Read it all. Sounds good. I hope you figure out the NES issue, and you go into greater detail regarding emulation. And give us the facts on multimedia playback later.
I was actually looking to buy one right when they came out, but ended up buying a ds instead because the first batch of gp2x had lots of problems. Now that most of the kinks have been worked out, I might end up getting one.
On my GP2X I use GPFCE . The roms for GPFCE MUST be placed in a directory starting at the root of your SD card with route:
/sd/roms/nes/
where /sd/ is actually just the mount point of the SD card... so when you view your SD card in windows it'll actually be:
H:\roms\nes\
where H is the drive name of your SD card.
The directory of the Emulator itself is independent of the rom folder and doesn't matter where it goes on the card.
The same goes for SquidgeSNES (/sd/roms/snes/) and hu6280 (/sd/roms/pcengine/ ---- obviousily a TurboGraphx 16 emulator)
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For instance my nes emulator is in this directory:
/sd/Games/gpfce_v02/
but my roms are in:
/sd/roms/nes/
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I am confused why they didn't do the same thing that DrMDX does for genny roms where you can place them anywhere on the SD card.
I think those wii cards are a gimmick. There haven't been any benchmarks yet, but supposedly the Nintendo flash card is the exact same model as one of the other sandisk card's painted white with Nintendo branding. I can't find anything official from sandisk as to the specs of the new sd card to disprove this theory. Sandisk lists absolutely no specs about the card on their site, which really makes me wonder they are really charging consumers $90 for. You'd think that if the card was very fast they would have mentioned that in the product announcement or on the website. I've only been able to find the official product announcement which again says nothing. I did go on newegg and find a 2gb OcZ card that is one of the faster cards on the market. As you can see from the link it's about half the price of the Nintendo branded flash card of the same size that is selling for $90.
That article is no longer there... so I don't have the low down on the SD Cards.
But what I can say is this. Nintendo COULD add some special encryption or something similar to the card to unnaturally bloat the price. This is similar to Sony and their proprietary Memory Stick Duo (which is sorta like SD only with different bus speeds and a encryption process).
I am NOT saying Nintendo did this, BUT it is definately possible. Does it say anywhere that you HAVE to buy the Nintendo branded SD cards? Or are they optional collector type deally's?
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As for the earlier comment about SD card speeds. Yes they are real. Everything has a bus speed and a bit rate (i.e. 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit.... 33mhz, 66mhz, 100mhz.... these are common speeds found in your PC). The bus speed (the mhz... which is the number of cycles per second) times the bit-rate gives you the amount of bits which when divided by 8 gives you the number of bytes that can be transferred per second.
USB has it(remember the slow ass speeds of USB 1.1 compared to 2.0? that was all bus speed!). RAM does as well... do you think those number at the end are for show? DDR400 is an effective busrate of 400mhz at 32-bit (its a dual pumped 200mhz actually, that is why I say effective. Similar to how P4 processors have effective Front Side buses... but they are actually quad pumped). These speeds designate how much data can be passed in one instance AND how much latency will occurr between data chunks.
For instance, if you have to grab a file that is located at the far end of the flash disk, but another bit that is at the close end. The difference in time to read up to the far end from the front end is latency. Logic chips can decrease this latency. For instance, say you ask for the far end bit first then the close bit second. You pass the second bit travelling out to the first bit and then have to back track. Higher latency... so the logic chip will look into the list of sectors you are GOING to access and decide a more efficient route to travel to get to the next bit of information.
Latency also occurs in things like 'system RAM' due to refresh rates of the RAM. RAM is not static, it can not hold information after you remove electricity from it as opposed to flash memory. So it has to sync electricity to it that rotates through it at the right speed so all data can be effectively stored and deleted easily and quickly. But the time it takes to run a cycle is the latency. picture RAM as a long string of words
electricity passes through it in this cycle and repeats every latent measure (4... 5 milliseconds or so). If it is at the beginning of its rotation and wants to access the letter U which is at the end it won't be able to read it until it gets there 4 milliseconds later, then it wants to read the first capitol F near the beginning it then has to repeat back over and catch up to the F 1 millisecond later. creating a total waiting time of 5 milliseconds to load UF.
5 milliseconds doesn't sound like long. And it isn't, that is why we use this technique for system RAM. It is very fast and great for running programs. But as those times add up latency can be noticed and is why we are always working on new ways to make RAM faster. (DDR2 attempts to lower wait times by increasing the amount of data that can be transferred... but the cycle lengths are made so large that latency is increased... you will notice slow down due to latency when loading several small sectors. But a massive increase when loading one very LARGE parcle of data)
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Obviosily this isn't EXACTLY how RAM works. But it is a little snipit of the big picture to understand WHY things do what they do. There is much more to it, but here is not the place for me to explain it.
lordofduct wrote:I am NOT saying Nintendo did this, BUT it is definately possible. Does it say anywhere that you HAVE to buy the Nintendo branded SD cards? Or are they optional collector type deally's?
Nintendo has said nothing to that effect. There have a been a lot of people that have tested the wii with normal sd cards and they work fine. As I mentioned earlier neither sandisk or Nintendo mention the benefits of using the wii card. That's why I am assuming that it's just re branded. If there really was something special about the card you would think they would list that in the product description.
