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Nintendo DS Review and Internal Pictures
OctaneZ writes "Lik Sang couldn't help themselves, and have already torn open their Gameboy DS. Among other things they found, the DS shares both its power and battery with the GB, and the 802.11b range is 10 to 30 meters, depending on the surroundings."
Just in English? We wormed them into our PE tests. Something about calculating distances between lines on a basketball court, whatever that is.
You do realize that since Nintendo has called their handheld line the "Gameboy" for so long, everyone is going to call it the Gameboy DS whether they want to or not?
But yes, this is a dupe. And as before, lik-sang's article is heavy on pictures and low on actual information about specs. I still want to know if they did go with the separate processor for each screen they had originally announced.
I'd very much like to see a DS PDA card to give it PDA/PIM type capabilities and web browsing and email.
As for functioning as a repeater, there's been a lot of speculation on this, with nothing definitive, except that there doesn't seem to be any functionality for that in the built-in software. I'm still eager to see what kinds of applications can be developed for it in games or otherwise. I hope developers aren't completely limited to games, though it is ostensibly a gaming platform.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
is does it run Linux yet?
. there used to be a sig here.....
I was talking last night, actually, to a friend about the PDA possibilities of the DS and speculating what Nintendo had in mind, long term, for this sort of hardware.
It already has all the basic PDA hardware needs. Nice display, touchscreen w/ stylus, internal clock/calendar, and wireless connectivity. Add a USB connection (via the expansion port?) and you're gold.
If you quit Picochat, it shuts the DS down. You can't get back to the main menu once a game has launched, without powering down. Gameboys have always not really cared about managing memory in a conventional way, and it would appear the DS is no more sophisticated in this regard. Makes it difficult to see it becoming more PIM or phonelike (which, with its feature set, would have seemed to be an obvious thing to do).
And yet I've noticed that there are already people scalping them through Amazon Marketplace for as much as $269. And Amazon has them in stock for the standard $149.99 price. Sick.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
Why bother with USB? It already has a mechanism to hotsync - the wireless. More likely it would be the other way around - a USB device for your desktop that communicates with your DS (not using the 802.11b because home users don't want to deal worrying about ports and servers). The DS broadcasts its name on hotsync, and you configure your desktop with the name as well.
I had asked the same thing on another Slashdot DS story. Here in north Alabama, I can't find any stores that have any in stock. The Wal-Marts and Target stores got about 6 each and were sold out by midday Sunday. A local Rhino store had two left at closing time yesterday, but had sold both of them by 10:30 this morning.
There is a definite run on them here. The EB stores got enough to cover their pre-orders, but no extras at all. Best Buy got 16 and sold them all in an hour. No stores I talked to had any concrete dates when they would get more, but all expected at least one more shipment before Christmas.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
/still not regretting getting a GBC on the release day
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Heck, with the right drivers, you specify the drawing area only as a certain portion of the screen (the tablet I'm looking at buying supports this), and configure the D-Pad and other buttons to switch drawing tools or colors. It'd make for a neat little toy/tool.
I'm returning my DS this morning. It has some major flaws.
I really wanted to like this machine. I *ached* to like it, because I want to see draw/chat becoming a daily thing.
I can sum it all up very neatly. It says that it has an "alarm." You would think that you set this alarm and the machine beeps at the time you've set, whatever you happen to be doing.
No such luck. The "alarm" is a special mode you put it in. While the "alarm" is active, you can't do anything else with the machine. It just displays the current time and the time the "alarm" will go off.
It's the same with every part of the DS software.
Want to PictoChat? The chatting's nice, but if you want to exit to the main menu you have to reset the machine. If you then want to check the time and date you have to reset the machine. If you change any of the user settings, like which screen GBA games will show up on when you run them, you have to reset the machine. If you're in Pictochat and you want to change your background color you'll end up resetting the machine twice!
Every time you reset it displays a several second startup screen and a health warning you have to click through.
What they had described was a multitasking system that would keep an eye out for other players, do the alarm stuff, and sleep when you weren't using it. What they gave us was a system with many modes, but no reasonable integration between them. It's a collection of kludges.
The game functionality is very nice if you just want to pop in a GBA or a DS game and play, but the bells and whistles are refugees from a 1994 handheld PC. So no, I really don't think a PDA card would work. A PDA requires an uninterrupted background OS of some sort to be watching out for your appointments. The DS just can't do that.
Oh, while I'm griping, the sound's got so much interference from two processors and two screens that in a good set of headphones the buzzing is nearly unbearable.
It's a marketing thing with two goals in mind. First, DS sounds a little more mature than "Gameboy" in an attempt to capture the nebulous "old gamer" market. Secondly, if the DS completely tanks, not sticking the Gameboy moniker on it means Nintendo can save their ass. They'll simply say: "oh, the DS wasn't a Gameboy successor anyway. Here's the real Gameboy SuperAdvance you were looking for."
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Hey I can only tell you about what it *looks* like... You don't agree, that's fine.. but YOU are the AC.. not me.
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.
Accurate NES/SNES emulators that don't have to stretch the screen anymore, and can download ROMs wirelessly instead of requiring a flash cart. :)
I CAN'T WAIT to play Starfox, Final Fantasy III, and the original Super Mario Bros. 3 on the road.
The wi-fi capabilities are going to sell millions of these things to little kids. Think about how big the IM market is with these guys. Haven't you ever seen the little faux PDA's that actually have some wireless text messenging built in?
Think about it this way. When little 10 year old Johny wants a new handheld cuz his GBA broke, what's his mom gonna buy him? My guess is that a DS would only make sense if she wanted to get him something new. Nintendo sold us all as kids with the NES, and has continued to do so with the gameboy for many years. They really have no competition. The PSP will either sink or become a niche item for 20 somethings with money. I can't see many people spending $200-300 for a portable console, especially on kids. How many times do you think one of those finely sculpted bricks will take a 4 foot drop.....with the drive spinning?
I'm getting nearer to 30 and I love the SP, but I think that is probably not the norm. I really liked the classic SP and seeing the familliar grey lines on black definately imparted some sense of nostalgia. When I get on the bus and I fire my SP up, usually the only other people actually playing video games on the bus are the really greasy fat nerdy kids (oh, no offense intended to 60% of you here) and 5-10 year olds. For some reason adults sometimes try to watch me play because I think it bewilders them that someone other than a kid would be playing video games in public.
The gameboy will certainly take this round because Nintendo knows its market so incredibly well and have always pushed for what it considers the golden pricepoint. >=$100
While the DS is $150, remember that the SP and maybe even the GBA started out at $120 or so and has slowly fallen to $100.
Clamshell is a great design too. It protects the pricey LCD screens that so easily scratch and break.
I mean really. Is there any debate over who will end up with the lion's share of the market here?
zosxavius photography