#19336 - SimonB - Sat Apr 17, 2004 6:28 pm
Several retailers in Hong Kong (including Success) selling gba flash kits have received requests to cease all sales of these products.
#19351 - satanicfreak2 - Sat Apr 17, 2004 8:14 pm
This sucks, I just got a 256 flash card two days ago. I dont know if it will still ship or not. i guess i'll have to wait and see.
#19355 - Cedric Greene - Sat Apr 17, 2004 8:39 pm
I was looking at the cards YESTERDAY! Guess it helps to hold on to cash so you can make those spur of the moment purchases. anyone know of a site still selling the flash2advance ultras or the EZF Advance II?
#19358 - zazery - Sat Apr 17, 2004 9:56 pm
I knew this was eventually going to happen seeing as lots of people buying the carts use them for illegal activity. It would be great if they could sell them to developers for their own personal use just like most of us here. It would be great if Official GCN, GBA, PS2 and XBOX dev kits could easily be obtained for homebrew. It would be great to have experience with these kits before getting hired from a company that creates games for those systems.
#19360 - tepples - Sat Apr 17, 2004 10:47 pm
GameCube, Xbox, and the forthcoming PSP handheldseem to use reasonably familiar PC graphics APIs. Xbox is Direct3d (obviously), PSP is OpenGL (a published screen shot calls function names that look identical to common GL functions except that in the sce* namespace instead of gl*), and GameCube is rumored to be OpenGL-ish.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#19366 - Rudis - Sun Apr 18, 2004 12:59 am
It's like if the RIAA were to request that Best Buy and Walmart cease selling blank CD-Rs.
I wonder if the EFA is safer due to the fact that you can't actually back up commercial ROMs with that kit.
#19369 - SimonB - Sun Apr 18, 2004 1:49 am
Maybe they are less safe just because they cant backup original games :P
either way, its not like NOA is going to stop sales of all gba flash units out there.
Simon
#19374 - tepples - Sun Apr 18, 2004 5:38 pm
Think NOA can't stop it? Where can I buy a new GBC flash cart and linker, other than the GB Bridge with an older (pre-Ultra) F2A cart, and have it shipped to my home in the midwestern USA?
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#19381 - SimonB - Sun Apr 18, 2004 7:20 pm
tepples: No I dont they can stop gba flash kits. If they could why have they been widely available for 2.5(?) years? Because NOA didnt mind? I think they main reason that GB/GBC flash kits are not available new is because the GBA was released over 3 years ago. The Bung people are still around but working on GBA instead.
Theres even more competition in the gba flash market so theres more companies and factories for NOA to shut down.
Simon
#19382 - zazery - Sun Apr 18, 2004 7:52 pm
According to what Nintendo is saying, the Nintendo DS is like a third pillar to the GCN and GBA. Obviously flash carts have become more and more popular for pirating games. Even though some people use it for development I'm sure the majority pirate games. Having only a few companies with not so great carts wasn't a big enough threat for Nintendo. Now there are more and more flash carts released including ones with internal clocks and 1G memory. I'm supprised how many more have came out since I bought mine about a year ago.
It would be great if there was a solution besides sending a C&D. If possible it would be great if a small website selling carts could sell it to starting up business or people proving that they want to program the GBA. I'm sure some would still pirate games however Nintendo might over look it. There's got to be a solution for homebrew developers.
Just my 2 cents.
#19387 - SimonB - Sun Apr 18, 2004 11:05 pm
zazery: I agree with you that there should be some kind of official support for start ups and amateurs. I would be very happy if NOA could put an end to the 'less than honest' use of 3rd party gba flash cartridges but since its the "only" way for many amateurs and startups to test their stuff I dont want production to stop entirely.
I just happend to post something yesterday about selling flash carts to amatuer developers from gbadev.org for a low price. If Nintendo would do this themselves for a reseonable price,there would be no 'real' reason for 3rd party flash carts to excist and sites like ours would never want to be affiliated with companies making or distributing these products.
Maybe the community should come together and put some pressure on NOA...
Simon
#19395 - zazery - Mon Apr 19, 2004 2:40 am
SimonB:
Why would Nintendo want to waste time, resources and money to set up a small cart shop for homebrew developers. I agree with your point that there would be no 'real' reason for 3rd party flash carts to exist then. However Nintendo will definitly not care about homebrew developers. I'm not sure how many there are but I'm guessing less than 10,000 or so. I'm sure at least 5 times that number flash carts have been sold. Nintendo looks at the problem they are facing, not the problem we are facing.
It would be a good idea to put presure on NOA but I doubt Nintendo will even look into the issue. Who knows, it's worth a shot. I'm just starting in GBA dev so I don't think I'd be the best one to start this sort of thing.
I would recommend that we stress the fact we don't care about 3rd party carts as long as we can get carts to develop our own games using devkit advance.
Maybe making some sort of boot loader for a cart, and that cart would contain some sort of encryption key which can be used in a program on the computer to confirm the rom is not licensed by Nintendo. Obviously this isn't a fool proof solution but Nintendo may possibly agree to it.
Well I hope we can organize ourselves to approch Nintendo so that they will actually listen to us. It could be hard.
#19401 - tepples - Mon Apr 19, 2004 4:16 am
I have an idea: How about making carts with 128 KB of mask or OTP ROM mapped into cart space and a heck of a lot of flash memory mapped into the savegame space? Then multiboot programs could be stored in several banks of flash, and the ROM could hold (among other things) a DOS to read and write programs and data in a filesystem in savegame space. A multiboot-only cart could probably seamlessly run standalone multiboot programs and programs designed to work with the DOS, but it wouldn't run your typical proprietary GBA game.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#19405 - zazery - Mon Apr 19, 2004 5:33 am
Sounds like a good idea. I don't have the knowledge that you have with GBA development but wouldn't your idea mean we would be restricting ourselves to only small multiboot games?
I want to create a big game and possibly talk to a developer when I'm done. I'm putting a lot of effort into it at the moment. Eventually my game will become more than the Multiboot size limit, so wouldn't that cart limit the size of my game? I believe Final Fantasy Tactics has a 128M cart, I've got the same size cart so I could potentially make a game that big and get it published by developers using that cart size. I know not everyone is planning to create big games.
I do think it's a good idea for the small games some of us make. It would work actually, but then again who would make it for < 10,000 people?
#19427 - dagamer34 - Mon Apr 19, 2004 9:54 pm
I wish Nintendo would do something like Sony did with the PS2, allowing homebrew developers to use the system through a kernel, and releasing it to the public.
One reason why I think it's too late for Nintendo to do something about it is because the system doesn't have enough copyright protection to do something like this. Maybe with the DS, we might see some hope.
_________________
Little kids and Playstation 2's don't mix. :(
#19432 - Cedric Greene - Tue Apr 20, 2004 1:04 am
Damn this really sucks, here's an e-mail I sent and the reply I got:
From: "MW Electronics" <sales@mwelectronics.com>
To: "'Cedric Greene'"
Subject: RE: Question on availability
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 02:06:23 -0400
No we didn't get any notice but have decided to close shop anyway.
Sincerely,
MW Electronics
www.mwelectronics.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Cedric Greene
Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2004 9:37 PM
To: sales@mwelectronics.com
Subject: Question on availability
I know several Hong Kong based internet sites were hit
with cease and desist orders today and am hoping that
your American site was overlooked. Also it seems you
only have the "EZ-Flash Advance 256Mb
w/ USB Linker" in stock, any possibility of others
coming in and is that one still available? Also any
plans in the near future to have the 512 version?
Thanks for any info.
#19451 - tepples - Tue Apr 20, 2004 5:39 am
| zazery wrote: |
| but wouldn't your idea mean we would be restricting ourselves to only small multiboot games? |
Heck no. Functions in the DOS (which would kinda-sorta operate like GBA BIOS) would allow one multiboot program to load another multiboot program and pass arguments to it. The menus and the game engine could be in separate programs. In addition, each multiboot program could load assets from the "disk." They could even load common libraries compiled with -fPIC into EWRAM or IWRAM.
| Quote: |
| but then again who would make it for < 10,000 people? |
If Clickteam or some other game construction kit publisher can make its engine run on the thing, expect a market much larger than 10,000.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#19519 - Krisjohn - Wed Apr 21, 2004 7:55 am
Oh please, I bought LotR:TT and LotR:RotK because I had the opportunity to try them out on a real GBA. I don't like the franchise and wouldn't have bought the games if I hadn't actually played them.
The only companies that need to fear products like flash carts are ones that have a bigger budget for their marketing division than their development department.
#19569 - MDonoughe - Thu Apr 22, 2004 2:49 am
Why don't they stop Microsoft from selling Windows? I've never seen the software to backup the ROM's for any other systems...
#19698 - tepples - Fri Apr 23, 2004 5:16 pm
Doesn't the MBV2 software run on GNU/Linux?
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#19767 - sgeos - Sun Apr 25, 2004 12:56 pm
| tepples wrote: |
| I have an idea: How about making carts with 128 KB of mask or OTP ROM mapped into cart space and a heck of a lot of flash memory mapped into the savegame space? |
That sounds interesting. As a potential alternative, why not offer 4 Mb, 8 Mb and 16 Mb carts. I think that that is actually enough for most home brew developers, and those carts are way too small to play commercial games. (Were there any first gen GBA games that can fit in 16 Mb?)
As another alternative, why not carts with x 8 Mb banks and dip switches? (Maybe I'm just sick, but I think that a "Please manually switch to bank 3 and press A" prompt would be really funny if somebody wanted to make a larger game. =P)
Maybe the homebrew crew can figure something out with eReader cards?
-Brendan
#19780 - Lord Graga - Sun Apr 25, 2004 3:49 pm
Basicly, multiboot is the safest and most legal method for deving... And it'll always be there :)
Just LZ77 compress the graphics and maybe some code (for EWRAM). There's lots of things that could be done.
#19787 - ufc - Sun Apr 25, 2004 6:02 pm
graga, that's not as great an option as you think... you hit the 256k limit REAL fast when you write anything significant. LZ77 compression helps, but with animated frames, you either have to decompress into VRAM every frame, or decompress everything to IWRAM, and that eats ram in a hurry. EWRAM is there (in my opinion) for decompressing ROM stuff so I can get at it without having to decompress constantly
#19838 - FluBBa - Mon Apr 26, 2004 3:19 pm
Well, it's easy to see you've never worked under severe memory constraints ;-P
check this produkkt out!
mmm, it requires 512MByte of RAM, but the exe file is only 96kByte big, if you want to you can create a whole lot of stuff in just 256kByte.
_________________
I probably suck, my not is a programmer.
#19839 - ufc - Mon Apr 26, 2004 4:23 pm
I don't think you quite get what I said. If you multiboot, there's nowhere to decompress all your crap to.
#19882 - FluBBa - Tue Apr 27, 2004 10:35 am
I sure got what you were saying, and my example was a little extreme (in that it requires 512MByte RAM and so on...), I hope my smiley got through even though this board doesn't display it as graphics.
Wether you run from ROM or multiboot EWRAM you still have to move the graphics somehow to the VRAM, if you decompress it on the way will only imply a (small?) cpu hit, I don't see why you have to decompress it every frame just because you run from EWRAM?
_________________
I probably suck, my not is a programmer.
#19923 - crossraleigh - Wed Apr 28, 2004 2:22 am
The small size of the .kkrieger demo probably was due more to generation techniques like Perlin noise rather than compression.
I have never written Perlin noise code, but I am constantly amazed at the effects achievable with it (e.g., http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/models/perlsph9.gif). Dan has experimented with it before: http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=2633.