DS web browser comes with RAM expansion

[quickstraw]

http://www.dsfanboy.com/2006/02/17/d...ram-expansion/

[BJWanlund]

WOO-HOO!!!

Seriously though, I LOVE it! Maybe Nintendo is WAY smarter than we gave them credit for.

BJ

[nukinetix]

Of course they're smart - that's their job, to make money, to make you believe you want - nay, NEED - to "catch them all". That's fine. But we gotta be smarter than them and keep them honest. It's in our best interest to stay one step ahead of them. An intelligent, thinking, well informed consumer is the foundation of a healthy, non-exploitative market.

Now for the memory expansion pack .. and my predictions for 2006/2007 ... downloadable games... downloadable games ... REVOLUTION!

[Womp]

Of course they're smart - that's their job, to make money, to make you believe you want - nay, NEED - to "catch them all". That's fine. But we gotta be smarter than them and keep them honest. It's in our best interest to stay one step ahead of them. An intelligent, thinking, well informed consumer is the foundation of a healthy market.

Now for the memory expansion pack .. and my predictions for 2006/2007 ... downloadable games... downloadable games ... REVOLUTION!

Seriously, screw the damn web browser....Sorry Shane.

As we discussed in show #1, imagine being able to download DS demos, full games or even NES classics from the Revolution? Just cool as crap.

I like your predictions.

[Shane R. Monroe]

I heard that the RAM expansion pack wasn't going to make it out of Japan.

Nuki - The problem here is... NDS code cannot be run from the GBA cart. Its a built in HARDWARE security issue. The ONLY way that it can be done is with a hardware modification - I doubt even NINTENDO can do it. That makes downloading DS code and putting it on ANY GBA storage medium impossible.

I believe they will use the DS DOWNLOAD methodology for everything - which has its limitations as mentioned before.

[nukinetix]

No hardware modification necessary.

Shane, what you mean is some add-on cartridge (a "passme" of sorts, specifically made and designed by nintendo themselves) that lets you do it. And that's only as far as we know (we don't know EXACTLY every last secret inside the DS's hardware and firmware, much less that of the Lite ... )

Whether it will be:
1) this same memory expansion
2) some other "optional" DS storage medium/cartridge
3) an online account through the revolution (or even without) where you can play games that you purchase (for the NDS) instantly as long as you're near a wifi access point.
4) some other way they will come up with

It's clearly technically PERFECTLY possible.

What limitations are you talking about ?

[Shane R. Monroe]

Maybe we don't know everything about the DS yet.

However, there are some limitations involved that we know about at THIS TIME ...

1) NDS code cannot be run from GBA's slot without passme or flashme. Passme2 code is specific to a particular game. Literally Nintendo would be giving out the keys to the city if they released their own passme2. It would be like Sony giving out a mod chip. I just don't see that happening from ANY perspective.

2) DS Download has already been mentioned as the current form of delivery. This means demos are limited to the DS Download area (again, we've been told its protected from outside the DS Download environment) which is 4MB. No access to SRAM, no access to DS or GBA cart. Someone has made wifime which allows DS download to execute unsigned code - but at the moment, its limited to code that can run inside the DS Download area (which includes a means of flashing the bios - SL1 contact still required).

3) Firmware modifications by consumers cannot be required. No one, including nintendo, are going to authorize someone to use the SL1 contact to reflash the bios to allow what you're talking about. Esp. considering one F'up and you have a Nintendo Brick.

This doesn't mean that demos out the ass aren't possible ... that indie dev 4MB titles can't be had, etc. However, I do not believe the current generation of DSes will be able to receive a full game with saves, etc. from wifi.

Here is a posting with some useful information as well as links to other information: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/...m/535004863731

[nukinetix]

You lost me. What did I say above, and what are you talking about?

I insist I see no reason that it's technically not possible. You say it IS technically impossible. Explain clearly this point please:

why can't a specifically designed DS cartridge - equivalent to local flash storage memory + passme functionality NOT generic, but limited to the local storage on the cartridge - be developed? It would allow to transparently (through onboard software that does everything automatically) simply download in 4mb fragments, copy to storage/flash memory, then stitch everything together and you're good to go from the cartridge.

EDIT: Don't get distracted by what I say below please, one point at a time (we seem to lose focus sometimes).

I get the impression that you severely underestimate that basic 4mb allowance. I think 4mb is more then enough for most fun things, especially those that the DS was made for. In fact, I'd say that 4mb is a pretty massive amount for the handheld games the DS is best suited for. Let me give you an example: remember that 3d splinter cell game on mobiles? It's only a 340kb download (yes , that's not even HALF a megabyte). How about the other mobile game, that large 3d Elite/trading/space shooter game ... no more than half a megabyte either! And how large is Ancient Empires 2? It's around the 200kb mark. All compressed, of course.

3d or 2d vector animation and most sprite based animation is cheap at such low resolutions, but extensive voice samples and tons of static whole-screens or whole screen video is expensive and unnecessary fluff IMHO. If you take away most of the unnecessary fluff, that doesn't really add any major points in terms of gameplay and fun, I'd be willing to argue that many/most of the GREAT FUN games on the DS, those that you should be able to download and purchase for anything between $5 and $15, should not surpass 4mb under most normal circumstances. Hell, Tetris DS without the fluff but with all gameplay intact should easily fit within those 4mb!

[Shane R. Monroe]

why can't a specifically designed DS cartridge - equivalent to local flash storage memory + passme functionality NOT generic, but limited to the local storage on the cartridge - be developed? It would allow to transparently (through onboard software that does everything automatically) simply download in 4mb fragments, copy to storage/flash memory, then stitch everything together and you're good to go from the cartridge.

Let's not call it a technical impossibility. Let's be honest - ANYTHING can probably be done. Let's not say "It can't be done" ... let's look at what we know and observe...

My first observation is; why aren't passme's available in some format that doesn't hang out the top of the DS? Looking at the passme and passme2 it requires a physical chip as well as a real cartridge to work. Could Nintendo compress all this into a real SD-sized card? Possibly. However, based on everything I've read, once you transfer control to the GBA cart, it takes over. This is BLANKET PIRACY on a new level. This means that anyone with pretty much any GBA storage device could easily run unsigned code. Do you REALLY think that Nintendo would do this?

Second, from what I understand, on-cart flashable memory is pricey - even in very small quantities. I don't understand it, but you CONSTANTLY hear GBA/DS developers saying that save space adds a lot of cost to the cartridge (hence so limited of saves, password checkpoints etc). True or not, if they are screaming about 128 megaBITS of SRAM in a cartridge, how much cost and/or effort would it be to get 128 megaBYTES along with that passme chip and everything else on that little DS card?

Third, eveything I've seen so far indicates that DS DOWNLOAD is a protected area - that cannot interact with the DS cart or the GBA area. If this is done in hardware, then 4MB WILL be the limit - without the benefit of save games or persistance ... power off, game is over. This isn't part of the passme - its something different. But, let's say its NOT this way. You're talking about moving something in 4mb chunks over wifi - which at this time, a simple single card play game can take up to a full minute or more to transfer (and I'm not going to assume every game takes up that full 4 MB). So let's shoot in the dark and say that 4mb takes 1.5 minutes to transfer. For a 16mb game, you're talking about five minutes to transfer (plus any downtime during the slow as sram copy process). This doesn't make sense to me. If it don't make "cents" it don't make dollars.

Again, I don't think we're arguing the same thing here.

I COMPLETELY AGREE that 4MB is plenty of space to make some DAMN good games. But, couple this with the fact that you can't do game saves and the memory is volatile (and it takes a couple minutes of transfer before you can play) - it raises questions at the VERY least about implementation.

I would imagine we'll see some very lightweight games that don't require the depth of saves, or the ungodly transfer times of a full 4MB.

[nukinetix]

The 4mb-games case is a separate issue altogether but it has its place in the larger scheme of "revolutionary" things.

I just get that deja vu feeling of acting as a replacement for a recently burnt out "imagination mental module", but let me once again suggest a scenario that should never take a nuclear scientist to come up with:

How about a ds cartridge that is very compact, has onboard download software that directly accesses the wifi connection to fetch the game and store it on the flash ram (no 4mb limits), and possibly even accepts sd cards which it formats in a custom nintendo format and the only way to access (through a nice menu) and play the downloaded games is by always keeping control by use of a hardware based system of encoder/decoder/loader/executing module.

Feel free to replace "sd card" with custom nintendo card, a new nintendo specific media shared between the ds and the revo.

Also feel free to assume that the contents can be accessed by the ds even when the flash card is inside the revo, transparently via wifi.