raindog

I still have my M1, standing on its end in the den, though the battery died years ago and hooking it up to the PC to sysex dump programs into it every time I want to use it is enough of a pain that I just do it in software.

For those who are wondering, this couldn't be more different than the DS-10. The M1 is completely sample-based, with rudimentary low-pass filters and a DSP that does up to two effects (usually reverb and chorus) at once. The entire sample set, drums and all, fits into 4 megabytes. It should actually be a lot easier for the DS to reproduce than the MS-10's analog oscillators and filters that the DS-10 was simulating, and will be much more useful to people who are trying to put together songs. On the other hand, it has far less character than the MS-10. No one will mistake M1 songs for chiptunes, but it has some very distinctive sounds that were used heavily in dance music in the '90s, especially the piano.

Sure hope the sequencer has greater capacity than the real M1 now that rewritable memory is so much cheaper. All your patches and songs had to fit into a total of something like 32K. At most, you could get 7700 MIDI events into the sequencer, including all notes and controller changes, a limit you'll hit in about 30 seconds if you use any pitch-bend in your songs. Not that I can really imagine an interface to allow you to pitch-bend while playing notes on a touch screen, but even without pitch bend, the songs you could record were not very long unless you kept it to a single instrument.

Regardless, I'll probably buy this if it gets translated, just as I bought the DS-10 and DS-10 Plus (and Electroplankton, and downloaded Nitro Tracker, etc.)

@pibs
I have the Homebrew Channel on the first one. She's not going to softmod the new one. Whether or not we decide to do that at some point in the future, we've learned our lesson about digitally distributed products: they're not a good deal for us, and won't be as long as they serve as an end run around the right of first sale.

I see no reason to buy used games from anywhere but half.com, except occasionally when I find a $5 bin with some well-reviewed games that everyone but me has played. I've never sold or traded in a game because I tend to collect things, but if I did, I certainly would not trade any of my games in to Gamestop, and probably wouldn't do it at Target or Best Buy either. The fees ebay charges for half.com sales and shipping are a pittance compared to the way retail chains mark up used games.

As for the arguments against used gaming, libraries have existed for millennia, used bookstores for centuries, yet people still write books. The "but our products don't wear out so our customers shouldn't have the right of first sale" argument is crap, because I've bought some mint-condition used books and some seriously scuffed up used games. Anyone who compares used game sales to piracy is not really a fan of the free market. I'm surprised they haven't sued Gamefly yet.

I bought some Wiiware games when they launched Wiiware, about 50 bucks worth. Then my launch-day Wii stopped reading discs, my girl bought a new one and suffice to say it opened our eyes. Neither of us will be buying digitally-distributed games anymore. When publishers stop distributing games on physical media, we'll stop buying them -- and so will all the gamers who can only afford to be gamers because they can trade in their games, and the almost 75% of potential customers in the US who still have no broadband.

@Bowser Rogozhin: Actually, Intellivision Lives was made by the original Intellivision guys, who still own the rights to these games. It's totally legit, which explains how it's getting released on a cartridge now.

Grabbed in anticipation of the imminent cease and desist, even though I have no Windows machines.

Wish they would have released the source so that when that happens, someone could make a decent original platformer out of it, since a VB game is unlikely to have nicked any actual code from any Nintendo games.

So, no one else thinks it's a little weird for a Mario soundtrack to be more bombastic than most Zelda soundtracks?

No doubt it's being pirated left and right, but I question whether the dozens of flash card owners in chat rooms and hundreds in web forums really amount to the hundreds of thousands to millions more they would have had to sell in order for it to be deemed a success. I don't think that many flash cards even exist in the wild, despite the industry's excuses.

It's easy to rationalize your poor sales using piracy when your platform is the PC. On the DS, though, it requires an additional hardware purchase, hardware that you can't find in normal retail stores or ebay, so you pretty much have to import it.

I'd love to hear exactly how many DS flash cartridges have been sold, and how many people have (like me) bought several to add capabilities (e.g. having both slot-1 and slot-2 carts in order to use the extra RAM for DSLinux.) I've never downloaded GTA:CW, so assuming a 1:1 conversion ratio if flash carts didn't exist would be way, way false. So I'm wondering exactly how many extra sales they thought they would get if only the spectre of piracy weren't there.

I've also never seen GTA:CW in a store to my recollection, so I'm thinking the bigger problem is that Wal-Mart, Target et al. correctly assume that most DS owners have no interest in touching the screen to murder a hooker, or whatever the core gameplay mechanic of this GTA may be.

What a shame that this is only one octave, and will never work with either of the Korg DS-10 products. At least it's practically guaranteed that one or more of the homebrew music making programs will support it. It seems like it would go pretty well with Pixelh8's upcoming chiptune synth.

Again, the Wii supports USB keyboards just like the other two consoles. I have a nice wireless one hooked up to mine, though it's more useful for homebrew than anything else.

Without a physical keyboard, I really don't see much of an advantage to any of their input methods over any others.