Well, if you're going in that specific direction, one could argue that keyboards and mice are good enough for most types of games. Just not always the best.
If player 1 uses a mouse and keyboard, what do players 2, 3, and 4 use? It's a lot harder to dismantle the family PC to bring to a LAN party than to toss a gamepad in your bag.
It has always been a bit of a limitation that officially you can only draw 500mA at 5V from a USB port, especially when FireWire can provide between 18 to 30V at up to 1A or more
This has changed. See my other comment.
leading to ridiculous things like a portable hard drive that requires two USB connectors - one for data and power, the other to draw more power, when a single FireWire cable will do.
Provided your computer has a FireWire port on the case. Apart from one Mac, I've never owned a PC with a FireWire port, not even the Dell netbook that I bought in 2010.
I haven't bought a phone at a store since my first one in the late 90s.
Then where do you try a phone to make sure that you will like it and not have to pay return shipping and the 15 percent restocking fee when you return it to an online store?
I hate any non-USB interface on a phone.
Do you also hate video output interfaces such as HDMI? A smartphone that has been connected to a large monitor to play a video could output the video using USB Video Class as if it were a webcam, but then that'd be silly.
and either refusing to charge or deliberately drawing less power when you detect the wrong charger.
One could argue based on the power management portions of the USB specification that drawing less power meets the spec, but refusing to charge does not. A device MUST NOT* draw more than one unit of current (100 mA in USB 2.0) until it successfully associates to the host controller. After a device is configured, it MAY request up to five units (500 mA) but MUST NOT draw more than the host says is available. The recent Battery Charging v1.2 spec specifies a protocol on the data lines that devices can use to detect dumb chargers and chargers that can provide more power, so that devices know when they MAY deliberately draw more power. You SHOULD support manufacturers of phones and other devices that support USB Battery Charging.
* RFC 2119 modal adverbs != shouting.
Lockjaw may very well be a better version of Tetris but doesn't have the name and isn't as flashy and will lack any connection to the leader boards at nintendowifi.com.
If the homebrew dswifi library were more mature when Lockjaw was being developed, then it probably would have had its own (parallel) leaderboard. It did have a few high score threads on tetrisconcept.com though.
I think if a single person was outputting something that was beating a whole team's effort they'd get hired straight away
Really? Consider the story of Bob's Game. And consider that some people can't be hired because they have family obligations in a state with no video game studios.
I think companies would turn a blind eye if the vast majority of people used these hacks for homebrew only because it sells more hardware and can lead to more software sales.
Not necessarily. Homebrew competes with legitimate sales of commercial games that use the same rules. Nintendo might argue for every copy of Lockjaw DS that gets downloaded and installed on an R4, it can't sell a copy of Tetris DS. Or Sony: for every copy of gpSP running Gleam or Luminesweeper, it can't sell a copy of Lumines or Lumines II.
If you aren't willing to put in the tiny amount of effort it requires
If everyone had to put the tiny effort to solder together a PC, would PCs have become popular?
and you aren't willing to buy a console copier
Console copiers are sold out according to Retrode.com.
and you aren't willing to have someone else do it for you
I'm willing to have someone else do it for me, but the only someone else who has the legal right to do it often isn't willing at any price short of half its market cap. If anyone other than the game's copyright owner does it for me, it's copyright infringement.
I fucking love the way some dumb Americans say "Europeans" suggesting that somehow Europe isn't a continent with 50 different countries.
I think it has something to do with some analogy between the confederation that is the European Union and the confederation that was the united States of America for the first decade of its existence.
Then buy [an EPROM reader]. It's not like it's some rare piece of equipment
Desoldering the ROM from the cartridge PCB and then resoldering it after you have dumped it is an obscure skill.
If you're really too lazy to do either of those things, then play other games
That's exactly what I was asking about in the first place: what other games should one play with one PC and two to four gamepads?
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
