Can Nintendo's iQue based GB64 outrun PSP???

[MfA]

It is funny that Nintendo is trying this kind of distribution system ... it is not too dissimular to one I proposed in a past PSP thread for a HD based portable.

I would really love to have a portable with the power of the PSP but with a HD instead of their proprietary downsized DVD. Games could be distributed on CD or DVD with a media-ID for people with PCs+internet (it would use online authentication through the PC for DRM, linking the copy to your portable when it is downloaded to it) and have downloading to the HD at shops for those who dont ... if it can work for the iQue why couldnt it work for HD based devices?

The HD could also be used to store your own movies etc. Without the online linking of software to the device a recordable medium makes effective DRM impossible ... but with it it is no problem (assuming the people in charge of designing the protocols know what they are doing).

 

[marconelly!]

Faf keep us updated how that 'developers request for more memory on PSP' thing goes on. Who's on board? EA? Sony's internal teams?

 

[ShinHoshi]

The iQue has twice the power of a N64 which means a lot of things. N64 was a great machine but it had a few failures such as:

1. Resolution.
2. Framerates (due to not being a great poly pusher).

If Nintendo managed to double the specs of the N64 or, why not, multiply them by a factor of 4: we could have great looking games.

400000 pps which all effects on would be awesome...

 

[Megadrive1988]

GB64 as in a Nintendo64-based Gameboy, will get eaten alive, tech-wise, by the PSP, imho. for the first time in history, there will be a serious competitor to the gameboy franchise. PSP is no Atari Lynx, Sega GameGear, NEC TurboExpress, Game.com, NeoGeo Pocket, GP32 or
N-Gage, this is SONY PLAYSTATION PORTABLE. heh

Nintendo needs something at least 10 times more powerful than the N64 to even look like it is trying to compete with PSP.


The difference between the GBA and PSP is extremely VAST. Almost as much as the difference between an SNES and a PS2:

rough measure of hardware performance

SNES..........................................................................PS1...................................................................................................PS2
........GBA.........................................................................................................................................PSP.........................



the difference between an N64-based GB64 and PSP would still be vast.

Nintendo needs at least a Dreamcast-quality 3D engine, not N64-quality.


God i am so glad the PSP is coming out, it will force Nintendo to give us better.

I think PSP will be the best thing to hit the handheld industry since 1989.

 

[Megadrive1988]

No, PSP has nothing to do with PSX2 architecture. It is an enhancement/modification made to the original PSX1 architecture.

Hence
the 10-year old console -> PSP
The 8-year old console -> GB64

DM, while i agree with you on some things, with this I totally disagree,

the PSP is not the Playstation1. PSP is far, far more powerful. it has 668 million pixel fillrate. what did PS1 have? I think it was under 70 million pixels. The PSP can transform 33 million polygons. the PS1 could transform 360k or 500k...these are not the textured+gouraud shaded+lit polygons, of which PS1 could only do 180k.

PSP realworld polygon performance = around 2 million polygons at worst, upto 10 million polygons at best.

PS1 realworld textured+lit+shaded polygon performance = 90 thousand polygons at worst, 180 thousand polygons at best.



to me, the PSP looks like it has 50 percent of PS2's fillrate and geometry capability, less memory yes, but PSP has graphics rendering features & effects that PS2 does not have, much less PS1. the PSP only having 12 MB of memory is not as bad as you would like to say it is. this 12 MB is ALL on-chip embedded eDRAM. what is PSP's main memory bandwidth? it's 2.6 GigaBytes per sec last time i checked. What was PS1's main memory bandwidth? it was 130+ MegaBytes per second. that makes PS1 bandwidth at least 1 order of magnitude less than PSP

As for the next Gameboy being a Nintendo64-based GB64, you dont know that, none of us do. I think Nintendo will come out with a decent competitor to PSP with no less than half the power of PSP, which would still make it vastly more powerful than N64.

Both the PSP and GBA2 will be leaps and bounds beyond PS1-N64

Yes, I still think a modified GameCube chipset is the most likely course for the next Gameboy. at worst, a downgraded GC chipset. not an N64 chipset.

 

[Megadrive1988]

There have even been talks of convincing Sony to increase the PSP memory to make things easier.

Faf:
It is interesting that developers are trying to convince Sony to increase PSP's memory. whatever the case may be, be it more eDRAM or adding some off-chip external memory.

It's interesting because, this actually happened in 1994. the Playstation1 was going to have only 1 MB of main memory but developers told Sony they could do so much more with 2 MB main memory, so, Sony agreed and put 2 MB main memory in PS1 (i know the PS1 has 3.5 MB in total)

I read this in an early Next Generation. it must have been a 1995 issue and i think it was after the PS1 was out in Japan but before it was out in America.

 

[see colon]

"The difference between the GBA and PSP is extremely VAST. Almost as much as the difference between an SNES and a PS2:

rough measure of hardware performance

SNES..........................................................................PS1...................................................................................................PS2
........GBA.........................................................................................................................................PSP.........................



the difference between an N64-based GB64 and PSP would still be vast.

Nintendo needs at least a Dreamcast-quality 3D engine, not N64-quality. "
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i don't think you give the gba enough credit, it's a more powerfull than a snes+fx2. but still, assuming you chart is correct, the n64 whould be a touch ahead of the ps1. if the next GB is based off the ique, and the ique=2*(n64), then it would be pretty close to dc quality to say the least. all things considered, the n64 has a pretty impressive feature set.

do i think nintendo will base it's next handheld off it? i dunno. kinda seams pointless to release a "beta test" of your next console first to the country that has some of the most rampant pirating on the planet.
c:

 

[Megadrive1988]

don't think you give the gba enough credit, it's a more powerfull than a snes+fx2. but still, assuming you chart is correct, the n64 whould be a touch ahead of the ps1. if the next GB is based off the ique, and the ique=2*(n64), then it would be pretty close to dc quality to say the least. all things considered, the n64 has a pretty impressive feature set.

do i think nintendo will base it's next handheld off it? i dunno. kinda seams pointless to release a "beta test" of your next console first to the country that has some of the most rampant pirating on the planet.

I gave the GBA enough credit. it is more powerful than SNES by 2x or at most 4x. but it has lower resolution than SNES and weaker audio. the GBA may or may not be more powerful than SNES with a SuperFX2. lets say it is. it's still VASTLY weaker than the PS1 by more than 10-fold.

but here is where you really stretch things:
if the next GB is based off the ique, and the ique=2*(n64), then it would be pretty close to dc quality to say the least.

the iQue is nowhere near Dreamcast,

the iQue might be roughly 1/10th of Dreamcast's graphics capability

lets review:

Nintendo64 = 160,000 polygons with texture mapping and all or most image features on

Dreamcast = 3,000,000 polygons (at worst) with texture mapping and most image features on.

the 3M polygons/sec figure is conservative, given by Sega in May 1998.

later in DC's life, articles came out showing that DC is capable of 6~7 million textured polygons/sec there is a point where one of the buses gets saturated with data, at around 6 million polygons or so. but even if we say DC is capable of only 4 million, that is so much more than N64's 160,000

so the iQue is twice as fast at Nintendo64. that does not bring it upto Dreamcast level. the clockrate increase *might* not allow for twice the polygon rate. memory and bus bottlenecks might not allow it. but lets give the benifit of the doubt to iQue. lets go ahead and give it twice the graphical capability of N64. that's still only 320,000 polygons/sec, about 1/10th of Dreamcast.

Dreamcast = 20 times more graphics power than Nintendo64 and 10 times more CPU power than N64.

the iQue being 2x faster than N64 would not make it close to Dreamcast at all, it makes iQue closer to the M2, but still not as powerful as M2, and the Dreamcast is far more powerful than M2.

yes the iQue has a nice image quality feature set like the Nintendo64. the Dreamcast's feature set is somewhat nicer, plus it has an order of magnitude (at least a 10 fold increase) more geometry+lighting muscle behind it.

 

[see colon]

"Nintendo64 = 160,000 polygons with texture mapping and features on

Dreamcast = 3,000,000 polygons (at worst)"
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there is more to console power than polygons (and i'm sure i could create a situatuation where the dc could not render 3m poly's/s). you can through numbers around all you want, but if you look at the titles produced for both systems, the differance isn't that pronounced. do dc games look better, yes. but there are some mighty impressive n64 games, and if you take into account the increase in clockspeed...

you also have to take into account the format. i specificly said...

"if the next GB is based off the ique, and the ique=2*(n64), then it would be pretty close to dc quality"

2 things in this sentence you missed. first of is that the object in queston is a handheld. thus it would have a portable screen, and with it's small size rendering quality would be perceptivly better than on a larger screen. lower quality textures would be acceptable, lower screen resolution, color depth, ect. second is that i specificly stated "close to dc QUALITY". take screen grabs of, say, gauntlet legends for n64 and dc, resize them to 2*2.67 inches and tell me if you can tell the differance in QUALITY of the rendering. the difference you be slim at best, and keep in mind the mythical n64 based hardware in question is 2x the speed of the one rendering the image.
c:

 

[chapback]

power ssspower, can we like know the price and battery life of PSP yet? Faf you should know the estimated by now yeay?

 

[Megadrive1988]

....and we could create situations where Nintendo64 is not able to produce 160,000 polygons. it's all relative.


lets talk about games. we could get the iQue to do Soul Edge, and even the arcade version of Soul Calibur, but could not get it to do the Dreamcast version of Soul Calibur which looks much better. nor could you do Shenmue or Daytona USA 2001 on iQue. even concidering the smaller screen, a Dreamcast portable would produce much nicer graphics than an iQue based portable. imho.


I don't think Nintendo should make the next Gameboy only as good as Nintendo64 or iQue. it leaves alot of room open for Sony to show how much better the PSP is. I would hate to see the comparasions between PSP games and souped up N64 games.

but being Nintendo, i expect something like a souped-up N64 or iQue. they will compete on price, not hardware. PSP will be like $200 while GBA2 is only $100


perhaps Nintendo will have another machine, seperate from the GB and console lines, that you can take with you. not a handheld, but a portable that can be used on the go, somehow. And it provides a GameCube-quality experience. remember Nintendo has new hardware coming that is not Gameboy or Console.

can't wait to find out

 

[Tagrineth]

Re: It seems sensible

I think you could look at the iQue as a testbed for a new gameboy..

Most N64 games ran at 256x224 - current GBA screen is 240x160, so increasing res for new screen isn't a big problem ( or games could be redesigned from 256x224 to 240x160 )

Most N64 games already rom based

It may not be as powerfull on paper as PSP, but it would easily compare to java phones..

Thread's too long... not gonna read most of it. But I will correct one thing here.

Most N64 games ran at 320x240, not 256x224. That's SNES's standard res. =)

However, a theoretical N64 handheld would already have a VERY good AA algorithm in place, and N64 was largely fill-rate limited, so working with a smaller screen would help too. Of course, in order to compete, N would most definitely have to include a faster, lower-latency memory interface, too... poor N64 was all but crippled by that.

 

[see colon]

"lets talk about games. we could get the iQue to do Soul Edge, and even the arcade version of Soul Calibur, but could not get it to do the Dreamcast version of Soul Calibur which looks much better. nor could you do Shenmue or Daytona USA 2001 on iQue. even concidering the smaller screen, a Dreamcast portable would produce much nicer graphics than an iQue based portable. imho."
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i think shenmue would be quite unplayable on a handheld anyway. the menus and general interface would not translate nicly to such a small screen. i think soul caliber could be done proficiently. daytona? give me a break. that game barely looked better than some 64 racers in some respects. and on the small screen, i think the differance would be negligable. would a portable dc look better? yes. i said before i would. but it wold still be close.

on the small screen you can get away with using sprites instead of polygons in several places. you can get nearly the same perceptable quality when your output devive is 1/10th the size.
c:

 

[Fox5]

"Nintendo64 = 160,000 polygons with texture mapping and features on

Dreamcast = 3,000,000 polygons (at worst)"
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there is more to console power than polygons (and i'm sure i could create a situatuation where the dc could not render 3m poly's/s). you can through numbers around all you want, but if you look at the titles produced for both systems, the differance isn't that pronounced. do dc games look better, yes. but there are some mighty impressive n64 games, and if you take into account the increase in clockspeed...

you also have to take into account the format. i specificly said...

"if the next GB is based off the ique, and the ique=2*(n64), then it would be pretty close to dc quality"

2 things in this sentence you missed. first of is that the object in queston is a handheld. thus it would have a portable screen, and with it's small size rendering quality would be perceptivly better than on a larger screen. lower quality textures would be acceptable, lower screen resolution, color depth, ect. second is that i specificly stated "close to dc QUALITY". take screen grabs of, say, gauntlet legends for n64 and dc, resize them to 2*2.67 inches and tell me if you can tell the differance in QUALITY of the rendering. the difference you be slim at best, and keep in mind the mythical n64 based hardware in question is 2x the speed of the one rendering the image.
c:

I usually believe the n64 is better than people give it credit for, but still, dreamcast probably was at least 10x better. Even taking the n64's best looking games, dc games are probably 2-3x better looking, plus run at 2-3x the framerate, and that's not even the dreamcast's best games.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I usually believe the n64 is better than people give it credit for, but still, dreamcast probably was at least 10x better. Even taking the n64's best looking games, dc games are probably 2-3x better looking, plus run at 2-3x the framerate, and that's not even the dreamcast's best games.

that's true to an extent. I realize the N64 had some fairly incredible games concidering the hardware limitations (of which there are many)
although there probably is not a single N64 game that is technically ahead of the worst dreamcast game. it's not really likely since dreamcast was anywhere from 10 to 20 times more capable, depending on the what area of hardware we're talking about. If a horrible Dreamcast game had been made, that was worse looking, (technically not artistically) than N64 or PS1, it probably didn't get released. not a hell of a lot of Dreamcast games got made either.

If the 3DO/Matsushita M2 had ever been released, we would have seen a good fight between it and the N64. Since the M2 was only two or three times stronger than N64, the games on those two consoles would have been much closer to each other, with some overlap, meaning the best N64 games surpassing the worst M2 games.

 

[Kolgar]

DGMA, you leave me genuinely amazed this time. This thread isn't a case of taking some Sony news and spinning it in the worst way possible. This isn't even Googling for obscure Sony PR. This is fabricating a scenario out of virtually nothing. You might as well create a thread asking "What if an earthquake destroys Sony's Fabs?", or "What if lightning struck Ken Katuragi?" What could possibly cause you to hate Sony so much?

LOL! Sorry, I wouldn't normally chime in here, but this reply was just too perfect. Nailed it on the head, nondescript. Touche.

Deadmeat, your constant Sony-trashing is just so boring!

Kolgar

 

[Clashman]

If the 3DO/Matsushita M2 had ever been released, we would have seen a good fight between it and the N64. Since the M2 was only two or three times stronger than N64, the games on those two consoles would have been much closer to each other, with some overlap, meaning the best N64 games surpassing the worst M2 games.

I wouldn't neccessarily say that. While the M2 might have only had 2 to 3 times the polygon processing power of N64, (although I think it was actually something like 4 to 5 times more powerful), the M2 could do much more in terms of texturing than the N64 could. But I guess that's completely besides the point in this discussion.

 

[see colon]

" usually believe the n64 is better than people give it credit for, but still, dreamcast probably was at least 10x better. Even taking the n64's best looking games, dc games are probably 2-3x better looking, plus run at 2-3x the framerate, and that's not even the dreamcast's best games."
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just so everyone doesn't think i'm puff'n white rocks between posts, i just wanna say that i'm not arguing that the n64 is anywhere near as powerfull as a dc from a technical standpoint. i'm just saying that once you take into acount the resolution and size of the final output of the device in question (in this case, a portable gaming system with a screen size about the size of a gba) the differance is negligable.

with that screensize/res you can cheat by using sprites, low res textures, and lower polygon counts, and the differance won't be noticable. even a lower framerate is less noticable. just take a look at some of the better looking gba games. they apear to run reasonably smooth on the gba, but ate slideshows on athe gbplayer
c:

 

[JacksBleedingEyes]

Which is an an illogical question since GB64 would have a longer battery life(smaller screen, slower chipset, and no UMD drive), have more games, and be far cheaper. They are not equal.

It was a hypothetical question, and I would like to hear a hypothetical answer. Besides, it's not that hard to imagine that PSP could have an equal number of games that you like, regardless of which one has more games overal. Let's have PSP be more expensive than GB64, to make it's detriment. Let's say it's $200 vs GB64's $100.

You could say my question would be - would you pay more for a PSP considering it has the same amount of games that interest you. Hell, let's go even further - let's make them equally priced in our dreamy dreams - which one would you choose then?

marconelly!, just a quick question - would you rather buy a GBA or dream about the PSP and just pirate all the GBA games you like because there's no Sony logo at boot-up?

90% of games from GBA that interest me are SNES ports that run perfectly on a SNES emulator on Pocket PC and look better than their GBA counterparts to boot. If GBA had more games that interest me, I'd buy it, not question about it. I'm traditionally not too much into Nintendo games, but I have no grudge with the company itself. I'm guessing by the nature of your question that you put me in the same grudged group that I see Deadmeat belongs to - however, somewhere in the back of your mind, try to keep in mind that I don't create ten 'Nintendo is doomed' threads a day, (and as a matter of fact, I barely talk about Nintendo at all)

Marcolleny as far as I know there is only one emulator for pocket PC that runs SNES roms and its a major POS as well as the GBA one which runs way to slow. Plenty of GB ones out there though. As well as nes ones.

 

[Squeak]

Re: ...

No, PSP has nothing to do with PSX2 architecture. It is an enhancement/modification made to the original PSX1 architecture.

So was PS2.
Kind of at least.