White’s of Henry Lane

A while back I came across the Gameboy Advance Movie Player on the Lik Sang site. At the time, it really seemed like just a toy. After all, I already had a Dell Axim on which I played movies, and really, the screen just seemed too tiny. The sound quality was supposed to be only mediochre. I wrote it off.

At some point this summer, I found myself with a lot of CF cards kicking around, and I thought: why not? There were a couple of other items I wanted to buy, and USD$25 is well within my discretionary spending budget. So I bought it, and it’s been kicking around with the odd episode of Family Guy or Aqua Teen Hunger Force on the card I leave in it. I showed it off at work a bit, and used it for commuting.

To tell the truth, I pretty much forgot about it, until my wife and I were getting ready to take a five hour train trip to Montréal. Michelle usually sleeps on trains and planes, so I wanted to have some entertainment. I had a book on the go, but knew it wouldn’t take me long to finish. I didn’t want to take another book, since I had every intention of travelling light. So I went to Craphound, and grabbed a bunch of Cory Doctrow’s short stories from his latest book (which seems to be trapped and eternally checked out at the Toronto Public Library), and some recent scifi from the Gutenberg Project, and dumped them into a folder on my 512M CF card. I also converted the Pimsleur French lessons I’m doing into GBA audio, and grabbed a homebrew Lumines clone called Luminesweeper.

Well, the Pimsleur lessons were a bust. For some reason, the audio came out worse than anything I’ve ever dumped to GBA Audio. Possibly since the original encoding was pretty low-bitrate.

Everything else was a phenomenal win. I have the most up-to-date ROM for the Movie Player which adds bookmarks. This is now my favourite ebook reader, and I take it with me everywhere. The screen on the GBA SP is very readable, and the d-pad is actually very natural for scrolling. I like the positioning even better than the scroll wheel on the Axim. Luminsweeper is every bit as addictive as the original is purported to be, and there are a number of other homebrew games that work with the Movie Player. Best of all, since the ebook reader is really just a text scroller (like | less for the GB), there’s little limit to what you can place on there. You could even turn your GB into a read-only PDA like some folks do with their iPods. Minus, of course, the calendar …

Long and short, if you’ve got a GBA SP and some moderate-capacity CF cards lying around, this device will give them a whole new lease on life.