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Must Nintendo Make a Mobile Phone?
Hiroshi writes "Earlier this year Engadget uncovered a patent filed in 2001 for a Nintendo cell phone but as we all know, nothing came of it. Now CNET is highlighting the Nintenphone once more, stating that it must be built if cell phone gaming is ever going to get better. Interestingly, CNET Photoshopped a DS Lite with Android and a virtual keypad, and while this probably wouldn't be what a Nintenphone would look like, I can't help feeling like the DS would make an awesome phone."
You make it an easy to use PDA, but sell it as a game device.
So people playing games would intuitively start using it for other things. Capture the 12-17 audience and keep it going. When they are in there 20's you will own the market.
You are right, it would be very difficult to muscle into the current entrenched users.
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I bet we see some Nintendo iPhone games that take advantage of the accelerometer. Would fit right in with their current Wii control style trend.
So few? I'm pretty sure the GBC had several hundred games released for it in America alone. In addition, it + Pokemon finally made portable gaming respectable to the average gamer. Failure indeed.
The M3 (at least the M3 Simply DS) doesn't boot like a regular game, but instead takes advantage of some aspect of the boot process to hijack the booting. Instead of making you press a button and showing the regular DS menu, it goes right to the ROM of the M3. This means it -is- still a hack as it alters the typical functioning of the device.
There's a flag in the DS ROM header that tells the DS to skip the normal boot sequence and boot directly into the game. I'm not sure if Nintendo has ever used it, but they did put the functionality into the DS firmware. It's not a hack at all.
While not a truly hardhack, it is still basically a mod chip and questionably legal since it helps skirt around the copy protection of the games.
It's not a modchip in any way. It doesn't modify anything. It's just a DS cartridge with removable storage. It doesn't skirt around copy protection in any way, it just passes the ROM directly to the DS. Flash cards actually won't play copy protected games - of course, the copy protection in DS games is trivial and can be removed from or added to a rom with ease using the homebrew dev tools.