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Nintendo DS Network
Kamalot writes "It looks like Nintendo is preparing a wireless peer-to-peer network of Nintendo DS ' to allow a new way of playing games online. Each Nintendo DS could includes a repeater hub to extend and share an 802.11 signal. A thread on GameCubicle unveils more, including a service called MarioNette and some disturbing marketing pieces with hidden images and messages." As with everything involving the new handhelds, take this one with a grain of salt.
ive been debating between PSP and DS, but after reading this, and that the PSP may cost $349, i think the DS just won
And I wouldn't put it past Nintendo to do it. They were doing console networking before most people here even knew what a network was. On the Famicom, in Japan.
However, the real question is:
Who shall save the poor boy out in the wilderness tied into the internet via the DSes the bears ate along with unsuspecting tourists who dared feed them! *
* - Providing this is true, of course.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
How great would it be to port mini-stumbler to this device. You could bring your little cousin with you while he pretended to play a game to scan a building's network, what a decoy...
At some point, all the Nintedo DSes in the world will form a neural net the Roombas. They will rise up and kill humanity in association with WiFi enabled Aibos.
Alternatively, look for the first Nintendo DS virus to forcibly re-direct all WiFi-based HTTP requests that use your DS as an AP to the Goatse-man site.
All of this is still speculation, as is even said on the GameCubicle boards. Unless you are actually working for Nintendo or have a source on the inside, everything you say holds no weight.
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.
It's still around and has an active development community.
You're thinking of the Cybiko.
I had one of those. It was crap. The keyboard was too small to do anything comfortably, the battery only worked until about a month after I got it, and the AC input port physically broke a month after that.
Several friends had them too, and they all had the same problems.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
Papyrus? Parchment? Stone tablets? Man, if the battery life on PDAs sucks now, what was it like in 200? :)
None of this is actually confirmed, and to my knowledge, nothing is actually from nintendo themselves -- rather, all of the clues have been posted by various promiment community members like Chad of WarpPipe. ..I'm not saying that it's false or a hoax or anything, just that it's not at all confirmed.
But i gotta say, alot of the messages are very cool, almost like Nintendo's ilovebees.com on a much smaller scale.
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
do you think it'll be until someone orginizes a DDOS attack with thousands of these?
So, the DS can run in Ad-Hoc mode, and AP mode. This is groundbreaking because.......????
1. Early adopters will get spottier connection capabilities than those that wait til tons of people have them? (much larger network based on the repeater concept).
2. What if I am connecting via John D.S. and suddenly he drops off of my range? Will I lose my connection and game? This would um...whats the word? Oh yeah...suck.
It's hard to decide right now, with all the speculation going on. However, Nintendo has backwards compatibility, low-battery using cartridges innovative dual screen and not to mention a ridicoulsly awesome track record for good first party games.
The price point is even on par with an 'upscale' portable system.
Let's be serious for a minute. What can the PSP offer me that is worth it's (expected) retail price? I really don't want to play my PS2 titles on the go, and the UMD media thing doesn't make me feel all warm and fuzzy either. Look at Wario Ware Inc. if you want to know why you will buy a DS. It's in the games man. The games. Oh, and the price too.-- I have fans? Wow.
If there's so much as a single remote code exploit found in the DS, it won't be long before someone writes code to forcibly propagate itself and do something to your DS...something like the PSO bug for GameCube would be lethal on the DS, if it were wirelessly exploitable.
I can just see someone writing a virus that forcibly installs a miniature Linux distro on your DS and propagates.
I'm not sure if that would be horrible or awesome, personally.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
A DSDDOS?
Is (from the article) a batch of pictures featuring creepy marionettes with the words ?Find(s)me? along with a shot of a lone boy in a forest using a DS as some sort of navigation device really all they have got to go on?
This is all they've developed this huge "OMG TEH W1RELESS GAMING!!!" story from? Ever think that a boy using a gameboy in the forest to navigate might be a 'pushing the frontiers' image? or an 'immersive environment' image? It's a very amiguous photograph, and I'd like to know how this rumour sprang from nowhere, based solely on one picture and a 'find me' slogan
Move along, nothing to see here.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Check out the FCC test report. According to the document, it looks like max RF output of the unit is 1.45mW -- not very much power!
Coral P2P link to FCC report
or
Direct FCC link to report
More info on Coral distribution network
It'd be even more appealing to someone without a GBA. Remember, DS is backward compatible so someone who wants to grab some cheap games after the DS lightens their pockets by a few hundred would have no problem (especially with the large amount of shit GBA games)
Nintendo DS....resistance is futile?
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Dual Screen, I believe.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
"So, the DS can run in Ad-Hoc mode, and AP mode. This is groundbreaking because.......????"
Because no mainstream handheld gaming console has ever had this functionality...basically.
Creative Demolition
I would assume they would have to have a toggle switch for airplanes if nothing else...
If there's so much as a single remote code exploit found in the DS, it won't be long before someone writes code to forcibly propagate itself and do something to your DS
Unless the DS boot blocks can be overwritten, I wouldn't worry. Remove the battery when in contagious zones and you won't propagate anything.
something like the PSO bug for GameCube would be lethal on the DS, if it were wirelessly exploitable.
Lethal? How? I can see how it might end up harmful to Nintendo's business model in that it enables homebrew, but if a computer with no permanent writable storage is turned off, it can't catch a virus.
First off, I seriously doubt this has anything do with playing with the DS "online", that is, it having anything to do with the internet. A much more fasible, realistic, and practical idea is that the DS can detect others within a reasonable range. I would put this range somewhere south of 200m, even if that much. The whole network/online thing is more of a LAN than a WAN... Especially useful in larger cities or where kids congregate (mall, school, parks, etc) as opposed to rural areas. I have no desire, nor hope, to be able to text a friend an hour away using the DS. However, sitting in a cafe and seeing a list of 10 opponents to fight you in ZeldaMarioTroid is a bit more exciting.
Now, if for some insane reason the DS has a 1+ mile range then yeah, that's amazing. But I can guarantee that that is not the case. It's just a way to play online with people within sighting distance. Will come in handy in urban areas, colleges, etc. But Tommy in Montana might have a hard time finding 100 opponents.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
"Unsubstantiated rumours and wild-ass guesses for nerds"
i've seen it mentioned 2 times today and I feel out of the loop.
/me starts porting BitTorrent to Nintendo DS...
Well, I know my younger brother will start foaming at the mouth again when he hears of this! We live in a town of only 200,000 people so not much stuff like that comes here. I think he may be dissapointed...
If the DS is going to suck juice like the WiFi card in my Clie, I would hope they'll include a feature to turn it off when not in use, a really good battery, or both. Sooner or later, we need to figure out how to effectively manage power consumption on all of these portable devices.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
The battery life was fantastic as long as you didn't run out of grape juice or better yet, wine: one for you, one for me, one for you, one for me and so on.
Info on the Baghdad Battery
Something I'd really like to see in the DS or PSP is the ability to go online (from an access point or whatever) and play other people.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
imagine war driving hand held game disruption via DoS, or the whole host of other problems that accompany "great ideas with no authentication principles"
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
Doesn't Pokemon Fire Red/Leaf Green already do this? Apparently (I haven't tried it yet, though it came with the adapter) there's a wireless adapter you attach to the back of the GBA that allows up to 40 players into a "common room" in which they can chat, walk around, trade pokemon and have battles. Maybe it's small by comparison, but evidently they're headed in that direction already, and it's well... it sounds pretty cool, I haven't found anyone out there that is playing it yet... besides me... the hopeless addict...
--Ray
Hmm, I thought the marketing materials were real until I saw this supposed "side view" of the marionette picture. It's just a photoshop rotation. It's clearly not a photograph. What's the point of this "side view"?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
I have one of those. All my friends said they would buy one too, but I was the only one who got one.
Let's just say, for a second, that this is real and it works great. And let's say you live in an apartment complex where there are five other people playing the DS at ANY GIVEN TIME. What are the chances that a single one of those five people are playing Harvest Moon?
Perhaps the DS simply includes a function that allows you to physically find other DS players. Like you know there is another DS player 100m to the north of you. This would be a great way to meet people, except that Hot Jenna is probably a six year old girl... or an undercover cop.
a beuwolf cluster of Nintendo DS's....
Oh wait, that is what we are doing.
Nintedo is calling it "Nintendo DS" where DS does stand for Dual Screen.
It's spelt "Beowulf", not "beuwolf". Because of that, your nerd license is hereby revoked.
This seems to have a future not only in gaming. Imagine an application or piece of hardware that allows users to connect wirelessly to each other for free provided that they operate as a repeater. This is similar to the wired internet, only there are no cables to run, phone bills, bandwidth fees etc. As wireless range and speed increases, and cost decreases, I believe this is simply a natural evolution of the internet and a rebirth of the laissez faire information exchange that once existed in cyberspace.
Actualy, the DS stands for "developer system", as in, it's the system that developers want.
And, speaking as a game developer, it is.
Ugh, I hate inaccurate submissions.
These are not "marketing pieces" and Nintendo is not planning a p2p Wireless Network.
The story: there's some guy named Chad who is the lead developer on Warp Pipe (a tunnelling system that lets Gamecube owners play LAN games against each other on the internet). There's this other guy Dean from n-sider.com who knows Chad.
A few days ago, it was posted that Warp Pipe got new offices in Chicago. Combined with this, it was also known the Warp Pipe attended E3. Apparently after E3 Warp Pipe became quiet about their future plans.
Fast forward to a couple of days ago, Chad posted the picture with the kid and the dog. After that, Dean posted a pick of the Marionette (which is photoshopped from an original Ragnarok Online piece of art http://www.prontera.net/cards/marionette_l.jpg. Dean claims he needed a Marionette.
The third picture (with the guy missing eyes) is another photoshop job by Dean. Chad said there would be a logo on the box of some games (DS? Gamecube?) that when you bought them, Warp Pipe would receive money. They both also said that this news will not be broken by Nintendo in their upcoming Oct 7 press conference.
Sounds like you'll be able to play GBA/DS games online with friends from your living room couch, via your home wireless router, via the Mario Net service, ala X Box Live.
You _MAY_ be able to access the Mario Net from places like starbucks and airports, but it's likely it'll simply start from home and expand from there.
moox. for a new generation.
Virtual Boy
IF this catches on in say, schools, the kids will always need to have the newest game that their friends have to be able to play against them. So everytime you sell a few carts to some popular kids, you're instantly selling them to everyone in the school.
This is potentially one of the biggest cashcows nintendo has ever dreamed up.
Even without adhoc wireless repeaters and a range of just 150m, that's more than ample for any mall/school etc.
Imagine kids using the touchscreen to write secret notes in class - cheat on their exams etc. Man I wish i was back in school!
I had one too. The hardware needed a little reworking, but the Cybiko folks got a lot of things right:
* Peer-to-peer chat and gaming - the most obvious
* A free SDK with a reasonably well-designed API
* A WML browser that could use another Cybiko connected to a PC as an access point
I really think that if Cybiko had waited a few more years, outfitted the device with a faster processor, a backlit color screen and WiFi, they would've made a fortune. And pulled the rug right out from under Nintendo, I might add.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
I've had this idea for a while and I figured sooner or later someone would do it for a cell phone.
I'll bet that Nintendo's making a game where each player's rules/actions, etc. are displayed on the DS. They have to find other people in the physical world. When they get close enough, the wireless will know and they'll get points or whatever.
This could be extremely fun.
The title "Marionette" has been sitting in Nintendo's cache since rumors began in 2000, though they were in a very different vein at the time.
But, yes, Nintendo has been toying with online content for a long time in Japan. They've known better than to try online with add-on products in the states, though, so any online strategy with the DS will have to be integrated in the launch hardware.
Furthermore, Nintendo knows that this is their last shot at getting the older gaming population to buy into portable gaming. They don't want to get beat by Sony a second time to the older-gaming spenders, and the remarkably early launch of the DS before PSP, along with this rumored adult-ish marketing campaign, makes total sense. Kudos to NOA for getting their heads out of Japan's ass and getting aggressive.
its a shame that the ds doesnt play gb/gbc games and only plays the singleplayed part of gba games
I don't understand why these companies keep coming up with trivial add-ons therefore making the damn thing more expensive. I want a good gaming platform that does just that. Instead we have them adding things like mp3 players, mobile phones, address books, blah, blah fucking blah. Is that too much to ask for?
gives a whole new meaning to war gaming doesen't it?
Who's to say it doesn't?
A lot of consoles are moving toward having some kind of permanent internal storage (PS2, XBox). It wouldn't surprise me if the DS did too. Hell, the media format sounds like it might be something like SD. Maybe they'll shock the hell out of us and make it SD for real (or something that's form-compatible with it, and let you browse digital camera SD cards with a simple file browser or something). Sky's the limit with this machine.
+++ATH0
"It looks like Nintendo is preparing a wireless peer-to-peer network of Nintendo DS ' to allow a new way of playing games online. Each Nintendo DS could includes a repeater hub to extend and share an 802.11 signal."
I'm figuring that this will either be an underutilized feature on incapable budget hardware or the DS is gonna fall way above the impulse buy range everybody is counting on. After all, if the hardware can do half of what they're claiming... Nah. This screams "Pay attention to meeeeeeee!"
You need a FREE iPod Nano
How about a VOIP application for the DS.
Synergy is your friend
Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
Marionette in japanese would be correctly pronounced or written "Marionetto". "Netto" is also the way to write/pronounce "Net". So it could be a very clear hint to something called "Mario Net".
A Nintendo network for the DS would be fairly easy to do. You only need to maintain a matchmaking service. Basically it's the same Xbox Live does (matchmaking and then letting one console be the host to others), but the footprint and requirements for DS games are quite smaller and there's no HDD to download patches to, therefore the service could be very cheap, paid by simple marketing schemes or even free.
By the way, Wi-Fi is not the only wireless protocol the DS has built-in. It also includes a proprietary wireless chipset, probably devoted to game requirements, like using lower frequencies and throughput than 802.11b to maximize range and battery power, and optimized to not include IP to avoid overhead/latency and simplify connectivity between users.
It's also desirable to avoid hotspot authentication when connecting locally since it can really be a nightmare because some hotspots are not configured to allow connectivity between machines on the same network, they only route to the outside and that could mean a lot of headaches for local users.
As much as I like Wi-Fi, it has limitations and can't really be considered "Plug and Play" (imagine typing your credit card number or WEP key on the DS screen in order to access a Boingo hotspot in an airport), so I definitely support the simplicity of another wireless protocol specifically made to run games locally and nothing else.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
Kamalot's summary of this is an enormous logical leap... all the evidence suggests that this is an independent Warp Pipe project, as we have heard not a peep from Nintendo.
That, and can you imagine playing games over a P2P network? Okay, I'm playing Metroid Prime: Hunters. I am facing off against my mortal enemy. We each have one bullet left, taking cover behind the tattered remains of the arena in which we fought. (Yes I know Samus doesn't use bullets but bear with me.) Suddenly, she takes a flying leap from behind a pillar! No! I shrink into a Morph Ball and dodge, then rise back up and pray that I can hit her first...
But, I neglected to mention that she is in Montana, and we are connected by a kid playing DS over his lunch break who is thirty feet away from somebody who is lollygagging on a park bench who is thirty feet away from somebody who is playing the DS on the can... and just as I emerge from my Morph Ball to stare my enemy in the face, the guy finishes washing his hands and walks out of the bathroom, DS in hand, and the connection is broken.
WHAAAAT?! Uuuuuaaarggghhh! I'll stick with hotspots, thank you very much.
So anyway, I'm sure whatever Warp Pipe has cooking is super ultra mega exciting; but there is nothing to suggest that Nintendo is in on it, nor that it is a P2P network, which are the two main points of the article. I hope Slashdot sees it fit to update the article with a retraction; they're busy people and I don't blame them for being duped by the hype, but, you know, they were still duped.
If this is true at all, I think people are taking it way out of proportion. What sounds way more likely to be true is this: if the DS has a range of 10 metres, you only have to be within ten metres of one person, who has to be within ten metres of someone else etc etc. i.e. One DS can pass through wireless info to other DSes.
This feature would be useful, surely feasible, and might well reduce the ammount of battery the wireless net uses (by cutting down the necessery max range of each device). Unlike this "massive distended network" the article points to, which surely (a) would take too much battery and (b) have very transient reception on most places due to users moving around (remember you'll be playing the DS on the bus).
Finally though: I am one massive supporter of the DS: I think it's pretty much the most exciting thing to happen to gaming in ten years.
Omroth
Maybe with the two different chipsets they're planning on allowing users to communicate with others nearby using 802.11 - forming local multi-hop ad hoc networks - and also allow users to connect directly to the web using some cell technology (e.g. GPRS/EDGE/CDMA2000). Just a thought.
No, the grandparent was correct, and here it is straight from the horse's mouth in a Press Release. Also notice the DS logo, where there are dual 'o's in Nintendo (made a little more square, like the screens on a DS)?
1. .....But does it run Linux?
2. Imagine a BeoWulf cluster running on these!
There is a wolf in the woods with the boy. Maybe you can make a beowolf cluster.... ugh. man slashdot has rotted my brain. :D
log into your wi-routers and limit the clients given out.
There are ads for DS on in Japan
Check out http://www.touch-ds.jp
Utada is so cute! Kawaii
das@dasmegabyte.org
spam me spam me please
das@dasmegabyte.org
PLEASE SPAM ME I'M A TWAT
das@dasmegabyte.org
spam me spam me please
das@dasmegabyte.org
PLEASE SPAM ME I'M A TWAT
das@dasmegabyte.org
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You didn't have to say it. And also, you're a moron.
No it doesnt. Ever hear the story of Nintendo banning third party music middleware? And access to the ARM7 hardware? A developer system doesnt pohibit developers from using it.
Also, speaking as a game developer, we want more power. PSP gives us power, DS gives us old.
If any of this wireless information holds up, I can imagine a very interesting implementation on the Megaman Battle Network franchise. Players can challenge other players by jacking-in to their cart (only if you set the game to accept challenges) and have chip battles and such.
WTF, are you worried they can't handle the added traffic? Jeeze, if the FCC runs out of bandwidth then I guess we're all just fucked.
He lies. No way this cunt has friends.
If GPS units were cheaper, you could put one in the cartridge, then make a game where part of it was to walk around looking for secret battle chips through a tricorder type interface.
:) Also imagine how incredibly sued you'd be as soon the first kid got kid by a train because it looked like a special bonus was on the tracks.
You'd just use the GPS to track that they are going to new places to randomly give them chips while gathering wireless network info in the background, when they sync with the internet to process their new chips it sends you the net infomation, you scour over it and next time they sync you have the game tell the kid to go back to more interesting looking locations for a special bonus, at which point the software then actually connects to the network in the background doing more specific actions that you specify.
Basically transparently distributed warwalking with the extra bonus that kids can innocently just be in out of place areas without total suspicion.
I don't quite know how you get away with all of this without somebody blatently noticing weird scans on their network the same time some kid is standing around with a gameboy and it immediately being tracked back to you