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Music Media

Songboy Turns GameBoys into MP3 Players 143

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thats-a-cool-one dept.
farfisa sent us linkage to Songboy which is a $99 addon for a gameboy which allows it to play MP3s. I just used my to play B mode tetris (Start at level 9 with the blocks all the way up and try to get 25 lines: total adrenaline). Its pretty amazing how general purpose these ancient little devices have turned out to be.
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Songboy Turns GameBoys into MP3 Players

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  • Re:Isn't it surprising (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think Game Boy has survived this long only because of the games. It has the largest collection of games, and as kids get older and tired of Game Boy, younger kids go into it because of all the games like Pokemon. It's still underpowered compared to just about every other handheld game ever released.

    I recently bought a Neo Geo Pocket Color. It's definately better hardware than the Game Boy Color, but kids don't really like it too much because the selection of games is more like what older people play.
  • Hong Kong is probably my favourite place on earth - worth spending the money to go there and have a look around.

    Once you're there, ofcourse, there are plenty of _cheap_ geek toys to buy to keep you happy. The cost of accomodation, food, etc., is/was quite cheap.

    Don't know the cost of getting there from the US, but there are often really good deals from the UK (and, I guess, the rest of Europe). It's also a pretty common place to stop over on the way to/from Australia and the UK. Last time I did Sydney to London we had a six hour stop over which was just enough to zip in to town, ride the Star Ferry, get some fake watches at the Night Market, and get back to the airport in time for some duty free shopping.

    Would move there in an instant if it wasn't for the whole communist rule thing. Oh well.

    ...j
  • No way man, if you play it in mono out of the gameboy speaker, I'm sure you could just encode all your mp3's at 32kbps or something. :)

    Heck, if we're going to be this silly, why not just make the gameboy processor do the work, and play .au files?

    (Oh, you want to use the *headphones*...)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • Infogenius blows goats. Try it for a couple weeks and see. It's the same problem as the GB emulator for Palm. Just isn't meant to do it.

    Faceball 2000 isn't exactly what I meant by raycasted 3D graphics. I was meaning more along the lines of Doom/Quake. Wolfenstein graphics are pretty "blocky", as are Faceball's.

    developing for a handheld that's still being commercially developed for sounds really cool

    It is. :-) I developped a little hardware dongle and software that talked to a reduced voltage soft starter (see here [benshaw.com]) via I2C. They called it too much of a toy so I now do it on a Palmpilot for 5x the price. :-)

    'sides.. The GB is a $70 child's toy, which means that our techs can't break 'em. Plus, they can play Tetris on the flight home. :-)
  • nintendo won bung in court and they're not allowed to make those cartidges anymore

    North America only.
  • I bought a couple year old model in which the book says 9.5 hours on Alkaline AA batteries. And it seems pretty accurate, although I get slightly shorter times due to the fact I play it loud in a noisy environment (with / as earplugs!).

    Some of the newest ones are so small that they only take a rechargable NiMH or Li ion battery flat pack. Think in terms of how thin the latest and thinnest Palm units are, the battery fits in half THAT thickness.
  • Minidisc players only take 1 AA battery too, for 10 to 20 hours of operation. REMOVABLE 74 minutes recording media costs me about 1.50$US per disc in 20 disc quantities, at a quality that is about that of a well encoded 256kbps mp3. I have yet to skip my MD player and I sure have tried. Before you think that MD is such an obscure format, consider the market for MP3 devices now, there is probably the same level of general awareness involved.
  • Enough That is incredibly gay and childish
  • I find it hard to believe that you think that the Game Boy version of Tetris sucks, especially considering that this was the first version of the game ever released.

    Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Go away, and come back when you've studied your history a bit better. Tetris had been around for some time before the gameboy was released.

  • I haven't found another version ever where the control is remotely as well done.

    Wow. I haven't found another version where the control is remotely as badly done.

    I'm kind of insulted you don't like the Gameboy one

    Don't be. I'm merely expressing an opinion. I don't get insulted when people have different opinions to me, so why should you?

  • Or at least, Tetris on the Gameboy does. I've played an awful lot of versions of Tetris, and the Gameboy one is probably the worst of the lot (sadly, the arcade version is not far behind).

    Probably the best version is Mirrorsoft's (IIRC) one for the Amiga. Twintris was always a bit of a laugh, too, although having the blocks rotate in the wrong direction wasn't so clever.

  • Twice I managed to get 4 tetris' (don't know the plural) on level 9 height 5. That was a while back when I still had reflexes. I also made it to level 21 on the tetris game for NES. That was an adrenaline rush!
  • I paid $110 for my gameboy, of course that was in 1990...

    And the name Songboy is no worse than Gameboy, or Walkman, Discman, or the hordes of other like names.
  • It was the fish sonar I couldn't believe :)
  • Anyone got a URL that confirms this? The best I've found is this one [t-station.net], which only states 42 hours using a "Nickel-Hydrogen cell" (NiMH?). How many AAs in the holder?
  • Not that the Guinness Book is terribly accurate -- they have categories for "biggest shopping mall on the Internet" (which 404s when you try to use the URL) and "most popular domain name" (".com" -- snicker)

    -j

  • Sony just released such a beast. Check out their newest portable player... MZ-E75. 45 hours with the Li-Ion battery, 31 hours with the AA battery holder, for a whopping 76 hours of battery life combined. - Ed.
  • Personally, I find it very surprising that the GB's architechure has lasted as long as it has. I mean look at the console and computer gaming markets, and the changes that they go through to keep up with technology. Now look at the GB's rather simple architechure and consider how they have managed to keep it around as long as they have. I guess that it has something to do with its simplicity of design. The way I figure it, Nintendo must have allowed for the cartridge to do a great deal of the processing thus allowing for its great "expandability."
  • MD are just to dam expensive ...

    No way, dude... MiniDiscs are the shit. I recently bought one (Sharp's most expensive model sold at Best Buy) and it's great... sounds great, looks cool, and you can name tracks, split tracks, and everything else you'd need. It was only $200 (you couldn't get a portable mp3 player for *too* much less than that, and then only one that has 64mb of RAM [which would hold 1/2 the music that a MiniDisc holds if you used a decent bitrate of mp3]) MiniDiscs themselves are only ~2 bucks a pop if you buy a 10-pack (again, at Best Buy.)

    You can record with a standard stereo headphone-plug type input or an optical cable from a digital source. I record using a splitter->RCA from my computer to my stereo, then RCA out from my stereo to a converter to a headphone plug and then into my MD player. I get absolutely no noticeable noise with this setup and the sound is perfect (and I have a pretty good ear for this type of thing) It even sounds damn good from an mp3, the compression in the MiniDisc doesn't fuck with mp3's compression too badly.

    Sorry to go off on this rant, but I think that everybody who likes portable music should have one of these babies instead of a portable mp3 player, since they seem so much more practical to me (and to switch songs, you don't have to hook it back up to your computer, just pop in another disc)

    "Software is like sex- the best is for free"
    -Linus Torvalds
  • From the DVD FAQ [dvddemystified.com]
    For reference, a CD-ROM holds about 650 megabytes, which is 0.64 gigabytes or 0.68 billion bytes. In the list below, SS/DS means single-/double-sided,
    SL/DL/ML means single-/dual-/mixed-layer (mixed means single layer on one side, double layer on the other side), gig means gigabytes (2^30), G means billions of
    bytes (10^9). See note about giga vs. billion in section 7.2.

    DVD-5 (12cm, SS/SL): 4.38 gig (4.7 G) of data, over 2 hours of video
    DVD-9 (12cm, SS/DL): 7.95 gig (8.5 G), about 4 hours
    DVD-10 (12cm, DS/SL): 8.75 gig (9.4 G), about 4.5 hours
    DVD-14 (12cm, DS/ML): 12.33 gig (13.24 G), about 6.5 hours
    DVD-18 (12cm, DS/DL): 15.90 gig (17 G), over 8 hours
    DVD-1 (8cm, SS/SL): 1.36 gig (1.4 G), about half an hour
    DVD-2 (8cm, SS/DL): 2.48 gig (2.7 G), about 1.3 hours
    DVD-3 (8cm, DS/SL): 2.72 gig (2.9 G), about 1.4 hours
    DVD-4 (8cm, DS/DL): 4.95 gig (5.3 G), about 2.5 hours
    DVD-R (12cm, SS/SL): 3.68 gig (3.95 G)
    DVD-R (12cm, DS/SL): 7.38 gig (7.9 G)
    DVD-R (8cm, SS/SL): 1.15 gig (1.23 G)
    DVD-R (8cm, DS/SL): 2.29 gig (2.46 G)
    DVD-RAM (12cm, SS/SL): 2.40 gig (2.58 G)
    DVD-RAM (12cm, DS/SL): 4.80 gig (5.16 G)
  • er, there was a palm driven lego set on /. not so long ago... used jini technology :)
  • Next Linux for Gameboy!!!
  • It's a joke mate!

  • Neat! (Score:1)

    by Penrif ( 33473 )
    Maybe that Color Gameboy I got for Christmas won't be completely worthless!
  • Why not just buy a rio? I can't see why anyone would waste their money on this when the 32 meg rio is less. Not to mention how crappy that gameboy speaker is gonna sound.


  • Aside: I wonder what using the Soundboy does to battery life?


    I wonder the same, but, I also wonder how it uses battery life if you happen to have one of those rechargeable battery things. I have one of those.. you charge it for about 8 hours, but you can also play the Gameboy as it's recharging. It lasts for a long time as well, and so I wonder how the Songboy takes its toll on these things. I bought the battery thing so that I wouldn't have to waste money on batteries. Nice piece of equipment.


    The other thing about this is it's coming at a time when I:
    • want to sell my Gameboy and all the junk I have with it
    • wouldn't dream of paying $99.00 for this thing, esp. if it's only 16MB
    • would rather stick with my laptop and just wait this mp3 player craze out, and get a really nice one for cheap when it all blows over

  • The details on this are just a touch vague. Which piece of hardware does the actual decoding? I would think the addon, since I don't think a gameboy has the horsepower.
  • Note quite: "Sore wa" means "That". So the exact translation would be: "That is a secret!" Just being pedantic... :)
  • Just wondering if you knew what "Sore wa HIMITSU desu?" means. (I do)
  • I too was a tetris junkie. Nothing I liked better than starting at level 9 hight 5 and then finishing that off and seeing that Huge frikin rocket take off. All I ever got on the progressive game (the one where you could go forever) was the dinky little rocket, of course I didn't spend a whole lot of time on that one. I would be more that happy to get addicted to tetris again if I knew that the gameboy could play mp3s as well. However there can't be a whole lot said for the quality of the speaker in the gameboy (8-bit sound anyone?). I don't know that I would be worth the effort to get mp3s to play on a piece of crap speaker.. although i suppose you could hook up headphones to that thing and get some pretty jammin toons. If anyone ever gets ahold of this they will have to tell everyone how well it works.

    ~Jester
  • From the look of it, there appears to be two tiny speakers built onto the front of the SongBoy. I may be wrong on that, but that's how the design looks to me. And I'm sure there's a headphone jack built in, so you don't annoy other people on the bus that don't want to hear 'Ray of Light' again for the 5th day in a row. ;)
  • You know,a cooler idea than that.... I want a DVD of MP3s! Just chok full of 'em! I Figured it out once- A DVD has 20x the capacity of a CD (i once heard) and perfectly good MP3 compression gives you another factor of 12...........

    74 min X 20 (cds in a dvd) X 12 (times smaller file size = a little over 2 weeks of CD quality sound :) Box set of the 20th century, anyone?
  • Man, These chips have been around for a LONG FRIGGIN TIME. I think I read here on /. about motorola or somebody working to enhance it with more speed..
  • Wow. This is all quite interesting stuff. Is anyone working on internet capabilities for GameBoy? It might make a good PDA afterall.

    "You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"

  • The 6502, Z80, 68020 and below, etc. don't have support for memory protection. You'd have to get rid of the linux MMU.

    Good thing it's already been done here [uclinux.org]. Of course, the Linux kernel, even when stripped down to the bare essentials, will need exponentially more memory than 4K... try 500K.

  • seems like a waste of money. i think any mp3 player with less than 64 megs is kind of a waste. maybe its just me.
  • As the Gameboy uses a modified Z-80 processor, I guess that would mean Linux would be pushing down into the CP/M market space.

    Maybe I better hook my BigBoard (Z-80 with a whopping 64K of RAM and onboard Video and Disk IO) up to a power supply again.

    I'm not banking on Linux reaching my SYM-1 single board computers (KIM-1 clones) any time soon, though. (6502 processor, hex keypad and six digit seven segment display, stock with 2K of RAM, upgradable to [I think] 8K)
  • Wow. That's pretty harsh. The original Gameboy Tetris is the only one I've ever actually liked. I still play it when I get bored sometimes, and it's still a damn good game. I haven't found another version ever where the control is remotely as well done. I'm not sure what does it, but everything about it, the look, the feel, and even the sound, is just so elegant considering what it's done with. I'm kind of insulted you don't like the Gameboy one, but that's your choice. Oh well.
  • Ok, I admit it, I'm a bad person for that last part. Or at least I didn't word it very well. I guess I'm disappointed that some people think something I like sucks, but I don't really have a problem with it. Well, sorry, my bad. Have fun not playing Gameboy Tetris :P
  • I wonder if you could make a program on the cd that would decode the mp3s and then throw a bunch of mp3s on the rest of the disc? Of course you would need to have the chip that lets you play regular cds.
  • "Users will be able to download music directly from the SongBoy website. Advertisers will sponsor the first 10,000 downloads of a new song which will be available free to consumers. As the music plays, images and advertising will show in Game Boy's screen." Wonder if when you play your own mp3's, you still have to watch ads? Well...I uh...well...well...look Nancy, the carpet is growing again. Bring me the lawnmower!
  • Yes, but not out the little pizeoelectirc speaker it doesn't.
    You only get the stereo sound with headphones, which I think the original poster meant.

    -BK
  • Guess I wasn't clear.

    I was trying to point out that any user who wanted the /extra stuff/ (liner notes and the like) would have to spring for the .mpe's.

    Ahh. I see the confusion -- I wrote 'mpe2mp3' when I meant 'mp32mpe'.

    .c

  • Processor is a Z-80... Scrolled down further and found it...
  • I bought an MD for my gf for xmas.
    It rulez. Uploading mp3's to ur mp3 player EVERY time you want a new set is a pain surely.
    We can make a new MD from our mp3s on HD but once you've made the disk you can just pop it out and the next one in. MUCH quicker.
    Who fancies lending their 32Mb Flash card to a friend? I can give my MD's away and not be too bothered.
    Ok when my mp3 hardware has 256Mb as standard then it might be worth it but 32Mb just isn't enough.
    .oO0Oo.
  • I don't know. I think "Songgirl" would have been better than "Songboy". I can see the marketing now.

    Castrate your GameBoy today with the new "Songgirl" add-on (or should we say clip-off).

  • Sure a gameboy can run Linux! All you need to do is make an attachment with a Crusoe processor, (or AMD if you have to) PCI bus, 128MB Ram, membrane keyboard, and 100BTX connection.
  • ok, just to make sure i don't get off on the wrong foot here, i'll say that i love mp3's as much as the next nerd. Although, i think that the things they are trying to use to play mp3's nowadays are getting a little out of hand. The other day, i read an article about a watch that plays mp3s, and now an addon for gameboy? I think that mp3s should be left to computers and portable mp3 players myself (and hopefully CD players than can read mp3 cd's in the future), i didn't even know a gameboy was powerful enough to play mp3s (maybe it's not!). Another thing to note is that Gameboy doesn't even have good speakers (but i guess you could use headphones.), anyway that's just my two cents.
  • Maybe I missed something on the page, but how do you get the stuff from your computer to the....the thing? USB would make sense, I think, but I didn't see it mentioned anywhere...

    --Colbey
  • does this mean were all going to be developing for game boy now ?

    is that even possible(seriously)?

    it actually doesnt sound like a bad idea. i would suggest doing n64 games or whatnot, but we would all fight over which system is better, and new systems would be coming out too fast.

    at least with gameboy you KNOW its gonna be around a while
  • AFAIK DVDs are capable of holding up to 17GB of data. I'll go see if i can verify this and ill probably reply to my own post

  • This sounds like one of the more useful addons for the gameboy :)
    When i saw the little snap-on camera and printer thing, i couldn't believe my eyes, but this is even funnier :)

    Personally, I'd rather listen to my mp3's on the road using my boring, simple rio player.

  • Apple II series and Nintendo NES also used a 6502 type CPU. NES also had a nice character-cell management chip.

    and then port all of the usual GNU programs to 8-bit code

    Using GCC and GNU binutils would simplify making open-source NES games immensely. (O.S. works better than "free" as an adjective when not in front of "software"; sorry RMS...)

  • I love that game (I've even cloned it [rose-hulman.edu] for Linux and other platforms that support Allegro [demon.co.uk]), but Tetris sucks [xoom.com]. The company that makes it is greedy.

    But let's get back on topic, shall we?
    Try typing "Tetris" into the song title search box on the Napster [napster.com] client and see what cool techno remixes don't pop up.

  • PDA software
    Been done. InfoGenius.
    raycasted 3D graphics
    Been done. FaceBall 2000.

    If you've got one and you want to hack it, join up. You can buy Bung's cartridge to transfer your software to a real GB or use one designed by one of the list gurus. There are some people in there who do GB code for a living, others who are under Nintendo NDAs, and even others who seem to know more than Nintendo themselves knows about the GB. :-)

    Right now I'm on nesdev instead, but developing for a handheld that's still being commercially developed for sounds really cool. Just think what will happen when Game Boy Advance comes out though...

  • Sorry, DVD-ROMs made with current technology (one side, one layer) only hold 7 CD-ROMs each. But 4700 MB at 1 MB/min is still over three days.
  • What about the world's smallest digital camera according to Guinness® World Records? Game Boy® Camera kicks.
  • If I remember correctly, the 6502 is the chip the Commodore 64 ran on. The is an operating system called "GeckOS" which runs on 6502's (esp C64's) and it has a Linux-like environment... complete with internet access and a web server. I don't know about Linux for Z80, but you could possibly make a custom kernel in assembler basing it on the Linux code, and then port all of the usual GNU programs to 8-bit code. Of course, you can't really run much with only 16kb of ram :) Imagine slashdotting a gameboy....
  • I kmowthis amy seema little off the subject but isn't itweird how game boy (whcich was first released in 1989) has outlasted all other game playing console such as segaand super nintendo, and hand held consoles such as turbo graphics, sega nomad, and sega game gear. Gameboy was the least advance thing nintendo could spit out yet it has lasted the longest...weird isn't it...LONG LIVE DOT MATRIX WWITH STEREO
  • Is this only available in the Japan? Us? How about Can? how on Earth can a colour Game Boy be worthless? I have one of the old nes from 1990.
  • Man, I used to OWN at Tetris game B, I remember a time at which I literally saw tetris in my head even when I wasn't playing. Level 9 Height 5 got to be too simple. On the gameboy I know you could hold down the down arrow when you turned the gameboy on and whatever level you picked, it would be 10 higher than that(really really fast) I think I got up to beating Level 12 Height 5. (Theoretical level 12 anyway, it was still really cool) I used to love beating up on all my family members in multiplayer :)
  • I think it might be cool to build a portable MP3 player around a 100MB ZIP disk. If it could be made small enough, it would make memory a non-issue for many users. And you wouldn't have to deal with any cables. I think i'll hold on an MP3 player for now though. Once a portable CD player can play a CDR full of files, then I'll buy that.
  • Add to the advantages of MP3 players
    1) they have the potential to hold more music without a lot of disk swapping (just buy a bigger flash RAM card. Hopefully the prices of these will come down.)
    2) music upload is quite fast using USB or parallel cable.
    3) you can use the flash RAM to store any kind of files you like

    I must admit those little MD players look quite nice. There are thousands of the sleek little buggers on display in the streets of Akihabara in Japan. Amazing how popular they are there. They're really not much bigger than the MP3 players I've seen.

    But doesn't MD uses some form of compression? So I would be worried that the quality of MP3's copied to and MD would suffer since they must be decompressed and then recompressed.

    Also recording to MiniDisc seems to require a separate recording deck. I like the convenience of being able to transfer tunes directly from most any computer to the MP3 player using a USB cable.

    What I would like to know is this: would it be possible to make an MP3 player that uses MiniDiscs as the storage media? That would really rock.
  • 16MB is not enough. You could store what, like 3-5 songs on that? Woo-freakin-hoo.

    I'm waiting for MP3 players w/ a whole lot of space. There are digital cameras w/ 320 megs of space. If I could get an MP3 player w/ that much space, I would be happy.
  • It might be nice if one could pry into the flash memory of the more exotic sound cards to program the DSP into playing things like mp3's. When I find a site that shows more detail on how sound cards are constructed, I would like to try programming one of those things.

    Right now, I just have a few simple sound cards and am not sure if they can be reprogrammed. I do know that looking at my RIO that uses only 1 AA battery, nothing is more effecient or flies like assembly on a DSP!
  • I'm waiting for the springboard based mp3 module for my Visor to become cheaper.. Cant really afford anything more than 99 bucks for a mp3 springboard..


    Then again, I'd love to own a GPS, Wireless or bluetooth module :)
    --
  • Maybe it is time for a springboard HUB module? eh.. :) Like the USB hubs.. or the Y cables.. Maybe it's time someone made a palm driven LEGO set..
    --
  • I believe the USB thingy on the Visor is a fully usable USB port.. Exepct the pins on both ends which are there to facilate with Hotsynincg.. Have you seen the new foldable keyboard that uses this USB port? The cradle has no special USB stuff in it.. it's just an interface to the Visor USB port...
    --
  • Minidisc players only take 1 AA battery too, for 10 to 20 hours of operation
    I don't believe you. The best I've seen a Minidisc player manage is 6 hours on a single AA, 12 hours on a pair.
  • ...320 megs of space. If I could get an MP3 player w/ that much...
    Try the eGo - it accepts the IBM Microdrive, two with an add-on (but it won't run on batteries when using even one). Plently of info (reviews) and links at my page [geocities.com]

    (Bias disclaimer - I'm signed up with the eGo affilliate thing, but because I thought it was cool first)

  • I downloaded the software version of the SongBoy and you can manually associate images with MP3 tracks like this;

    Songname: whatever.mp3
    First image: whatever.1.bmp
    Second image: whatever.2.bmp

    You can do text somehow too. (probably "whatever.1.txt") I've already got a few bits of artwork copied off MP3.com and epitonic.com that come up when the appropriate tracks are selected. Hopefully the hardware version will also allow for this...

  • mp3 springboard.. Then again, I'd love to own a GPS, Wireless or bluetooth module
    That's the problem with the Visor, and the TRGpro - only one slot, when there's so much cool stuff on its way... *sigh*
  • I'm wondering if there will be a Springboard USB card, or perhaps a CF-to-USB adatpor. Can the USB port on the Visor be connected to devices, or is it just used to connect to a parent computer?

    More on topic, I wonder if the SongBoy will let you share MP3 files via the GameBoy's comms port?

  • I own a Rio (300SE) and a GameBoy and I'll probably get the SongBoy. I downloaded the software and I like how you can associate images and text with each track. I do rather enjoy toys like this, I don't consider it's an either/or situation (you are allowed to have more than one portable MP3 player in your home), and I have my GameBoy [geocities.com] slightly expanded already...

    BTW: I also submitted this story, based on an article at MP3.com [bfast.com].

  • My bet is that the add-on uses the Gameboy as a sort of dumb terminal and power supply.

    If that's the case it seems like it should be possible to leave the Gameboy free to play games while the Soundboy plays music. It might require some sort of pass-through connector for the game cartridge, but once the Soundboy has received its instructions (playlist) there shouldn't be any need for it to use the host's I/O or processor.

    Hmm. An alternative to a pass-through would be to store games in part of the Soundboy's memory and allow the Gameboy to read this direct. Of course, that would make the Soundboy an ideal way to pir^Wbackup commercial cartridges (you'd need a way to read a cartridge into a file first, but that can't be too difficult).

    Being able to play games and mp3s simultaneously on the same handheld would be very nice.

    Aside: I wonder what using the Soundboy does to battery life?
  • Nintendo just won a permanent injunction against Bung last month. A US court ruled that the Bung carts were intended for piracy, not development, and ruled that Bung must pay Nintendo some $7 million as well as cease selling its flash carts in the US, Canada, Mexico, and (I believe) parts of Central America that the court has jurisdiction over.

    As a GB Developer myself, I'm upset about the ruling - I was planning on buying a cart soon. Now you either have to have them purchased and imported by someone outside the Continent or win one in the current Bung Amatuer GB developer contest. Frankly, I doubt Bung can stay in business now, with a hung debt and a huge market dead (then again, Hong Kong is where they make all their cash off of software pirates anyways).

    I think that a large percentage of the people who purchased these ARE using them for piracy, but now I have to and either continue to use an emulator or wait for my "studio" to become Nintendo licensed (soon, I hope) and purchase a several thousand dollar cart =(
  • The page said it's coming out in 16, 32, and 64 meg versions. 64 megs is enough for 8-9 normal quality mp3s. :/
  • That thing has only 16 megs of Ram, meaning about
    1/4 hour of mpeg music ... :(

    It looks that they use the gameboy only as "display" for the song titles, etc, so I think
    this is a pretty useless invetion.

    I think I stick with my RIO .. :)

  • This comment is *not* insightful, it's just plain wrong... the device can play both mp3's and mpe's... you just get some extra features with mpe's (lyrics and copyright info).
  • there is a psx device [mp3psx.com] that fits into the parallel port that allows mp3 cds to be played on it.

    it's not a program on the cd, but it works nonetheless.
  • Wow man.

    With enough of these babies clustered together you could probably get the processing power of a 386-SX 16!

    Cool!
  • The article was misleading (from the songboy site):

    Songboy has licensed the .MPE file format from Destiny Media Technologies for use with the SongboyTM portable and Songboy PC PlayerTM.

    The .MPE or encrypted multimedia format enables artists to release music tracks that are encrypted for the purchaser.

    As far as I can tell, users (who would like the fancy-shmancy liner notes and the like) will have to purchase .mpe's from songboy.

    Until, of course, some geek builds mpe2mp3 (if it doesn't exist already).

    .c

  • The baby little processor (z80 or 8051, don't remember which) in a gameboy could not handle the decoding by itself. However, Micronas [intermetall.com] makes DSP chips [intermetall.com] that will do the decode in hardware, taking in blocks of data, and then dumping out a PCM stream that a D/A [intermetall.com] can handle. This is how the MP-Man works. I looked into making one of these for a senior design project in school. All the processor needs to do is dump the mpeg data into the buffer of the dsp. The Gameboy could be doing as little as sending control signals to an fpga that dumps the data from memory into the decoder if the processor couldn't handle it. We were looking at a 20Mhz PIC to do the data handshaking for us, along with some other things.
  • I sure would feel weird about bringing a "Songboy" with me while I went on my jog during lunch break. Imagine what girls in the weight room will think when they see you with one of these...

    "What's that?" the pretty brunette doing sit-ups asks flirtatiously. "This? This is my Songboy!" I reply smoothly. ... Needless to say, you know how that encounter ended up.

    At $99 it is an add-on that's twice the price of the original product. Probably not gonna do too well, me thinks!

  • This "pluggable" MP3 player for the Gameboy reminds me a whole lot of the Handspring [handspring.com] "Springboard" MP3 player from Innogear [innogear.com]. The MiniJam Player [innogear.com] uses the same approach as this Gameboy product uses of inserting a module with a DSP, stero-out, and memory; and leaving the "host" hardware to do management functions.

    I might actually buy the player from Innogear: I just love those buttons on the top (ala MiniDisc [minidisc.org])! It is just too bad they had to go with a proprietary flash memory spec. Bummer.

    For the MiniJam spec in PDF, click here [innogear.com].

    -AP [remotepoint.com]

  • Fish finder.... (Score:3)

    by Silicon_Knight ( 66140 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @10:17AM (#1389064)
    I think the fish finder's a cooler hack. At least that uses the gameboy as a something more than just a display.

    http://members.xoom.com/nintendorep/gameboy/peri pherals/pocketsonar.html

    -=- SiKnight

  • Better alternative for the money (Score:4)

    by FauxPasIII ( 75900 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @08:22AM (#1389065)
    I got a Rio PMP300 for $99 about a month ago... I can certainly see the geekiness of a gameboy that plays MP3s, but I think the costs outweigh the benefits in this case... it's less portable, it has less RAM, there is not, AFAIK, a good solid codebase of open source to support it, there's no reason to believe it's going to use anything but a proprietary memory expansion (ie probably not compact flash or smartmedia) and of course it presupposes you already own a game boy, which I don't. Since the Gameboy's CPU doesn't have the strength required to do this on it's own, we assume that this thing will have a processor on board, so essentially it's just a slightly dumbed-down Rio that's permanently tethered to a Game Boy, for the same price... the ONLY benefit I can see is that it can use the display for visualization or some other optical goodies (the page lists album covers, lyrics, etc), and this is not a good enough reason to warrant the drawbacks, IMHO. Game boy owners, just buy a Rio and have two excellent devices that are specilized to their respective tasks, and do them well.

  • this has been tossed about for quite some time (Score:5)

    by tzanger ( 1575 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @06:56AM (#1389066) Homepage
    ... in the gbdev mailing list. I run the archive at mixdown.org/gbdev [mixdown.org].

    The add-on would be a DSP or fast processor because, as one poster correctly put it, the GB processor (a bitched-up Z80) simply does not have the balls to decode an MP3 stream at any usable rate.

    I too consider a GB MP3 device totally useless. A RIO gives you all that, has more memory (IIRC) and is better on batteries, to boot. The GB can't even be used as a (proper) audio output because there is only a single pin on the GB cartridge you can inject audio on, so that leaves stero operation out. Unless they've somehow used the GB sound chip in its digitized mode.

    The people in that list have a lot of great ideas, but some seem to want to push the platform too far (read: beyond something economically worthwhile). Things like MP3 addons, PDA software, raycasted 3D graphics and <cough> a multitasking OS are, IMHO, a waste of effort and brainpower for otherwise bright minds. However... full-colour imagery, robotics and a multitude of cheap computing projects are well worth the effort.

    If you've got one and you want to hack it, join up. You can buy Bung [bung.com.hk]'s cartridge to transfer your software to a real GB or use one designed by one of the list gurus [hiwaay.net]. There are some people in there who do GB code for a living, others who are under Nintendo NDAs, and even others who seem to know more than Nintendo themselves knows about the GB. :-)

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