Announced: Smart Media Reader for GBA

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KiVan

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Am3, a company which’s shares are also hold by Toshiba and Bandai, will release a Smart Media Player for the Gameboy Advance and Advance SP end of May 2003.

The Adapter is supposed to play 24 minutes of animation (movies) on a standard 32MByte Smart Media card, a 256MByte Smart Media Card could hold up to 192 minutes. The compression technology used is provided by IMAGICA, which are also known for the HDCAM video compression.

The Gameboy Advance Smart Media Player will also be released outside of Japan, but no release date or distribution partner has been named. am3 will present the unit at the E3 in Los Angeles and Lik Sang expects further details by then. Since the Gameboy Advance doesn’t have a region lockout, we don’t expect that available media will come with such. It should be possible to play all files released on any GBA or Smart Media Player around the world.

The device will cost about US$ 39 .

More images here...
(Thanks to Lik-Sang for the info)
 

KiVan

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imagine if it may work with roms too =P
the bigger smartmedia card is sized 256 MegaBytes (not megabits eheh)
 

shaunj66

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Yummy space. Do you think you will need a flash linker? Hope not...
No of course you won't, you just need a smart media writer. But they should ship with them really otherwise it's not much use. The price is a lot cheaper than I imagined it would be!
 
N

Niveaking

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You don't have to shout.
I personally dont think, that it will be available in Germany. But, there's still LikSang, or?
If you don't want to order via HongKong, I am sure, that you will find enough opportunities to purchase the card. Germany is not the edge of the world!
 

Djang

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Just a question, maby it is already answered in the text but My English is not all that.

Is it possible to write the cards and delete them.
Ow and does anybody already know (if it is writable) that you can write you divX to it (after you convert it right lol)
 

Cyph3r

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I don't think it will support roms, 'cause you don't have the needed eeprom etc. chips rams on a smart media cart, eh? but i will purchase it, so i can watch all my movies on the go WOW
smile.gif
 

Vince989

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Ok, I'll try to clear some facts up... I'm not a Smart Media master, but I asked my friend who kinda is (Zeked, already posted a few times here), and he gave me those answers :

- Can you save with it?
Right out of the box, no, since there are no Chips on the card (obviously). BUT, someone might code some "emulator" so that it could run roms AND save them (switch the normal SRAM address to somewhere on the card) , but it will probably not be made right when it is shipped...

- What can you play with it?
Obviously, as it is showed in the pictures, pretty much everything is possible. A few pictures show some movies, and in KiVan's news post there is even info about the fact that it will be made for a specific codec. SO, what that means, is that it will have internal support for one kind of video format, which means that you will, of course, be able to put DivX's on it, but at some price... The GBA's screen resolution has always been and always will be 240x160, so movies can't be larger than that. I don't know if it will automatically stretch them, but I guess not, since it would take quite more processor power to stretch it, with the big power that is already used to only show the video. So, you might need to resize the video by yourself before. That's it for the resolution, now there's the other problem : Compression. DivX is a codec, and the Smart Media Player isn't meant to play DivX; So, you will have to convert them to the right codec before you can see any image in a video...

Hope this clears up some questions!
smile.gif


- ViNcE989
 

Electric_Wizard

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I was just looking at lik-sang and i dont think that its designed for people to author their own stuff. It sounds more like your going to have to buy films/ cartoons on the smart media! So unless someone makes some publicly available authoring software I think people are gonna hae to buy anything they wanna watch, just like you buy a DVD. This would also explain why the price is so unnusualy low. I might have got the wrong end of the stick, but check out wht lik-sang have to say:

Code:
http://www.lik-sang.com/news.php?artc=2806
 

Vince989

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Nah you are right on that, the dev kits will still be used by commercial developpers, and the flash cards by home developpers and gamers. But what I said for the possibility of even saving on a Smart Media Card, we'll have to know if this will even be possible : Right now, we can't know at all how things are working... Is this just a "converter" for the GBA to be able to read Smart Media Cards, or will it be made in the same way as the GBA E-Reader is (software in the device, that asks you to sweep a card, and plays it with the read-only software in the device) ? We'll have to wait further informations for this... But just imagine running PogoShell on a 256mb card (not Megabits this time, "real megs" !
happy.gif
) , it would be sooo sweet if it would be possible!
biggrin.gif


- ViNcE989
 
S

Solidstate

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Initially thought this might be a good idea - but I think I'll stick to one of the video jukeboxes coming out later this year. Low res - limited colours and expensive storage media all count against it. $300 for a 20 gig hard drive attached to a full colour hi-res screen capable of playing DIVX files seems like a better idea to me.
 
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