Ben Heck's Portable Emulator

[wraggster]

via gizmodo



Everyone's favorite game console mad mod genius, Ben Heck, has a new project, and it's something that you and I might actually get a chance to play with for a change. Instead of a one-off like the Xbox 360 Laptop, he's designing the case for the GamePort, a handheld emulator designed to play retro games.

So he's designed it for a reputable company rather than just for fun, so we should be able to buy it, right? Well… maybe. According to the GamePort site, "the company that would have distributed the GamePort in stores perished after legal problems. Several other options are being discussed, including selling directly online." Awesome. Not exactly something to fill us with confidence, but who knows, maybe it'll go up for sale at some point.

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[robocelot]

Interesting idea, though I think trying to compete in the niche the GP2X has carved out might be the wrong approach.

Maybe the plan is to make it an 'off the shelf' system that anyone can pick up and play, but then there are the licensing issues with such official releases, driving up the cost. If the cost is on par or more than a PSP or a GP2X then it's DOA.

Anyone else think that it's a really bland design? It's not something that exudes Ben's sense of panache and style to me. And please, more buttons buttons buttons buttons! You'd think someone designing such a device would have looked at the most common complaints with the current handhelds and tried to do them one better.

One thing I will say about Ben -- like his work or loathe it, he has the ear of the media. When he makes an annoucment outfits like Wired, Rolling Stone and EGM pay attention! He might have just enough clout and favors in reserve to get this thing into some big chain stores.

[SnoopKatt]

I think it's an interesting idea. It will obviously never appeal to the mainstream media since it involves putting roms on a memory stick (of course it's easy, but there'd be tons of people who wouldn't understand it at all), but I could imagine that people who don't have a DS or PSP and want portable 8-bit games would want it. It could do very well if the price is right.

[Emeriastone]

You know, if the legal problems ever get sorted out, Ben Heck could be the father of a new type of industry. He does seem to create things that people will pay big $ for...

[Tetris999]

im not being negative, but i really disagree with this

i feel like it was such a waste of his ability, anyway who knows some people MAY like it

but as some people mentioned, such emulation is already available on other machines

[Psumoni]

Somebody tell me what this has over a homebrew PSP?

*crickets*

Thought so.

[StormB]

I can't see this appealing greatly.

What I'd love to see is a console about the size of a GB micro, but with a decent CPU/GPU to provide good emulation capabilities. And a decent analogue nub/mini stick (not like the PSPs one).

That would be a great niche market. But I fear the development costs would be too high for such a device. Maybe if GamePark were to do it?

[Paradok]

And please, more buttons buttons buttons buttons! You'd think someone designing such a device would have looked at the most common complaints with the current handhelds and tried to do them one better.

Somebody tell me what this has over a homebrew PSP?

*crickets*

Thought so.

If you click the "More Info" link and poke around a little, you'll notice that this system is designed for *very* retro games. I'm not familiar with some of the consoles listed, but it looks like the NES and the Sega Master System are on the more advanced end of what's supported. There's little sense in adding a ton of buttons to a system like that, and I'm guessing that the advantage over the PSP, as far as the intended function of this system goes, is a significant price difference.

[Cwiiis]

Ben Heck's projects are all very cool, but only because of the novelty factor of shrinking down/making portable traditionally very large things. In terms of actual usability and comfort, this looks terrible, like a lot of his other designs. It looks like the original GB, but wider and with crappier buttons... I'd definitely not buy this product if it came to market.

[Exophase]

Seeing FPGAs put to use in consumer devices is interesting, but this looks kinda ridiculous.

The site makes the rather arbitrary claim that software emulators aren't as good as hardware, which isn't really fair. Never mind that the best emulators have superb compatability (usually only off by a couple percent, often in games no one cares about), but they offer many advantages too.

So why would anyone buy an ugly, not very well designed handheld with a very odd aspect ratio, and with little capability of playing anything but a fixed number of systems and music? And almost none of the benefits emulators can have (save states, fast forward, button remapping, cheating, net multiplay, rapidfire, you get the idea). Yeah, it has an actual processor that can possibly run up to ~230MHz (for the NTSC version), but they don't say an awful lot about it. And with only 256kb of RAM, well... Actually, that alone will make various platforms impossible to "synthesize" because it won't be able to provide the address space.

Even the battery life isn't anything special.

Once again, purists put forth the argument of "accurate" emulation when actually you don't need anything nearly this accurate to play almost all games ever made. And that's the only real point of emulation, to play games. Although I guess if you want to develop homebrew for these platforms this might be useful, but that applies to almost no one.

Maybe if you want a toy FPGA platform it'd be nice too.