Re: ...
Deadmeat said:
The cost of GC tech has not dropped low enough for Nintendo to implement it as a $99 handheld.(Nintendo is losing money on GC at $99 and the power consumption is still fairly high to run on battery) Plus N64 architecture and development environment was optimized for the cart format, whereas GC is strictly a disc-oriented architecture. This makes N64 a better candidate for GB64 than GC.
I'm going to disagree with this. For one, it doesn't have to be a 99 dollar handheld. It could well be a 150 or 200 dollar handheld if it's going to compete against PSP. Secondly, it is already possible to make the Gamecube "portable", as there is a mobile monitor and battery pack available for the device, which allows it to run for 2 and a half hours, and this is on 3 year old technology, so I think there's plenty of room to trim down power requirements. You also have ATI working with Nintendo, which is the king of mobile GPU's. Furthermore, you have better dev familiarity than an N64, (who wants to brush up on programming for an 8 year old system?), on a system that is more developer friendly to begin with. I also think that a Portable GC would help boost developer support for the GC, as you'd be developing for 2 systems, and not just one. It would drastically increase the GC userbase, and extend GC's life for several years, allowing it to eclipse the longeivity of PS1. And the biggest reason, IMO, and I've mentioned before, is that a Portable GC, (preferably not simply GC-based), would really give Sony a kick in the teeth. I personally feel that PSP would have a really hard time competing with a system that already has hundreds of games out for it, was a well known and documented architecture which games would simultaneously be developed for, and that, at least on paper, is somewhat more powerful than it, (higher resolution, more RAM, etc).
A GB64 would let PSP get in on the high end, and grab a sizeable marketshare as the hardware migrated downward on the price scale, and would be a more difficult and vastly inferior architecture to program for, with smaller margins, and a smaller market.
One last thing, are we even sure that Nintendo is losing money on a GC at 99 bucks? I don't doubt that they are, I just haven't seen any documentation of it. If you could point me in the right direction, it would be appreciated.