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Nintendo DSi Software Will Be Region Locked
aliquis writes with news that software made for the recently announced Nintendo DSi will be region-locked. Nintendo's reasoning is that the DSi "embeds net communication functionality within itself and we are intending to provide net services specifically tailored for each region." It's also been discovered that accounts with the DSi's online store won't be linked with the Wii store, so points for one won't work with the other. Nintendo has stated that they don't intend for digital distribution to replace retail sales. We discussed the DSi's announcement last week.
Unless someone invents a workaround.
And that's bound to happen.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Regionally tailored content I can understand, but you could:
Just do a check on the region, and have a default if you have no content tailored for that region
Region locking is especially painful when it comes to portable devices. When I travel, one of the advantages of a DS is that if I see a game I am interested in, I know I can buy it and play it regardless of where I bought my DS.
All I can say is that this greatly reduces my enthusiasm for the device as it becomes more clear that Nintendo want to keep the region restrictions that allow the crazy price variations viable. In Australia it is still cheaper to buy a console and games from the US and pay shipping than buying them from the actual storefront.
Well there goes any intention I had of upgrading. I have many import games. I also have many domestic games. I am not going to get two DSis just to play them all.
Yet another reason I cannot wait to get my hands on Pandora. My primary gaming handheld is currently a GP2X, but I am starting to outgrow it for non-gaming purposes.
It also sounds a lot like something Nintendo would do:
The Nintendo Wii has region locking, and many games (such as Zelda) use it.
The Nintendo Gamecube and SNES also had region locking, though more primitive.
The Sony PSP supports region locking of UMD movies and games, but no games are locked.
The Sony PS3 supports some degree of region locking for games, but no games are locked.
(Please someone correct me if I'm wrong about any of these)
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Except the flashcarts uses the NDS-slot now adays. so this won't stop them. And if it would be as easy as just blocking a key or something such it would probably have been done by now. So I don't see how removing the GBA slot will stop the current piracy alternatives. It will also break a few utilities.
I think it was an issue with size.
Built in ram, bigger screens, SD-card reader, smaller size, something had to go, GBA-slot did.
Also maybe they want to sell GBA games as downloads to SD-card, which don't seem all that weird.
Correct. All of Nintendo's home consoles (NES, SNES, N64, GCN, Wii) have had region locking. Only their Gameboy line and the DS have lacked it.
At the age of global free trade, when companies can legally utilize anywhere in the world the lowest cost labour, cheapest material, biggest tax advantage - is it still legal for companies to limit consumers with region locking?
Your right in that Nintendo seems to be on a general path to region locking and Sony seems to be doing the opposite. Regardless, the DSi issue especially is a shock to many because the time to pull a switch like that would have been when the original DS was released. Changing their policies mid-game feels a bit cheap.
One thing that I want to point out is that in a few spots the region locking was differing hardware/features. Usually the actually region locking was ridiculously light otherwise. There was no game of making modchips that had to use stealth modes not to get caught.
I don't own a PSX either, but I do have one PSX-J game. I play it on an emulator because I would rather not have to buy a Japanese PSX. It'll be the same for the PS2 when I get fast enough of a computer. The PS3 was pleasant a surprise after those two. But still, Sony isn't too innocent with their PSP firmware race and blu-ray video regions. They are just the good guys right now. Are PSP movies regioned too?
In the end, most games are licensed for sale and usage in their specific regions. Until the big three stop putting that ridiculous label on everything, I will stay weary of all three. (If I was wrong somewhere in this post, someone please correct me.)
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
The DS is basically a GBA "with extra bits". Kinda like the Wii is an overclocked Gamecube with a few chips thrown in (Bluetooth, wifi, etc.). Even though the GBA slot on the DSi may be missing, the hardware is still there so it could easily play GBA games if it simply had access to them. I'm betting you're spot on about the SD card thing, or more than likely, downloadable titles that are probably little more than repackaged ROM files.
I give it a few months before someone has any ol' GBA Rom working on this thing, particularly as the DSi seems to be a "DS with extra bits" and the DS homebrew scene are extremely familiar with the hardware as it is.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I actually don't think the NES and SNES were region locked per say. At least not intentionally.
The hardware between the FC and the NES was very different. The cartriges had a different amount of pins, meaning games had to literally be ported. The lock out chip (famous for creating the blinking power light and yellow screen) wasn't made to create separate regions, it was created to keep cheap/pirated games off of the market. The last revision of the NES removed the lock out chip functionality from the console itself.
If you noticed the totally different designs between the SNES and the SFC, this was because Nintendo was pretty damn sure a system with the SFC design wouldn't sell in the US. With the cool image that the Genesis was letting off, I don't think they would have been wrong with how toyish the SFC looked and it's multi-colored controllers. This was also after the NES, which revived the game market. The NES originally had a much slicker design for the US market but it sold horrible. Nintendo didn't want to repeat the same mistake that way either. Thus, Nintendo released a new, boxy system with boxy cartridges that was fairly large and used muted colors much like the NES, but fairly different from the FC and the SFC. The boxy, large designs were also employed in the cartridge shapes.
Another words, the cartridges being different sizes was not for region locking. If they were trying to create regioned cartridges, Japanese cartridges would not simply fit in and work in a SNES.
The first Nintendo system to have actual intentional region locking was the N64. Up until that time, I don't think any one had ever thought of doing that. It just wasn't in people's minds. Thankfully, there was a popular system that came out before the N64 known as the PSX that had shown Nintendo there was another way. ;-)
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Replace "christian" with "Iwata" and this pretty much nail my views on this region locking crap, comming from Australia where we always get ripped off on a platform independant level.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
How on earth are they going to keep compatibility with DS games, then?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Simple, Nintendo is, in the groupthink, one of the companies that can do no wrong.
Please help me pay for room & board.
yea, this is a pretty disappointing announcement.
that makes no sense at all. region-locking isn't required for providing region-specific online services. even without region locks you can still have different region releases connect to different online servers. and even with region locks you can still import a Japanese DS and use it in the U.S. to connect to Japanese services.
the parental controls argument is also completely nonsense. there's no need to stop adult gamers from playing import titles just so a U.S. parent can control what games their child plays. if they're worried about conflicting rating (censorship) standards they can just add an option in the parental controls which lets parents region-lock that particular machine. what is so hard about that? and if the region-locking only affects DSi-specific games then kids will still be able to play games without parental controls. so what's the point of all this?
this whole DSi thing seems like a really dick move by Nintendo. not only are they confirming that the DS/Lite will be obsolete and unable to play many new releases (just 2 years after the DS Lite was launched), but they're also needlessly restricting consumer freedoms.
Unfair moderation!
Exhibit A: Nintendo absolutely hates piracy.
As well they should be. Piracy is a problem ... in Asia. Worse, at least in the Philippines it is hurting their reputation because the shrink wrapped pirate crap being sold under their name is just that - crap and breaks almost immediately.
Is there anyone here who seriously believes that someone should be encouraged to sell crap under someone else's name and be able get away with it? Really?
The Wii is not only region locked - it's technically mandatory. There is no "unlock" bit on games. You can pick a region or have the game not play at all.
For VC games / channels this is different - there's a code for "region free".
Of course, if they ever decide to release region free games, they could release a firmware update. But you'd have to install that update via the internet, because the game itself wouldn't even load to the point of installing its bundled updates.
Cause I for one would not like to receive offers to participate in an ARG with the DSi as the crux if it's taking place in New York City while I live in Los Angeles.
Better than receiving ads for subprime mortgages for property in California when you are living in the jungles of Mindanao. I got plenty of those. Thank you! Yahoo!
Probably by assuming the ARM7 code is their official binaries, and emulating those elsewhere. The official DS emulator from Nintendo, Ensata, doesn't even emulate the ARM7 at all. It provides the same functionality in software instead.
This would work on games developed with the offical SDK (all the commercial ones, I'm guessing) and not at all with homebrew.
It's technically neither and both - of course they didn't just get some leftover Gamecubes and up the clock speeds in them, but it's closer to being an "Overclocked gamecube" than simply being compatible with the Gamecube. It's not literally overclocked, but the processors inside are of the same type as in the Gamecube, just clocked slightly higher. Go have a read here if you don't believe me:
Hollywood, the Wii's GPU, also contains the southbridge and a DSP for audio processing. It is based on the GameCube's GPU, Flipper, and has no notable increases in programmability. However, it is clocked 50 percent higher (243Mhz versus 162Mhz). Most of the chip remains unchanged; for example, it still sports the same 3.1MB of embedded memory, distributed into separate pools for the frame buffer and textures. Similar to Flipper, Hollywood still sports a fixed-function pipeline, with no programmable vertex shaders. However, like in the GameCube, it is possible to emulate some pixel shaders by using "texture environment stages (TEVs)."
I've worked with the Wii on a professional level, Nintendo's OWN programming guidelines literally say something like "Develop your game as if it were a Gamecube game, then add in some nicer effects for polish". I'll dig out the manual if you still don't believe me.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
There is NO justification for region lockout. None.
Say you develop a video game based on a book. Copyright in the book has expired in your region, but the copyright still subsists in another major market. You do not want to be sued in the other market for copyright infringement. So you region-lock your product to reduce your exposure to copyright lawsuits.
Case in point: Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie. Barrie wrote the novel Peter and Wendy in 1911 and willed the copyright to Great Ormond Street Hospital. The United States copyright expired in the 1960s under the Copyright Act of 1909's publication plus 56 years regime. But under the life plus 70 years regime in effect in Europe, the copyright subsisted until 2008, and GOSH demanded royalties for any copies distributed in Europe.
Nintendo said that "it would require more than a firmware upgrade to play DVD's", and that they'd sell a Wii that could play DVD's for more money. However, some hackers found out that the Wii disc drive CAN actually play DVD's and made some homebrew to get it working.
Does the hackers' method license the CSS trade secrets, Macrovision patents, MPEG-2 decoder patents, Dolby Digital decoder patents, and other patents or trade secrets involved in DVD-Video playback? If not, then it isn't an authorized DVD player.
Well, the world is divided into three territories for game marketing purposes, US, Japan, PAL. You won't import PAL games anyway since they always get released last, cost the most and get the fewest games anyway (most importers carry almost no PAL games). Importing from Japan or the US is more likely and those both use NTSC, if you're in the PAL region (which gives the most incentive to import) that doesn't matter either since most PAL TVs do NTSC too (the PS2 can even output NTSC with most PAL games to get a higher refresh rate).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Yes, Catholic priests hump choir boys in ALL regions.
(That said, most poo-poo heads who use the "athiest" misspelling are of the Jack Chick brand of Protestant hate-choir anyway and dislike Catholics almost more than us non-slavesouls.)