Return of the Super FX

[Cyberman]

This could make things interesting from GBA-DEV site I saw this reference (http://www.gbadev.org/) to this article (http://gamesradar.msn.co.uk/news/default.asp?subsectionid=162&articleid=65377&pagetype=2). That Nintendo was planing on adding an updated Super FX chip for the Gameboy line. I think cost wise it's going to to hurt Nintendo. Nintendo is hurting financially from a 16% decrease in profits and pressure from the new Sony portable that uses 6CM disks. The media is a lot cheaper than the cartridges Nintendo seems to like. Will ROM media meet it's end here?
Even if the chips cost $2 each it would add close to $5 per cartridge using the chip. (assembly costs).

[blizz]

the funny thing is Nintendo already has the compact disc media for portable gaming at use in the gamecube, so I'd expect to see a clamshell like design using that sooner rather than later now

certainly I think developing the gamecube as a portable for the next generation is what Nintendo should go for

having said that If they really want to work with these LCD screens in controllers idea which is all GBA connectivity seems to be then they ought to just drop an LCD screen into the middle of their nextgen controlers, if they made it the same size as the X-Box Controller-S and go back to a more normal button layout, since the layout of buttons on the gamecube controller just isn't natural for games requiring you to use multiple buttons.

that's my ideal anyway, but then again I wasn't expecting Nintendo to make a sequel to WW after I played it...

[Cyberman]

Well.. my humble opinion is Nintendo should create a cartridge called the 3d Advance. Special carts designed to use the new hardware merely plug into this cart. The new 3d carts would have say 4 extra pins on them so they won't fit into the GBA connector that's available. The extra pins could be for enabling the 3d hardware (ooo simple in otherwords). For the 3d hardware I would use a low cost FPGA the reason for that is, if you aren't using it, it can be transparent. If you are it can be a go between. It can be programed to operate at whatever speed the programer needs for the game have whatever features they need for the game and or be used for decoding video data MP3 data etc. and or be used to perform floating point computation etc. In other words it's a lot more flexible than a hardwired toy.

That's a real solution in my opinion. It's not cheap but you can get FPGA's now as cheap as 2.50 in 10000 unit quantities where as 5 years ago.. it was 55.00 in 10000 unit quanities.

[Tagrineth]

Um... look up Matrix ROM. 256MByte and up at the same price to manufacture (intially!) as current 8-16MB mask ROM.