that seem to be succeeding the plug'n'plays have had TV output as well, so I imagine you'd be including it in the portable Flashback, too. ...word is bondage...

No, I've just been posting it. That was me who argued that the difference between the Gamecube and Wii is not as great as between the SMS and Genesis or NES and SNES, but that certainly doesn't mean the Wii shouldn't be considered a new console. ...word is bondage...

What are you talking about? Nobody in this thread has argued that the Wii isn't at least Nintendo's fifth console, the arguments have been on other semantic points and have been totally academic not the fanboy nonsense that some of you seem to be assuming they are, so there's no need to get persnickity. I keep saying that we're not on GameFAQs, but the way people keep popping up and trying to defend the Wii as if there was some sort of attack in this thread, it's almost like we are. ...word is bondage...

The situation of the Wii is quite different from the Genesis or SNES, though. Like I said before, more like the Master System (which was indeed called the SG-1000 Mark III whether or not could be considered a wholly new system). Not really. Both systems are very much "upgrades" to the existing hardware. While more capable platforms, signifigant sacrifices were made for the sake of backwards-compatibility(though only one company ever exploited the fact). To the best of my knowledge, the Mark3/SMS' ONLY improvement was more colors. The SNES used a CPU in the same family as the NES, but it was a 16-bit version of an 8-bit chip. While the SNES's CPU had a mode where it could parse 6502 instructions, thinking of the SNES as a souped up NES is pretty silly, especially since there wasn't really much else in common besides the CPUs being in the same family. The Genesis used a main processor totally unrelated to the Master System's. The Master System architecture was integrated as you pointed out, though I don't know how much this held back the potential of the Genesis. Things like cost were probably much more limiting factors. All the factors I mentioned in the Wii's favor like the lower manufacturing costs and ease of development because programmers are familiar with the architecture don't seem to have been the case for the SNES and Genesis early in their lives, so the extent to which they were upgrades to the previous generation's hardware must be less than the case of the Wii. I still think the Master System is a better example. In addition to more colors, the upgraded video processor in the SMS had much better sprite handling capabilities. Much better. The SG-1000 rarely was able to produce graphics that looked as good as the Colecovision, the Master System regularly produced graphics that looked better than the NES with even it's most complicated mappers. That's a large leap. I haven't really been following the Wii stuff since I'm not the type of person that buys a system at launch, but I'm not sure the strictly graphical improvements of the Wii over the Gamecube are even as much as that. Which, again, I think is good. A move away from horsepower and graphics and towards gameplay and innovation as the measuring factors in a console can only be a good thing, but it seems like no one--either the Wii's detractors or its supporters--is understanding that as much as Nintendo does (they don't seem particularly embarassed about the Wii's heritage, for instance). ...word is bondage...

I personally get annoyed because it's being thrown about as a bad thing. If, for example, I was calling the XBox a crippled PC, the intent would be clear. A crippled PC is still a darn nice game system, but the obvious implication is that the XBox is deficient. No one calls the Genesis a souped-up Master System, or the SNES a souped-up NES(well, wouldn't if Nintendo hadn't basically named it that...). They're allowed to stand on their own, instead of constantly being rebadged "NES 1.5" or "Master System 2." The situation of the Wii is quite different from the Genesis or SNES, though. Like I said before, more like the Master System (which was indeed called the SG-1000 Mark III whether or not could be considered a wholly new system). I understand trying to defend the Wii from what you consider attacks, but the fact is that the Wii IS a souped up Gamecube (just as the Xbox is a crippled PC) and simply listing all the things Nintendo is adding to the Gamecube design to make it a Wii isn't a very good way of defending it if that's your intention. I think a better tactic would be to just embrace the fact that it's a souped up Gamecube and instead point out the many advantages that fact brings to the Wii such as lower hardware costs, easier development, lower development costs overall, attracting third parties and especially small dev houses, a focus on gameplay and solid engines rather than flashy graphics (that invariably look dated five years down the road), etc. These things are what I personally think are worth getting excited about with the Wii. They put it light-years beyond the Xbox360 and PS3 in terms of everything that makes for great games. ...word is bondage...

It's funny that the SG-1000 and Master System got brought up for a completely different reason in this thread since they're actually the closest analog in gaming to the Gamecube and Wii. The Master System is basically an SG-1000 with a more powerful graphics co-processor and more memory, which seems to be very similar to what Nintendo has done with the Wii. The Master System was even originally called the "Mark III" in Japan which was short for SG-1000 Mark III (the Mark II being just the same as the original SG-1000, but in a new case and with an expansion port). Whether that means that Wii and Gamecube are indeed different systems or, on the other hand, that the SG-1000 and Master System are rather the same system, I couldn't say. I don't think it matters much. Fans of the system seem to get awfully hot and bothered when people point out that the Wii is a souped up Gamecube. I don't understand why. I think it's absolutely great that Nintendo have just souped up their existing system rather than introduced an entirely new architecture as is the norm. There's some small disadvantages, certainly, but there's far more benefits in this sort of approach. Huge ones. ...word is bondage...