Eh, I was linking to a PocketPC MAME emulator, and people wanted MAME on the go, so they can if they buy a PocketPC.
Anyways, while you guys hype over a simple GB emulator I will be playing all of the GB, GBC, GBA, SNES, NES, GameGear, MAME, (pretty much everything before DS/PSP) games that I can fit onto my memory card (and I’m buying a 6 GB card later this year).
I already own a Pocket PC, you astounding doofus. And I do care, because the controls suck, rendering any non-stylus gaming completely unplayable. I love how you think that me pointing out that Pocket PC controls are basically unusable for twitch gaming is some sort of cop-out argument, when your retort to this perfectly valid complaint is that someone pught to purchase a control pad for their Pocket PC. A controller that happens to cost more than a GBA SP and almost as much as a Nintendo DS. 100 dollars for a bluetooth Pocket PC control pad?
Anyways, while you guys hype over a simple GB emulator I will be playing all of the GB, GBC, GBA, SNES, NES, GameGear, MAME, (pretty much everything before DS/PSP)
Almost every single one of these systems is currently emulated on the GBA, with much better controls. Price? $150 bucks, inclusive of a generous flash cart. Your Pocket PC, on the other hand? With a modern Pocket PC, your suggested bluetooth gamepad, and an SD card, you are talking about a $500 investment… minimum. What kind of fool recommends a 500 dollar investment to badly play a 20 year old game?
PocketPCs are terrible gaming platforms. If you want emulation on the go, you should buy yourself a GBA and a flash cart or, better yet, a Gamepark 32 (which has a much better Mame port than anything for the Pocket PC). If you want to play new games, you should buy a DS or a PSP. I simply can’t understand anyone who would recommend a substandard $500+ Pocket PC gaming rig for portable gaming when there’s so many devices that have been built from the ground up to do it better and for a fraction of the price.
Eh, I was linking to a PocketPC MAME emulator, and people wanted MAME on the go, so they can if they buy a PocketPC.
Anyways, while you guys hype over a simple GB emulator I will be playing all of the GB, GBC, GBA, SNES, NES, GameGear, MAME, (pretty much everything before DS/PSP) games that I can fit onto my memory card (and I’m buying a 6 GB card later this year).
I have a ppc, ngage, DS and psp and the psp gets more playtime.
Just saying. Also ppc controls are a HUGE issue, enough to ruin it except for shooters with forgiving hitboxes and strategy, TBS, and RPG titles. Which I DO play quite a bit on the ppc. Military Madness is really awesome as a portable title (psone game like a 3d advance wars, but non cartoony, sorta)
I also play a lot of ultima 6/ Savage empire / martian dreams on it, I love those 3 games.
It’s still the WORST portable gaming platform I own. Ngage beats it for some emulation, for example, gunstar heroes really gains from the decent dpad the QD has. Same with twitch SNES titles. PSP would = good controls, and high performance, so I’d LIKE to get some emulation going on it. I’m happy with psp games, but emulation runing on it wuld allow me to leave the ppc at home unless I’m reading a book. Right now I cart all this shit around because who knows what I’ll want to play at lunch? (Ok, so it’s been nothing but hotshots golf since it came out… but still…)
Maybe you shouldn’t have bought an Ipaq? Do you have one of those really old ones where you can’t press two buttons at the same time? :roll: With PocketPCs you have a choice to buy the best one, I must say mine (a Dell Axim x50v) works just fine for gaming.
Economies of scale. They can’t make it cheaper producing it at small quantities. It’ll go down eventually (it just came out this month).
What about $500 for playing a hundred games. A thousand. Ten thousand? As much as you can fit on the SD card, and you can fit a lot, a lot on a 1 GB.
I wasn’t recommending that you buy a PocketPC solely for gaming. That would be stupid. I use my PocketPC primarily in aid with my studies, thanks to an awesome homework manager and a Japanese IME that lets me write Kanji on-the-screen (which even a PC can’t do) it gets the job done quite well. The games are a nice extra bonus. The GP32 looks like a great Gameboy replacer, but 128M for £24.99 is even more expensive than the $100 Bluetooth. Just look around for cheap prices on 1 GB CF cards and you’ll see what I mean.
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Anyways, if you guys have a PPC too, post your model (and just remember better models are coming out all the time). One other thing a PPC has is the recent trend of recompiling games under the Windows Mobile OS, such as Stratagus. WarCraft II with a stylus? Heck yeh.
You’re right, maybe I shouldn’t have bought an iPaq. Which, coincidentally, is exactly the reason why I didn’t buy an iPaq, but (amazingly) own a top of the line Dell Axim. You know, the same brand you have. I referred to an iPaq because you linked an iPaq-oriented port of Mame. Is it possible to compose your own posts without reading them? I would have assumed it wasn’t, but apparently your hand crept away from your body and, like a pianist’s decapitated hand, began typing out your post in which you talked about iPaqs while your brain, wallowing in the porridge-like wodges of your own drooping eyelids, didn’t even register your own argument.
Either way, you’re wrong: a Pocket PCs PIM buttons are piss-poor for gaming. They are tiny, unobtrusive buttons meant to occasionally trigger calendar and email functions, not to be incessantly hammered as you try to get Racoon Mario to fly across the screen. Not to mention the screen, which (being wider vertically than it is horizontally… in effect, the complete opposite scale that all consoles have been designed in for the last twenty plus years) means that games rhave to letterbox, making it even less suited for emulated games.
You sure can, which is why you should purchase something like the GP32 if you want a portable gaming experience. It also takes SD cards and is a much more ergonomically satisfying gaming experience. The screen dimensions are correct, it’s cheaper, and (being dedicated) its faster for almost all emulation. Hell, even a GBA with a flash cart is better: my GBA flash cart has four or five GBA roms, an NES, a TG-16, a SMS/GG and an SNES emu on it right now, and that’s not a full tally. Again, the advantage of even this poor emulation handheld is that it is ergonomically designed and the screen is the correct dimension for a satisfactory emulated experience. Do you really mean to say that having to reach over two of your device buttons on the axim to reach the D-Pad is comfortable? I think you’re deluding yourself.
As Moore says, a Pocket PC is a great device, but it simply can’t hold a candle to a single device that is dedicated to gaming. I could understand you smugly recommending one for portable emulation if there weren’t superior emulation platforms on the market, but there are: the GBA and GP32 are both infinitely superior to a Pocket PC for gaming, and the most expensive of those is no more than a 250 investment. When PSP and DS emulation picks up (and it will - Pocket PCs didn’t have rich emulation scenes within a couple months of their relase), there will simply be no contest. I don’t care about how many fatty-gaijin kanji you can write with Calligrapher: this isn’t a thread about overall Pocket PC usefulness. It’s a thread about gaming, and your recommendation is ridiculous. I’d sooner recommend a first-gen GBA and a 64mb flash cart (price? Less than 100 bucks) for portable emulation than a Pocket PC, and this is speaking as a guy who has religiously used his Pocket PC for the last three to four years.
Listen, I’m not going to get into a pissing match with you. You started talking about the iPaq yourself, and yes, the MAME port was iPaq oriented but it can still run on modern PocketPCs, because if you even bothered to take a moment of your time you’d notice it was compiled under the ARM processor, which is apparently compatible with XSCALE processors.
I will tell you this, I’ve been using PDAs since the original Palm Pilot came out (oh, poor cracked screen :() and I’ve always found the Gameboy emulation quite adequate. Moreover, once the novelty of “cool, i can emulate a 20 year old game” wears off, you can actually do useful things with it. But like you said, this isn’t a thread about the usefulness of a PocketPC.
Before you start recommending GP32 to people though, let me ask you this? Have you ever touched one? It looks great on the website, but how come I haven’t seen this at my local store if it’s so cheap?
edit: and PocketPC has the best stylus oriented games 8)
Okay, so now you’re scaling back your argument: now you’re only talking about the emulation of GB games. That’s fine: I agree! The Pocket PC is quite “adequate” in emulating a 16 year old platform with only two buttons. Any more than that, though, and it goes all screwy, because a Pocket PC has it’s d-pad right between the rest of the buttons. That means that (depending on your handedness) you can never control the d-pad and press the buttons on one of the sides at the same time. That’s a huge drawback for emulation, considering the fact that most cabinet systems and all consoles past, say, 1993 have had more than four buttons on their controllers.
I’ll pimp the Pocket PC to death for things like puzzle games, adventure games and PC style turn-based games. But MAME? Forget it. I’d rather wait for the PSP to get its emulation scene together (that a GB emulator has been released in a couple months is an amazing feat) than play a single round of MAME Pac-Man on a Pocket PC.
Before you start recommending GP32 to people though, let me ask you this? Have you ever touched one? It looks great on the website, but how come I haven’t seen this at my local store if it’s so cheap?
Because it’s Korean (with English firmware)? To be fair, I don’t own one, since a GBA and a flash cart gives me more than enough emulation prospects. But it has been raved about in numerous reviews. Even looking at it, how could it be worse than a Pocket PC for gaming? The D-Pad is on one side. The control buttons are on the other side, or in a shoulder position. The screen has the correct dimensions, aligning it with the dimensions of all televisions and computer screens. As a bonus, it takes SD cards. It plays DivX and mp3s. The only drawback is it uses AA batteries, as opposed to chargeable. And it emulates everything pre Nintendo 64. I simply do not see how anything that has been designed with even rudimentary ergonomics could be a worse choice than a Pocket PC… at half the price, mind you.
Nintendo DS includes a built-in “GBA emulator.” ;)[/quote]
Yeah, but it’s “cute” stuff like this that makes me think you need correcting. The DS has GBA hardware in it. Maybe that’s what the smiley means, maybe it isn’t…
There’s lots of GBA emulators out there for a variety of platforms that happil escape Nintendo’s Wrath. I believe the Zodiac people were charging for their emulator - that is what brings down Nintendo’s wrath, someone making money other than them…
