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I thought nintendo was supposed to be using the Gyration miniature gyroscopes. Link here

I'm not sure where Nintento licensed their motion sensing controller from, but the gyros required to make such a thing work, while not exactly "old news," are available and there is already a company making a similar controller for PC.

Strangely, Nintendo invested in that company in 2001.

A valid comparison would be gamecube launch vs xbox 360s

This article (written by a pronintendo blog) indicates that early gamecube sales werent that great.
http://www.gamecubicle.com/specials-gamecube_sales _north_america_2001.htm

As compared to Xbox360 in USA where at bestbuy, people lined up at 5pm saturday for a sunday morning shipment...

They've been tried. When I was working as a Nintendo demonstrator in college, I did a good enough job (actually, I was in a good enough location) to win a mouse for the Super Nintendo, which came with Mario Paint.

However, that was really a single-game mouse. While mice have come out for other systems, they had various degrees of utility (an example would be the Dreamcast mouse, which was mainly useful for using the Web browsing software in my experience). I think the reason why is up until now a mouse isn't good for living room play. Even with Mario Paint, a flat surface was needed to use the mouse. I had my Dreamcast set up as a quasi-PC (hooked to a VGA monitor, with mouse and keyboard as well as joystick), in order to make good use of the mouse and keyboard.

The Gyration technology they licensed is designed for a mouse that doesn't require a flat surface, which is a much better design for the living room.

Nintendo are basing their next generation console and handheld around the concept of the mouse. It will be fairly easy to translate DS concepts to use this controller on the big screen, which they are probably planning to use to leverage the popularity of the DS. We may see a big divergence between the consoles, Nintendo specializing in mouse base games with their competitors sticking to standard controllers.

It's a gamble, but if they can create a killer app, Microsoft and Sony may not be able to follow. Nintendo paid a lot for the patents on this technology, so any implementation from their competitors will have to follow different design routes. (I could see Sony trying to do something similar with an implementation of their Eyetoy controller, which I think is also a kind of mouse, however. I'm not sure if that will work as well for ports. Microsoft, however, seems to be left out in the cold here.)

Step 1: Go to fry's or any other computer store
Step 2: Buy any "gyration" brand wireless mouse

That's it.

http://www.gamecubicle.com/news-nintendo_gyration. htm
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1128548 ,00.asp

Obviously the USAGE of this controller will be important, but the technology IS there, and it IS amazing. I own one of these mice, and it is EXCELLENT.

I use it for a media center computer, and using it is like magic. Playing an RTS using a gyration mouse is hard to even describe.

For under $100 TODAY you can play with this technology in an "unoptimized for gaming" way.

the developers have a bit more power and say than you think

You mis-read my post.

I'm not talking about FF, Madden NFL, or any other third party games. I'm talking about the Nintendo-Rare partnership. Again, I could be mistaken, but I believe Rare developed games for Nintendo on the SNES and N64 that were Nintendo First-party titles such as DK Country.

Nintendo owned 49% of Rare at the time they sold to Microsoft. From this article over at GameSpy.com, "Nintendo indicated that it retains exclusive rights to franchises in which Rare had a hand recently, such as Donkey Kong and Star Fox." You will not see Donkey Kong Country or Diddy Kong Racing sequels on Xbox (unless, for some reason, Nintendo decides to sell the rights to Microsoft, but DK is one of Nintendo's biggest franchises).

GTA: Vice City holds the sales record for console games at around 13M copies

Maybe the record for this generation, but certainly not the all-time record. Super Mario Brothers on the NES sold upwards of 40 million copies.

This generation, maybe. But super mario brothers 3 still is the best selling console game ever at 40 million+ units sold. Even without bundling it, it sold 17.28 million.

In the past, most other systems are sold at a loss when they first debut. The manufacturer makes most of its money off of the games and peripherals that it sells during this period.

Of course, when manufacturing costs drop then profits will increase also.

some general info here and here

Link to puzzles and gamecube forum: http://www.gamecubicle.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=3035 /

Im especially curious about the picture of the Marionette heheh (Mario Net) and the boy in the woods with the dog. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Also after reading through all the information and speculation on what the DS online capabilities are going to be I read that the reason that Nintendo didnt want to go online with the cube was because the didnt want to charge their customers monthly fees like Sony and M$. However Nintendo has been wanting to go online for sometime and doing it witht the DS offers them a way to do it for free. Imagine if you will your DS as a repeater hub, then imagine being able to plug your gamecube or next gen Nintendo console into your DS and being connected global multiplayer areana. I honestely havent read anything cooler in a long time, and to repeat whaty someone said in the gamecube forum. "man Nintendo really knows how to sell a gaming system!!

Link to engadget where my adventure started: http://engadget.com/entry/4182100443364188/

As I've said over here, If this repeater stuff is in any way true, it really could be a killer app for handheld gaming.

The potential hinted at by these new revelations totally trancends your basic "sit around in a group and play wirelessly" functionality. If this (the repeater functionality) is in any way true, then it will make the touch-screen part of the DS look about as groundbreaking as MP3 support on a Sony player, and it makes the PSP's infra-red wireless gaming look like a silly kids' toy.

Seriously, wide-area gaming would be the killer app for handheld consoles. Imagine some sort of asynchronous MMPORG-style game whereby when a fellow player's DS is detected, some form of battle can take place. Some sort of modern take on the old style Campus 'Assassin' games.

Not to mention the facilitation of true munchkin-style ubiquitous networking.

Gamecube's system LSI (which is what the original article is about -- not CPU's) was designed by ATI + Nintendo. It is manufactured by NEC, using NEC's 0.18um embedded DRAM process. DRAM processes are used for more than just memory. In this case, a full system LSI chip is done in a DRAM process, but all of it, embedded DRAM and the logic that goes with it, is manufactured by NEC. It is one chip, after all, so all of it is made by NEC. It was designed by ATI and Nintendo, but we're talking about manufacturing here.

How would you do Linux on the Gamecube? It uses a smaller disc, so you can't just stick it on a CD-R (I don't know if the mini ones work).

The gamecube disc is a miniature DVD disc developed my Matsushita. I don't know exactly how proprietary it is or if there are DVD-Rs that small.

Does the Gamecube have any USB ports or the like?

No USB ports or any standard IO ports for that matter. Just the four controller ports on the front, and three expansion bays on the bottom.

More info here.

The controller ports are pretty capable though. They are used to send code to a gameboy advance when hooked up. When you play a GBA link capable game, you just get a link cable that runs from the GBA's link port to any controller port on the cube, and the GBA will display a 'please wait' screen and a few seconds later the game will be running on the GBA, no cartridge required.

That simply isn't correct. We need some numbers...

Jeepers Creepers 2 opened on Friday. Over the weekend it was seen by roughly 1.5 million people. I am not sure I would even classify it as a major motion picture, either. Certainly not as big as a Terminator, Matrix (considered a disappointment at more than 20 million tickets), Lord of the Rings, Finding Nemo (more than 30 million tickets so far, it looks like), etc. But that weekend number still kills the sales of most console games.

(I am rounding up ticket prices to $10, too, which is largely not true. So ticket sales are even higher, perhaps significantly so! This is also all US-centric - it is hard enough to compile numbers for just the USA. For reference, some Japanese console game sales can be found here, though of course more games are sold in America or Europe.)

I can't find very accurate sales for the Nintendo games (which aside from Pokemon, have not sold as well as anticipated - Metroid Prime in particular), but I know Vice City broke all sales records in America by selling a million copies in two days. I am estimating here, but by now Vice City has maybe sold close to 10 million copies (it was at 4.4 million back in January - I am being a little charatible). I am sure it will still sell pretty well for a while, especially the coming port to Xbox. But the number of copies sold is still dwarfed by ticket sales for something like Finding Nemo. And really we should include future video/DVD sales, as well, seeing as how popular games have a much longer 'sell life' than a film at the theaters.

The original Super Marios Brothers is one of the best selling games of all time: ~40 million copies. Very good numbers, but this is partially because it was bundled with the NES itself! Super Mario Brothers 3 (which was not bundled AFAIK) sold 'only' around 17 million copies.

Now, I won't disagree that games like Vice City make more money than films like Finding Nemo (they do), or that they have far better profit margins than most films (again, they do - though maybe not for much longer, unfortunately. Let's see how Half Life 2 does...). But the truth is that big films nearly always sell more tickets than even the biggest games do.

specs