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Nintendo To Take On Apple With DSi App Store
Dave Allen writes "Despite Nintendo publicly claiming no direct competition with the iPhone or iPod Touch with its new DSi console, reports have been leaked about the Big N actively encouraging developers to begin work on small form gaming and non-gaming applications for the DSi's download service.
This is the first step toward Nintendo putting together a direct App Store rival, and could be the marketing hook it's been desperately searching for to convince gamers to upgrade their DS." It seems only fair that since the iPhone is now a gaming platform, the DS is becoming a PDA. And, if the only difference between them is a 3G wireless connection, the rivalry can only get more fierce.
The DS has an ARM7TDMI and ARM9 inside. The former is clocked at something like 33MHz, the ARM9 (which is used primarily for 3D rendering) at 67MHz. Specs are a little skiffy on the DSi, but the primary processor is an ARM9E at 133MHz. It also has 16MB of RAM, which is something like four times the capacity of the regular DS.
It should allow for some much improved games.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Mod parent up. You'll probably still have to be a Registered Nintendo Developer (aka thousands of dollars) to develop for the DSi store.
~$2,000 last I checked. The price isn't the problem, it's getting into the program that's the problem.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Wii? DSi? Sounds like a combination of the DS and Wii names to represent this has pulled feature ideas from the Wii generation.
What did you want them to call it? The DS Lite Plus?
while you raise a good point, it isn't particularly hard to re-invent paging. ;)
When you reinvent paging, you reinvent thrashing. The PocketNES emulator for Game Boy Advance had a version that ran on the GBA Movie Player, and before heavy optimizations were done to free up some more space for the paging system, Kirby's Adventure thrashed the crap out of the emulator's 192 KiB page buffer.
Not at all. The Nintendo DS has sold over a hundred million units; that's 2-3 times more than Apple has sold iPhones.
And the DS has been out 2-3 times as long. It's not just the iPhone, but also the iPod touch, as well as any future iPhone OS devices that the DS will compete with.
People won't be choosing between iPhone or DSi. They are completely different devices.
I own a DS Lite & an iPod Touch. If I had a DSi, there might be times when I'd buy downloads for it instead of my iPod Touch, hence there would be competition.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Nintendo have been trumpeting the DSi Store as a WiiWare equivalent for the DS for ages, I don't see why someone would "leak" the fact that they're - gasp - getting people to develop games for it.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
There are some specific differences between the GBA's 2D video and that of the DS that would get in the way of bug-for-bug compatibility. The extended rotation modes (3, 4, 5) act significantly different on the GBA and DS. The different row pitch alone screws things up.. The sprite priority . You'd need to use some sort of window system to hide an 8px wide border at the sides and a 16px wide border at the top and bottom, and you'd need to change all the scrolling register writes and all the mode 7 HDMA writes to offset the position by (8, 16). Trust me; this has already been hashed out on the board at Pocket Heaven.
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True, you can use a DS with gloves or a stylus when it is cold out.