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Nintendo's Busy Week
GameDev.net has a wrap-up from Nintendo's busy week. They touch on the release of development kits, production delays for the DS Lite, and the ongoing DS vs. PSP war. From the article: "It seems Nintendo, who have in the past tended to rely heavily on first-party games, are eager to elicit support from third-party developers. According to some big-name developers who have had their kits for some time there have already been several versions of the kit: the first was just the console and a wired controller, while the second had a few minor tweaks and the third a boost in CPU power."
I remember on my original 8 bit nintendo, most of the games I had were not made by nintendo..... Konami, Data East, Square etc...
'If they wanted to say "DS is for DS games and not a replacement, go buy a GBA if you want GBA stuff", why include the support at all?'
The GBA slot is used as an expansion port for things like rumble packs and game expansion packs (Band Brothers has a GBA cart full of extra songs for example). Since one of the DS' CPUs is the same as the one in the GBA (although it runs double the clock speed in DS mode) it must have been fairly simple to recycle the cartridge port from the GBA and offer simple backwards compatibility. It was more likely a case of "hey we can make GBA games run" than a design goal to make the DS a fully functioning GBA.