Flash RTE on next-gen portable game systems

I was just reading about the next generation portable game consoles coming out from Sony and Nintendo via a post on FreakSauce. These units will feature large color screens, 802.11 wireless networking (presumably with internet capabilities), and processing power to spare. The Nintendo even has a touch screen built in.

I sure hope Macromedia is considering deploying a Flash run time environment Flash for these system. There should be a large user base for both of these consoles and there are so many possibilites: occasionally connected apps; apps that communicate with other nearby consoles for community, collaboration or gaming; rich productivity and commerce apps; apps that use the network to synch data between your portable gaming system and your home computer. The idea seems really exciting to me, and I haven’t even had a chance to think them through yet!

Obviously though, this could all be muck, if there are hardware, orlicensing limitations on these systems that would preclude it.

Anyway, I need to get some sleep. Enough ranting.

Grant Skinner

The "g" in gskinner. Also the "skinner".

@gskinner

6 Comments

  1. Grant, I think that without an evolution in the Hardware and the Flash Plugin I don’t see it.

    I love Flash, but to challenge in the game’s field Flash needs more capabilities, like 3D and 3D card support…

  2. Carlos,

    I’m not interested in it from the gaming perspective… more from the application perspective. These systems have the ability to go way beyond just doing games, and Flash would seem like the ideal tool to leverage that with rich media, network capabilities, etc.

    Cheers.

  3. yeah, for instance, you can do bloging on those devices like some mobile phone did 🙂

  4. Well, the problems are hardware based. The NES one is a 300 megahertz. That hurtz.

  5. >Well, the problems are hardware based. The NES one is a 300 megahertz. That hurtz.

    ehh…? I don´t think that´s a problem… the Ps2, for instance, is a 294.912 MHz…

  6. I doubt Flash will come anytime soon on thesedevices.

    Look at what happened with Symbian.

    The P900 is a great device, but there is no Flash. The A920 has Flash 5.

    We have templates for the Nokia 3650, but there is no player.

    I had great plans for mobile device applications on advanced phones, but Macromedia needs to catch up. Java is everywhere (Java3D too). MM always has small demos to show at events, but nothing concrete is ever released because the way they make manufacturers pay for developpement is wrong. It just fragments the market even more.

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