Nintendo patent...not sure what to make of it.

Rabid:
You can't patent that which has already been invented by someone else, or else someone would have patented the wheel long ago.

Clashman:
What's the point of arguing wether a portable GC is feasible or not when we have no facts, or even RUMORS actually, pointing towards a portable GC? Looks like an exercise in futility/total waste of time to me.

Current GC tech is totally unsuited to being put to mobile use, and the engineering effort spent on making it thing possible could be put to better use designing a totally new hardware which is actually suited for mobile use to begin with. Just shrinking the GC chipset to a smaller process isn't going to magically fix everything.

 

When I was looking through Nintendo's patents it seemed as though many of the patents had been gotten first in Japan before they came through in the U.S. It also seemed as though they had multiple patents of the same thing, and I think the GC-GBA connectivity thing was one of them. So there might be an older patent that says basically the same thing. Does anyone know why they would do this? My guess would be to cover all their bases, ie each patent has some slight differences to make it as broad as possible. But perhaps there is another reason.

 

Why speculate on anything then? It's really all an excercise in futility because nothing you say on the message board is going to change what the games hardware is/does/is capable of. People come on here because it's fun to shoot the shit, so to speak.

Secondly, the whole point of this was to argue that current GC tech *is* in fact suited to mobile, and I think I've presented plenty of evidence, both speculative and actual, to back that up. Is there any other system out there, (besides perhaps PSOne), which can run on battery for two hours with an LCD? I think in fact their's plenty of evidence pointing to GC being designed from the ground up to eventually be portable, small form factor, small disk, etc. It may be wild speculation as to what Nintendo's actual plans are, but that doesn't make it completely usesless as a topic of discussion.

 

Offhand I think at the very least it's harder than people think. (Would be lovely to get more chip engineers weighing in on this, but then they don't just drop from the trees. Hehe...) And since there's been no stirrings of a rumor so far, nor chip and process focusing over the past years (and would be a level of aggression Nintendo hasn't shown for a while... if ever?), I put it under "quite unlikely" until I hear differently from them. <shrugs>

 

Nintendo will certainly need to be aggressive to fend off the PSP. I agree with what's been said here, but this type of reality does not always reach the misty fog that surrounds Nintendo's lofty offices.

I'd love to see Nintendo offer two handhelds that didn't compete in the same markets. Such as the current GBA and a PSP competitor... Or a PSP competitor and license GBA tech to cell phone companies.

But does that fit Nintendo's current "Keep It Simple" philosophy? It doesn't seem like it. I think Nintendo will play conservative and not announce any real handheld tech until the PSP has been unveiled.

I'd love to just pipe-dream for a minute, and hope that it's some type of cool GC server to launch along with a national online plan. I've had three conversations this week, one was a high school buddy, two were family members. All three were asking when Mario Kart was going online. None of them have the resources to set up Warp Pipe, they just want something simple. I hope Nintendo can come up with an online plan before N5, because I can think of three people who are seriously considering turning to the Dark Side (XBox). And I think that Virtual Boy 2 will be enough to push them over the edge.