Play Famicom Games On Your DS
Do you miss those glory days of blowing so hard into a worn out game cartridge that you got light headed and had to lie down for a while? Well now you can relive them with the CYBER Familator Lite. The device plugs into your DS and lets you play Famicom games (not NES ones, at least not without an adaptor) either on the DS or on a television via a TV-out. Short of emulation and a homebrew-enabled DS/PSP/cell phone, this might be the best way to play your old Famicom games on the go, even if the device roughly doubles or triples the thickness of your DS Lite. Time to trade those skinny jeans for cargo pants!
The price of the device doesn't seem to be listed on the homepage, but keep checking your favorite import shops next month to see about nabbing one if you think it will scratch some itch. Not actually owning any original Famicom games myself, I'm content to either wait for Nintendo to release some kind of Virtual Console-to-DS mechanism, or you know, just keep playing all the new games they're making.
CYBER Familator Lite [Cybergadget]
[Via: DS Fanboy]
Dawdle
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 24 November 2007
· Comments (6)
Other stuff like this: famicom, nintendo ds
How dare you suggest we go back to wearing cargo pants!
I prefer to keep my DS in a fashionable man-bag.
Just because game and media companies at large are too dense to get the hang of digital distribution doesen't mean we have to support their medieval ways. A typical NES game weighs in at less than 512 KB, one of my older SD cards from my camera can hold the entire library of every game ever released for that system 20 times over.
And what can I say, one of them already does. Once in awhile I pop it into my zodiac, but my HTC phone could probably hanlde them as well. Why on earth would I want to lug around my cartridges for a quick game, or pay to download them for a Wii?
This is hardly news, but the industry's snake oil about how piracy is the reason for the slump in sales needs some contra. It's not about the medium, it's about the content!
I don't think anyone really considers this the ideal way to play famicom games when you're out-and-about. The Familator seems to be primarily for famicom fetishists, who melt at the maroon and white color and who just want the experience of playing with cartridges, no matter how awkward it seems to sane people. I don't read Japanese, but I'm pretty sure Nintendo has nothing to do with the contraption, and this doesn't seem to be a way for game companies to avoid legitimately publishing their older titles.
Now, whether companies should charge for their emulated retro titles at all, that's an entirely different ball of wax, but I think most everyone can agree that what we have now just isn't good enough.
My wrists hurt just thinking about playing my ds with a NES cartridge in the back. I'll stick to roms loaded into a portable cart.
everyone can agree that what we have now just isn't good enough
I'd like to see a virtual console on the DS - I think NES games are a fast enough download, and small enough to go on a blank nintendo branded memory card.
heck, you could delete the games when you want new ones, and just go back and re-download if you're jonesing for a play.
I'm kinda curious what they are going to do about the resolution differences in the Famicom and the DS... you are still missing 32 vertical lines of resolution... resampling can only go so far...
Also, NOAC driven systems tend to have abysmal MMC3 + MMC5 compatibility. Emulation at least can FAKE those things.