Well, following on from my rant about Sega, the news today is that Nintendo is releasing an as-yet undisclosed range of NES classic games on embedded trading cards, which can be read byt eh Game Boy Advance.

Decent summary from Wireless News regarding possible futures of pure IP telephony — the general opinion seems to that 3G has to happen first to get enough end-to-end bandwidth for it to be possible; and a bunch of developers are working on concept handsets…

When the Sega Dreamcast was in the final stages of collapse, Sega seemed clueless as to how to get back in touch with their core audience of gamers — the generation who grew up at arcades and playing Sonic the Hedgehog on Megadrive.

I think they missed an obvious strategy — covertly port the MAME emulator to the Dreamcast platform and distribute the port covertly on the internet (without any attribution as a Sega product, given the copyright issues). It might not have rescued the platform, but it would have been a cheap and very easy way for them to reassert some of their key brand values, and reconnect the Dreamcast with the people for whom Sega was a watchword for classic gaming.

Anyway, they didn’t do that, and the rest is in any case history.

Now I find myself wondering similar thoughts about mobile gaming. Repeated claims that the new generation of phones have about the processing and graphics capability of the C64-generation of consoles and computers, and some pretty feeble offerings of Java-based or native games cloned from that era — Space Invaders, early driving games and so on.

Why not go for the real thing? If those phones are C64-spec this year, then next year’s will be capable of emulating that spec of machine (the iPaq 38xx-series runs MAME fairly well on a 200MHz StrongARM). Bring on MAME, lets have some REAL classic gaming on the new phones.

Obviously the manufacturers want a way to use phone gaming to up their ARPU, and hope that proprietary systems mean that users will be locked into their hardware and web service. I think that, like Sega, they’re missing a chance — increase uptake of more powerful handsets and ARPU will go up simply from people downloading more stuff directly onto the phone, from wherever they find it online.