Latest Gaming News

More Multimedia GBA and NDS Info - GBA

17th December 2004, 12:17pm
A few more details have arisen about the Multimedia cartridge that will be produced by Play-Chan, in corroboration with Nintendo. The GBA cart will actually be slightly longer, so that you can comfortably fit the SD media inside it, and also to enable a headphone port in the cartridge. Yep, in the cartridge. This is obviously because the GBA SP features no headphone jack straight out of the box - only with an additional connector. The cartridge is still set to be only for GBA SP and not GBA users.

MP3 playback is set to be awesome. Left and right scans through the song, just so you can get to your favourite guitar solo. Up and down adjusts volume, and L has three audio settings. The sound is only one channel audio, presumably to save battery. This is where the program really shines. If you don't press a button for 30 seconds, the system goes into sleep mode, after which you can shut the lid and keep listening. In this way, you'll save battery. In fact, you'll be able to get 15 hours of juice out of it before it dies.

Playback is less interesting. The MPEG-4 compression is certainly better than what's available on the GBA Video cards. It's nice, but could be nicer. Left and right again scan through the movie, but infuriatingly slowly. L changes the contrast.

This is certainly interesting, and it should be good for those who want an all-in-one system. The same pros and cons of other all-in-one systems still seem to be relevant, in that the individual quality of each product is a bit less than a stand-alone product, but for a combination item, it looks like you can't go wrong with this offering.
by Nick Schaedel
click to view full image
click to view full image