GBA E-Reader... questions

[Alex Kidd]

I may seem really stupid for asking this, but what IS the e-reader exactly?

I've read up on Nintendo's website, and read the back of the box, but, they're very vague... I also notice that the packs of cards are called "refill cards".. refill? what do they mean by that?

I seen it at walmart, and was thinking of picking it up, and here's my hypothetical/theoretical querstion.

If I buy the E-Reader ($55) and say Donkey Kong 3 ($6) and Excite Bike ($6).
Will I be able to just plug in the e-reader and swipe the games I want to play anytime? Say, swipe DK3, play that for a while, swipe excite bike, play that for a while... back and forth till I'm bored?

That's what I'd assume I can do... but... why all this hassle with a huge piece of machinery hanging of the end of the GBA... and having to swipe cards? why not just put them on carts... probably 4-6 games on a cart, and sell em dirt cheap (whatever it costs to produce a cart, cause it's not like they have to pay coders... most of those e-reader games were coded years ago... and emulators are pirated rampantly so I'm sure Nintendo could just do the same (legitmatley of course, it IS there own software and hardware they'd be emulating)

Alex Kidd

[Achika]

Theoretically yes, you keep swiping till you get bored I suppose. There is memory in the e-Reader to store one game, be it Excitebike, DK, or even the Animal Crossing software that you d/l from the game. There is also a cool Air Hockey card too. A 'super' e-Reader is supposed to be released in Japan, it was fuzzy wether it will come here or not, but apparently is supposed to store *3* games.

Why not put them on carts? IMO, Nintendo is the master of "gimmicks" :P I can't say what the "refill" is about, unless you were just looking at the "Out of Stock" card board tags.

If you think it looks bad on the GBA, you should see it with the SP...yuck.

[ManekiNeko]

I'm really, really disappointed with this peripheral. Nintendo hasn't supported it nearly enough... they've missed an important opportunity to get third parties in on the action and their own supply of NES games that will actually fit on cards is dwindling fast. The e-card reader is a whole lot of wasted potential in my opinion. Could you imagine all the great games we could have played with the reader if Midway or Namco had supported it? Cards are a lot cheaper to make than carts, and it would have been a cinch for companies to print out cards with their most popular classic games on them.

JR

[calthaer]

Yeah, but the real question is whether the cards actually ARE cheaper than carts. We really don't know what kind of deal - if any - Nintendo is offering to 3rd-party developers with this thing. They may be asking them to place large minimum orders of cards and dumb things like that.

It sounds like Nintendo is producing all the cards themselves, as I know they recently decided to stop using Wizards of the Coast to print the Pokémon cards and start printing them themselves.

The other thing is the cards themselves...well, let's look at it this way:

-the Donkey Kong Jr. ROM file for NES emulator looks to be about 25kb large. Excitebike is around 40k. I'm not sure how many cards Excitebike uses (maybe someone who has it could tell?) but the DKJr one uses five cards. Assuming that they fit the max amount of data on one card, then that makes about 5k per card. That number looks about reasonable to me checking out the number and relative size of the dots that it looks like they have on them.

The Contra ROM for NES is about 128kb. That means that if the aforementioned estimates are correct - that's 25 cards! Even something like RC Pro Am that's like 64 would take 12-13 cards. Looking through the NES ROMs I have I can see how relatively few NES games would fit the e-Card model. Apart from the amount of memory on the thing (they said somewhere it was 1 meg, but if you can only store one program on it at once it's doubtful it even has 256k), the cost of printing those cards can't be cheap. Why would a third-party dev use them for classic games if they have to shell out all that money up-front (as Nintendo is probably making them do)? A better idea would be to produce the Animal Crossing-type cards that add things to an extant GameCube or GBA game.

On top of that - who really plays the current e-Card games on the NES emulator? I don't - not really. Golf? Ice Climber? Forget it. Give me SMB2 or Contra or something. Oh wait...they want to gouge me for $30 for a remake of that game. No thanks.

[davidbrit2]

Has anyone tried reverse engineering the data encoding? I've already done the layout: http://www2.gvsu.edu/~brittedg/ereader.png

Don't tell Nintendo/the FBI. ;-) There's a good reason it isn't linked from the main portion of my site.

[RetroYoungen]

I like the e-Reader, but I do agree with the fact that it's potential is being wasted. But what I don't know is what else Nintendo can really do with it. Codes, small NES games, and little Game & Watch games, what else is it really capable of? I'd love to see it live to it's potential, but first I'd have to get a taste of that potential, because I don't think it's even shown it yet.

[Ed Oscuro]

Has anyone tried reverse engineering the data encoding?

Whoa, assuming I'm not hallucinating or mistaken and the cards are true...optical storage, for lack of a better term (somewhat like a punchcard in appearance, actually) it should be easy to program for this thing.

Hmm...that would be a fun business to get into.

Atari-esque games that can use Mode 7 hardware, anyone? o_O

[nesman85]

I'm not sure how many cards Excitebike uses (maybe someone who has it could tell?)
it uses 5 cards. :)

[Achika]

I'm not sure how many cards Excitebike uses (maybe someone who has it could tell?)
it uses 5 cards. :)

Swiping them twice each :-D

[nesman85]

O_O yikes! i hadn't actually played it on the ereader yet since i have it for the nes. that's too much swiping!

[Ed Oscuro]

On the other hand, with a little bit of smart programming and such you could make a card system where you had a base set of cards, and add a card for an extra "module" (since there's limited space, extra cards would be separate and not affect the base data) for extra characters, levels, or whatever.

It would be neat to have a 2D Super Smash Bros. Melee type game this way (add a card or a set of cards and you get to play in a certain world or whatever).

[davidbrit2]

Yeah, using the cards to load additional characters, areas, and things like that would work great. It's too bad the e-reader doesn't have a passthrough to plug in a cartridge that can make use of the scanner, because you could just have an extra megabyte of flash ram on the cartridge for loading additional parts of the game.

[Alex Kidd]

Well, I think I'm gonna hold off on picking up an E-Reader just yet...
I have this fear that they are soon gonna re-release it as they did with the GBA itself, and make it more compact, probably more internal memory for loading bigger games (if they keep makin em) and probably a cart passthu or something... Nintendo is king of cash-raping us with the Gameboy, ever since the Gameboy Pocket.

I picked up some games for it tho for 6 bucks each...
I have this weird feeling that if the e-reader DOES take off (or even if it doesn't) the first generation of games (all the old nes ones) will probably not see much production... whereas high demand stuff like Animal Crossing and Pokemon will be well stocked by stores.

And was I infuriated (tho not surprised) when I seen that the e-reader version of Donkey Kong is STILL missing the Pie/Kitchen level >:(

Alex Kidd

[Achika]

While I was at work today I checked to see if there are anymore cards coming out. I didn't see any, but it listed Ice Climbers as being "discontinued". Now, not saying rush out and buy every single pack of IC you see and sit on them, but if you can hoard one for future use, it might not be a bad idea.