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Nintendo DS to Launch November 21
mcc writes "PlanetGamecube is reporting the upcoming Nintendo DS handheld has been given a launch date of November 21st and a price of $150 ! It is also being reported that the Nintendo DS will ship with PictoChat (a sort of chat/whiteboard software) and some form of the Metroid Prime Hunters multiplayer FPS bundled in. A fact sheet is also available."
Nowadays, these things are fantastically cool, and I love them, but man, do I not need another video game platform. Now I drive myself places. My only video game time is at home, where I've got a 65" TV, a PC, and six different consoles. I want a GBA, I'm sure I'll want the DS, but I know I'd never play them.
It's really kind of depressing.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
If it supports a chat/whiteboard/etc. type app, will it eventually have a cellphone cartridge? That would be just sweet! MMORPG's with a phone, that's really a gameboy... much better than the ol' green screen tetris.
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Now I have to re-buy it. Curse them for improving it!
Who here wants to make a betting pool for how long until linux is hacked onto it?
You mean like Gameboy Advanve and it's 90-something % share in the portable market?
I think nintendo should make a cartridge with emulations of a couple of those old multi screen game 'n' watch games they had. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's an example. You can see others on Gameandwatch.com, just click on "multiscreen" on the menu.
Hell, if they don't do it, I might just have to waste my time programming it myself once somebody gets together a free dev-kit for the DS.
Maybe... a lot of those games are available elsewhere now, however. FF Anthology & FF Chronicles available on the PS (and hence on the PS2 as well) give us access to FFIV, FFV, FFVI and Chrono Trigger. I also don't know how doomed its previous hardware is... the GBA is the dominating force of the handheld market. I guess we'll have to wait and see how Sony's PSP does, which I'm personally rooting for.
Of course I remember when the PlayStation was first announced and thinking to myself, "Sony? Sony doesn't make video games who are they trying to kid?"
My largest rant about games nowadays is that companies seem to spend so much time/money on graphics the contents is, well, lacking. This seems to be slowly changing of late. But, heh, I always get suckered into buying Nintendo stuff because I am a huge fan of the few genres that they have come up with. Zelda and Metroid, even with good graphics, still maintain good game content, and I still buy one after another.
To iterate is human; to recurse, divine!
It seems rather odd to me that something by Nintendo would be released in the US first. Is this normal for their handheld systems?
Oh, other than the crappy Ngage? I guess you mean handhelds like Sega Gamegear, Atari Lynx, Neo Geo Pocket, Turbo Express? They all went up against the original monochrome Gameboy and failed. You'll soon be able to add the Sony PSP to that list.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
A friend of mine's a developer for a Guillemot subsidiary, working on a DS launch title, and he says that it would be pretty trivial to port Linux to it. So, there you go, straight from the friend-of-an-anonymous-developer's mouth.
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
I'll wait until I have the thing in my grubby hands. At E3 GB/GBC support was confirmed. things change though, I guess. I hope it hasn't been disabled.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Eh, not necessarily. Don't count on a continued lack of copy protection in the new system.
This is very easy to explain. The Game Boy and Game Boy Color used an ~4MHz 8-bit CPU similar to the Zilog Z80 (which was itself based on the Intel 8080). The Game Boy Advance uses a ~33MHz 32-bit ARM7 CPU. In order to make Game Boy backwards compatibility as fast, simple, and (yes) cheap as possible, it's got a second processor: a Z80. They can't be used at the same time, because they're for different architectures for different cartridges.
Since the DS uses a ~67MHz 32-bit ARM9, they either had to 1) have three processors in the thing, 2) abandon the legacy games, or 3) write emulation software into the console. $150 is already fairly expensive for a Nintendo device, portable or not, so they chose option 2. Accordint to the Wikipedia article, there are emulation projects for the ARM9 underway.
Especially at first the DS is going to seemingly beat the crap out of the PSP, but Sony is taking the PSP in the same direction they took the original playstation. Instead of trying to win over nintendo handheld customers, they are looking for a totally new untapped market of young adults that previously wouldn't be associated with videogames.
By marketting the PSP as being like a 21st century walkman, they intend to crack upon a whole new set of consumers. Being Sony, they can start it off at the really high end market, people who see the gaming industry as being a closed set of consumers will call it a failure initially and as Sony brings the price down and people who've always been jealous of the early adoptors start to be able to justify it, the market will take off.
...so does this mean that you can just connect via 802.11 to other GBDS users on your local subnet? Or would I be able to enter the IP address of some distant chat partner across the 'net?
cycle rates are expressed using decimal prefixes, not the binary ones.
I used the binary prefixes because they are simpler in the case of the Game Boy systems, whose master clocks happen to run at a power of two times 1.00 Hz. If the clock speed of a system is specified as 16777216 Hz plus or minus n Hz, then it's easier to say 16 MiHz than 16.7, 16.8, or 16.78 MHz, no?