Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade
bbc.co.uk
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The 3DS library is good despite somewhat lacking in diversity. But the 3DS also has native compatibility with the entire excellent DS library, and after hacking it can also run the entire great GBA library without emulation (like Matroshka dolls, the 3DS hardware includes the complete DSi hardware which in turn includes GBA hardware, and it has firmware support to access them both).
The old models emulate a lot of 8 and 16 bit consoles well, whereas the New models have nearly complete compatibility for 8 and 16 bit consoles and additionally can emulate some Playstation 1. Moreover, hacking the 3DS has become even more accessible due to recent newly found exploits. Still getting a lot of fun out of mine.
Of course all of this can also be achieved on a PC with a simple 10$ amazon controller and free emulators, if you're comfortable pirating games.
Could you make some recommendations? I'd be very interested in your list.
1. LoZ: Ocarina of Time 2. Super Mario 64 (ds version) 3. Donkey Kong Country Returns 4. LoZ: A Link To The Past 5. Shin Megami Tensei: IV (maybe not "must", but you should give it a shot) 6. Earthbound 7. Super Mario World
Pretty please, play the Wii version of this! You can use Dolphin if you want.
The 3DS port halved the framerate from 60 fps to 30 fps, and it makes a big difference! At 30 fps, the game is much too difficult—unless you play on the "adjusted" difficulty they added, and I'm pretty sure I know why they adjusted it.
Also, while I'm here I'm going to add on Kid Icarus: Uprising. I know the controls were divisive, but if you can adapt, it's a really unique and well-done action adventure. From the creator of Smash Brothers!
1/2. Metroid Fusion & Zero Mission
3/4. Advanced Wars 1 & 2
5/6. Golden Sun 1 & 2
7. Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced
8. Kirby and the Amazing Mirror
9. The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
10. Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga
There were also 3 great Castlevania's, 3 great Sonic Advanced, 2 or 3 Fire Emblems, I enjoyed the 3 Dragon Ball Z RPGs, I enjoyed the newer Pokemon Emerald and throwback FireRed (QoL improvements). Final Fantasy 6 is available.
Really, a flash cart was very much a worthwhile investment (and a larger capacity battery) for my gameboy micro. Would recommend EZ-Flash IV.
1. Super Mario Bros 3
2. The Legend of Zelda (1986)
3. Super Metroid (1994)
4. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
5. Super Castlevania
6. Pokemon: Silver/Gold
7. Advance Wars: Dual Strike
8. Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (tecccchnically an n64 game though) (Majora's Mask would make this list if the DS version wasn't a butchered shadow of the original)
9. Metroid: Fusion
10. Like... ANY of the billion Final Fantasies available between NES and N3DS
edit: 11. Mario 64 baybbeeeeeeeee
They tweaked that fight where you chase the big monster around an endless forest hallway to be ABSURDLY easy.
On that note, same for the originally TERRIFYING jungle warrior fight.
Oh and the changed swimming mechanic was fucked, although I just read that they fixed it maybe?
Here's a video I think captured it well https://youtu.be/653wuaP0wzs
And why specifically Super Castlevania, which is regarded as kind of a garbage castlevania (the player sprite is bigger so you get less of a heads up on whats ahead, and it's not part of the "metrovania" pantheon).
Why Fusion and Super Metroid?
Does the original LoZ hold up as well as say Link's Awakening?
Why are there only 3 companies represented on this list? Did Capcom run over your pet dog?
I would never hate on a game for this.
> super linear
point taken, but speedrunners would say otherwise.
> much of the exploration is of the "guess and check" variety.
I finished the game as a 10 year old so I think it wasn't too easy or too hard.
To each his own !
I think "achieved perfection" was the bar you set =) And Super Metroid set the bar quite high.
And to be totally fair, it's true SC is clunky and dated in several regards (it was a very early SNES title and it shows...) So maybe Jeremy dings it on those aspects more than others do. But I would argue it makes up for a lot of that in atmosphere, style and uniqueness.
If you're only going to play one LoZ, play A Link to the Past. (I think "play the 3rd game" is pretty good advice for a lot of Nintendo series.) ALttP is when they figured out the formula; I played it after I played most of the others, and after playing it every other LoZ (at least the 2D ones) all kinda felt like a copy of ALttP, like they're each just remaking a different aspect of it (and adding in their own little gimmick).
The original LoZ holds up, but is a very different game than the later games. The world is empty for you, there are no towns, just wilderness; it's being a kid exploring the woods behind your house, pretending you're alone in the world. The loss of sword beams when you take damage made me feel that taking damage is getting hurt, rather than just some meter in the corner of the screen that I need to keep up; more so than any other game.
Fusion is lit but you super metroid is like... The OG metroidvania.
[0] https://devkitpro.org/wiki/Getting_Started [1] https://www.3dbrew.org/wiki/Homebrew_Applications#Game_Engin...
It's true the 3D effect is just a gimmick, but it's a very neat one. Games like Metroid Samus Returns are much better in 3D IMO. The game feels like an actual mini diorama is in front of you.
Some of the best would be yeah Metroid and Luigi's Mansion 2. The 3D gives a real "diorama" feel.
I think later games realized people weren’t actually going to do that, and effectively optimized their visuals for the highest setting.
- CPU got double the ARM11 cores (now 4, was 2) at triple the clock speed (exactly)
- RAM doubled from 128 MB to 256 MB.
- VRAM upped by 2/3 to 10 MB, was 6 MB (which sounds like not a lot, which is true, but the top screen is 800x240 with an effective resolution of 400x240 and the viewport rendered twice from slightly different perspectives when 3D is enabled. Lower screen is 320x240, so it's not a lot of VRAM but it doesn't really need that much)
- Added an H.264 hardware decoder (yes, the original lacked one)
- NFC added, not big but an external reader/writer puck was required for the old 3DS models and amiibo is huge among a subset of fans
- ...Wi-Fi still maxes out at 802.11g (come on now)
The hardware gap is great enough that the New 3DS got a Switch port (Fire Emblem Warriors) and a Wii port with the 3D enabled (Xenoblade 3D). It can also be used for Twitch/YouTube streaming, as it has enough horsepower (and apparently extra hardware, but I'm not sure which is required; maybe someone else can enlighten us in this respect) to just dump the display buffer over Wi-Fi to a PC. Even with the 802.11g deficiency.
It's a great console with a huge library of games, especially with DS backwards compatibility, and with mods (all are vulnerable) it's also a capable and very portable emulation machine. Cheaper as well (although not necessarily significantly) than even the Switch Lite, and more moddable (unless you want to shell out for a Switch modchip).
Nintendo could have sold many more but botched the name and the marketing, like the Wii U. But it's worth a look.
Because it was only ever used by a handful of games!
When the New 3DS launched, I expected it to be something of a stealth new console generation. The trajectory would been like the Gameboy Color; at launch, games could still be played in Black & White on the original gameboy, but it didn’t take long for games to drop that support so they could truly make use of the GBC’s superior internals.
But of course, this did not happen.
But it’s the ideal size IMO, and it has swappable faceplates and Super Famicom coloured buttons, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Over the last year or so I've been squeezing individual fps's of performance out of the PSX emulator and it's been some of the most fun hobby programming I've done in a long time.
Plus you can write for a platform with a 3D screen! How cool is that?
That sounds really cool. Do you have any pointers for getting started?
For the basic stuff you can use the usual C libraries. I picked up a lot by reading and tweaking the examples, which are installed along with the toolchain: https://github.com/devkitPro/3ds-examples
libctru, installed with devkitpro (https://libctru.devkitpro.org/) is where a lot of the platform-specific APIs live. There are also some higher-level libraries built on top of it
A good understanding of ARM will take you a long way. A lot of what documentation there is (especially on 3dbrew.org) assumes you understand the terms and general architecture of an older ARM platform. This book https://www.brucesmith.info/arm-a32-assembly-language/ was great for building enough understanding that I could understand most of the official reference manuals. From those, I found the ARMv7 reference manual and the ARM11 MPCore Technical Reference Manual to be the most useful, and I refer back to the ARM instruction set reference card a lot.
Besides that, it's reading and modifying the source of other projects, and trying things out. If you look at homebrew apps like ctrQuake (https://github.com/masterfeizz/ctrQuake), you'll notice there's usually not a lot of platform-specific code -- most is just standard C / C++.
Hope that helps. Just like anything, it's knowing enough to get started (a toolchain, some C, and some examples) and using your questions and ideas to draw you into the next thing to learn.
The main change seems to be them removing the 3DS page from the Nintendo website? My impression was that they stopped making them long ago and were only making new versions of the 2DS (which kind of defeats the entire purpose of the device).
They also don't make enough Switch consoles to meet demand, and they don't update basic things with their software (friend codes really?)
I'm not sure what the culture is like at Nintendo, but there's a lot of low hanging fruit that would make things a lot better (and make them a lot more money at the same time).
By “defeat the purpose” I just meant that a version of the 3DS without the 3D part isn’t really the same thing.
I generally find Nintendo the company frustrating to interact with when trying to buy things from them.
You can make good online services that are still safe for children (and they wouldn't have friend codes).
I got one basically as a bonus in an ebay auction a few months back along with a 3DS I was getting for a friend and I've found myself playing original DS games on it more than I ever did on my own New 3DS XL so I was almost certainly picking up on the iffiness of the upscaling to fill the screen.
I think it's a wonderful, heartfelt, and technologically fascinating documentary. I recommend it when you have a half hour to spare.
There’s something beautiful about the pride the printers had in their work. Even if the output is somewhat ephemeral - a daily newspaper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGjFKs9bnU
great video
It's hard to tell, but that room seem really loud
Edit: I'm always more amazed at old mechanical technology than modern technology. Thanks for sharing
Last edit: "Sign language is used, among the many deaf printers". HA!
People with disabilities historically had very few job opportunities. Printing was latched onto in the late 20th century as the major trade career for the deaf--essentially every deaf trade school was teaching it. The noise of the printing machinery making spoken conversation difficult was probably a motivating factor, but it also appears that there was generally little issue with printers not being able to listen ([1] lists that most deaf printers in 1923 used written communication for tasks and their employees generally found deafness no handicap).
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/44462325?seq=4#metadata_info_ta...
If nintendo use a third party manufacturer then I can't imagine there was much ceremony. If they own their production facilities then maybe they had a little mini-party? Most likely it'd depend on the particular teams working in the factory and what the culture is like.
Having said that, they may not even have known when the run was finished that it was going to be the last (management still pondering whether to do another run, or stock from the previous run lasted longer than expected so no new product produced) so it may well have been a total non-event.
I’m not sure what all they do these days, but at least they do a decent amount of serious testing and QA. They might have had a send off when authorizing the final models.
The 3DS XL was the first time I ever saw 3D.
In my life.
I don't just mean "the first time I saw a stereoscopic 3D effect in movies or a game console."
It was the first time I ever saw in three dimensions ever. As a human being.
It's a little bit hard to describe my typical experience with you, since I've never had "normal" version and I don't know what it's like. I would compare my life to playing a video game with a first-person perspective. You know how when you play one of those games, you're thinking in three dimensions, even though you're seeing the game on a flat two-dimensional television?
Well, that's my life. I see the world in two dimensions, even though I'm thinking about it in three dimensions.
But playing Zelda on a 3DS XL? Wow. I mean, it took my breath away. THAT'S HOW NORMAL PEOPLE SEE THE WORLD? You can just look at things and immediately know how far away they are? You don't have to move your head around to see a parallax effect to help your brain compute the distance? WOW. AMAZING.
I'm not a brainologist, so I'm not sure why the 3D system on the 3DS worked for me when nothing else had ever worked for me before, such as 1950s-style red/blue glasses. I'm still nearly blind in one eye, and the 3DS relies upon a lenticular stereoscopic effect that requires two eyes. It seems to me that it shouldn't work. But it did.
(Maybe modern VR headsets with stereo displays would work for me as well; I don't know -- I tried an early one in the 1990s and it didn't work for me, but obviously that was ancient tech)
Regardless, I had never ever experienced three-dimensional vision until the 3DS XL showed it to me. Thanks, little dude.
Not a brainologist either, just a guy with a maths/physics degree who works in IT. My first thought is that the 3DS was close enough to your face that the parallax might have been apparent just from your one good eye looking at different places on the screen.
That's an interesting theory but I think that's not what's happening.
For those unfamiliar, the 3DS uses a lenticular screen. It renders two separate images: the "right" and "left" image. The one you see depends on your viewing angle. If my good eye was seeing both images, I believe I'd experience a sort of double vision or as least discontinuities.
Perhaps more to the point, the 3D effect disappears if I close my "bad" eye! So my "bad" eye is contributing... somehow.
It's absolutely fascinating that you say some folks reported the effect carrying over into real life - do you perhaps remember where you read/saw that? It's not easily Googlable!
I have a similar condition, and in fact only VR headsets and IMAX screens work for me. 3DS doesn't :<
I saw an IMAX 3D movie once but I forget how that system worked. Was it a shutter system, or was it like an updated version of the old red/blue system that relied on polarization somehow?
I haven't tried a modern VR headset. Honestly, I'd always kind of assumed that they wouldn't work because ViewMasters never worked for me back in the day. As primitive as ViewMasters were, they actually did provide fully stereoscopic images with a separate photo for the right and left eye, no lenticular or polarized or shutter system trickery involved.
May I ask what your eye condition is?
In my case, I was born with a cataract on my lens and my lens was removed circa 1980, before transplants were common. So that eye has just been chillin' without a lens ever since. I can see light and shapes, but I can't read the big "E" on the eye chart at the optomotrist's office.
>May I ask what your eye condition is?
I don't know if it's neurological but I just don't register depth w/o forcing it. I have astigmatism and short-sightedness.
So, your brain gets a stereo signal, but because of the "fuzziness" of far-away objects, it doesn't "compute" the depth information?
That makes sense to me, but - corrective lenses don't improve the issue? That's fascinating. Is that common with astigmatism? I don't know too much about depth perception issues outside of my own experience. (One might say I'm short-sighted in that regard... har har har)
No, I doubt that's the issue, corrective glasses don't help here at all.
>Is that common with astigmatism?
I don't know, lol.
I've got used to live with it, doesn't bother me during day to day life.
Still, it was super cool to catch a glimpse of that elusive third dimension thanks to Nintendo's little wonder!
The eye and brain are fascinating things. One time I broke my eyeglasses and did without for a year. Then I got a new prescription and was a bit disoriented at how flat the world seemed, to my mind it was "like a PlayStation game". What had happened was, my brain had trained itself to use blurriness as a proxy for distance (I'm myopic), and the eyeglasses removed that.
Then I got a new prescription and was a bit disoriented
at how flat the world seemed, to my mind it was "like
a PlayStation game". What had happened was, my brain
had trained itself to use blurriness as a proxy for
distance (I'm myopic), and the eyeglasses removed that.
It was horrible and fantastic at the same time. The debugging tools were poor, most of the documentation hadn't been translated to english yet, and testing the dual-camera rendering pipeline required hunching over the desk to be in the sweet spot for the parallax to work.
I still love that kind of low-level development, but these days python and shell scripts pay the bills. RIP 3DS, and thanks for the memories.
1: https://www.engadget.com/2010-05-17-is-this-a-prototype-of-t...
Dominic Arsenault goes into why this was something of a deliberate strategy for Nintendo in his book on the SNES, Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware.
I am mostly thinking about Pokémon. They’ve got this rich new Pokémon Home system to transfer between generations, but that’s reliant on having functioning older hardware. Now, there’s a massive pool of functional 3DS systems out there, so it’s not a pressing issue, but eventually, some poor Ash Greninja will be trapped on a 3DS cartridge. (I suppose the answer is: port all the Pokémon games, profit, swim in giant Scrooge McDuck moneybin of coins.)
It was nice for games like Pokémon; easy access to the inventory, little mini-games on the touch screen, stuff like that. It obviously blew right up in their faces with the Wii U, but it worked for a certain class of game.
I'm honestly surprised chess is still around. It's basically the same game with the same rules from centuries ago.
There's strategy to pick an ideal team. To ev/iv farm if you're really into it.
There's a story, you can battle friends, you can make trades.
Pokemon isn't pog collecting.
But Pokemon is not just about collecting pokemon, there's the competitive scene for one, where people will welcome new pokemons to shake the meta and not always care about a mon being available or not.
I'm honestly surprised baseball is still around. The first game came out in like 1839, and it was initially addictive because it was easy to play. But each season is basically a carbon copy of the previous season with player changes.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/pokemon-home-guide-transf...
But still, they finally have what appears to be a canonical place to store Pokémon, and it’ll be a little annoying when 3DS units start dying off and you can’t dance that particular jig.
I wonder maybe a VR 3DS emulator could emulate it the best?
3DS eShop might be a safe bet but aside from the usual downsides of digital, the games are tied to the system, not your eShop account.
But knowing that the console and likely all first-party games will soon be OOP certainly lights a fire under me, as I'd much rather pay $40 for a new, sealed copy of the game than $70 for a cart-only copy of the game off eBay in a year's time.
Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology evidently went OOP while I wasn't looking, and the Ebay price has already skyrocketed. Argh!
EDIT: And yes, I've got a couple from the eShop (Devil Survivor's 1 & 2 and Soul Hackers), but I prefer carts since they're not locked to my system/account. And who knows when Nintendo will decide to shut down the eShop, just like they did for the Wii shop?
There were not quite so many copies of SMT IV or Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright.
For example, Pokemon Platinum, is selling used for about 120-150.
Games for consoles tend to follow the same cycle every time. They get cheaper as the current console gets older, then once the new Gen starts, they get really cheap and once you're about one to two generations removed, they get more expensive again.
It has been the DS's time to get more expensive for a while. PSP has also started to get more expensive, though not remotely as much as DS games, since the DS was more popular.
I think it's an amazing time, and the games will stand the test of time just like the original mario series because the content is rich and great vs having to fall back on pushing systems & I/O to the max.
Nothing recently has given me as much joy as to replay N64 classics on the 3DS with better graphics, added gameplay and 100% solely in Japanese after originally growing up with them as they were released in the USA/English.
The context and general idea helped alot to drive me to replay the games and relearn vocabulary in a different language. And how the games are targeted at a young audience makes full kana or furigana available, with settings to use just Kanji if you want is fantastic.
It's something that every other learning app doesn't have for Japanese - but then again when you learn more languages you don't really go for the cultural angle, you do it to communicate and use culture as a reference point.
This is very late intermediate stage - to put yourself into having to read "Japanese."
I would only do it after knowing and writing/speaking Hiragana and Katakana outloud, several times, written it over and over and listening to songs (or any text, but songs have lyrics and it's easy) over and over and doing the lyrics over and over to kick in the muscle memory.
My secret, really, was learning the kana via Kyary Paymu Paymu songs. I enjoyed them, but, after doing that, over and over, the alure was lost and it took me about 3 years before I could listen to Pon Pon Pon again. But - the repetition in the song drilled down the kana for me.
If you already know Kana, then basic vocabulary/grammar. There's a great app on the Android App Store called "Kanji Study"
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindtwiste...
It's been further tweaked and is more refined then what it used to be, but the memory games are super useful for both kana and N5/N4 Kanji - the basic of the basics.
As for playing with a game/any game, it all falls together after a while - you see the pattern, you "get" the idea, but I would use a dictionary such as Akebi on Android or Jisho.org (Jisho literally means dictionary.) or even translate.google.com and each word you don't know, add it to a unique list and study/drill those over and over.
Soon it will come together. It's very slow at first, and painful, even though I could read Kana and had N5, I suffered reading the "warning" screens on the 3ds even though they're for kids, some of the words did not make sense, but the context was implied.
That's it, as for the games:
Pokemon is great, Zelda is also great, but if you really want to excel -
Karaoke.
You can go to youtube, and find karaoke songs to listen too - the 3dS joysound app stopped/died, but it's still on the WiiU and on the Switch and it is excellent, it offers near 100% furigana (except for very very simple kanji) and being forced to sing along makes you vocal quick.
You can also youtube "karaoke battle" or general karaoke after songs.
"カラオケバテル”
”カラオケ”
I personally enjoy lots of J-pop (which made learning the language much more easily/motivated) so I used songs I knew such as Tatsuhiro Yamashita
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rzBvkcHUz4
山下達郎 RIDE ON TIME （カラオケ）
And then just drilled on that as if it was memory cards or study drilling.
Pokemon games are good, zelda is great. Mario isn't per se as there isn't much "text" The inkling for a bit of puzzle makes it more that you need to "understand" what the meaning is, as it's different in English.
Context is much more inferred then stated in Japanese.
Phoenix Wright Professor Layton Animal Crossing
Then you can go onto some normal plain jane ds games, final fantasy and Square Enix titles are great once you're nearing the end of intermediate understanding.
Something tells me this is Nintendo hedging bets
• Did you know that the SNES’s CPU starts up in a “NES 6502 compatibility” mode, sort of like x86-64 processors starting up in 16-bit real mode? It’s fully possible to design and build a game entirely for the NES as a 6502-assembler codebase; and then to “port” the game to the SNES, by taking that very same 6502-assembler codebase, and just adding a few minor SNES-level “enhancements” that temporarily switch to 65c816 mode, do something, then switch back to 6502 mode. Since the market penetration of the NES was so high, many games in the early 90s were “dual-released” this way.
• Did you know it was possible to create a GBC cart that would act as a fully-fledged SNES game (i.e. mapping a separate SNES game ROM) when plugged into a SNES through a Super Gameboy? Or to have “progressive enhancement” logic in the GBC ROM itself that draws full-color sprites (OBJs) when played on a Super Gameboy? AFAIK, literally nobody has ever fully exploited this, not even demoscene devs.
But, well, third-party devs just seemingly have no interest in releasing for old platforms. They want to “be where the action is.” And Nintendo can’t carry the momentum of a platform all by itself. (Plus, Nintendo’s software dev-teams are too busy acting as stewards and shepherds for how to make use of the newest-gen hardware capabilities — by making games for them, and by interfacing with third-parties — to have any labor left over for making games for older consoles.)
That being said, Nintendo did try to keep the gameboy line going after the DS. They released the GB Micro. It was its whole own thing, with its own product code (OXY) that signalled that they had likely built up separate factories just to build it. But basically nobody bought it.
(But really, I think Nintendo was speaking to developers there, not to gamers. They meant that there’d still be a point, as a game studio, in producing GBA games, because the DS would also play them.)
https://loveconquersallgam.es/post/2350461718/fuck-the-super... are the definitive posts on this madness
One game did! Space Invaders, of all things. Jeremy Parish did a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAyt8NI9u9c
A full exploitation, IMHO, would look more like the thing Pokemon Stadium did with Pokemon RBY — but done purely in-cart in the GBC game. A SNES game that "interacts with" a GBC game through the SRAM, such that you're playing the same game, two different ways, when you put it in your SNES vs. when you put it in your Gameboy. (Pretty much like Dragon Quest XI Definitive Edition's ability to reboot the game between 3D and 16-bit mode.)
Of course, to do that, you'd need actual separate ROM chips in the GBC cart for the SNES game, so that the SNES ROM-image could be larger than WRAM yet still fast. All that ROM would be untenable to fit into a GBC-cart sized cartridge even in 2003, the last year of the GBC's lifetime. It'd be perfectly doable now, though!)
I don't remember games that were released on both systems, do you have any example ?
But that doesn't mean that we can't figure it out! Grabbing the No-Intro databases (https://no-intro.org), and then intersecting the romset names between the NES and SNES lists, gives me this list: https://gist.github.com/tsutsu/0a9d7dbaa3cb7bb1929b31d7bc878.... About 82 games!
Of course, some of those are sequels that just happen to share a name; some are ground-up-rewrite-style dual releases; and some are just unofficial ports — people trying to recreate a SNES game on the NES or vice-versa, without access to the original code. But there are likely a good few in there that were SNES-enhanced-NES-code dual-releases.
If someone here is a gaming content-creator, there's a very unique deep-dive essay waiting to be written here, about how these games work. (Retro Game Mechanics Explained, I'm looking at you.)
Not demoscene but I remember Pokemon and SML2 having custom frames and sprites.
According to https://tcrf.net/Super_Game_Boy#OBJ_TRN_.28Object_Transfer.2..., the SGB OBJ_TRN command wasn't even intended to be used by games! And it was removed in all revisions of the SGB after the first. It's no wonder it went unused. I wonder what Nintendo were thinking, including it in the first place!
But also, to be clear, when I said "fully exploited", the "fully" part is important. :) I didn't mean that nobody has ever used these features in some trivial way in a GB game. (IIRC, the definitive example of a trivial use of the SGB OBJ layer, is in Donkey Kong '94.) I meant that nobody has ever really pushed these features to their limits. There's a lot that can be done with the SGB (https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/SGB_Functions) that I've literally never seen a game doing, let alone doing something interesting with.
Using all the SGB features together, you could likely cook up a SNES-looking or GBA-looking game, running purely on the GB's Z80 CPU! Surely not something a time-constrained game studio would care to do; but a hobbyist, as a passion project? Sure, why not?
No commercial SNES games used the 6502 compatibility mode afaik.
If the Switch had been a market failure (or had the DS been, back in its day), Nintendo probably would have kept the older system alive. But once it became clear that the Switch & DS were runaway successes, they could wind down the older hardware without losing their major source of revenue.
Even when I also have the PC or console version, some games just feel more at home on a handheld, and more appealing when you don't have to commit to a whole session of playing them.
On one hand, handhelds take less focus than sitting in one place staring in one direction, so you can play on them in bite-sized breaks, putting them away at any time and instantly resuming where you left off.
But on the other hand, something so close to your face, that you can snuggle with in any position anywhere, also has a level of intimacy not found in bigger screens and bulkier controls.
Nothing can compare to dozing off in bed while engrossed in a game with a captivating story, mechanics, and music..
Laptops are too bulky, and phones or tablets don't have built-in physical controls.
Which is why I'm a bit concerned about there being only one handheld left. The Vita was amazing and I still love it but Sony did everything they could to kill it off, and the Switch's success hasn't inspired them to try again.
If anyone feels like making a new handheld that anyone can develop for, my money is yours. :)
On the other side of things are deliberately wacky low-powered, lo-fi devices with novel distribution mechanisms, like Playdate: https://play.date/
The problem as you say is the lack of native titles, and an uncertainty about how long the devices will be supported for. In this day and age an official distribution channel like the App Store/eShop is important too, even if it's just a website you can download from onto an SD card.
But I'll try one of these out!
Besides that the population of these devices is relatively small, it seems there are a lot of subtle incompatibilities between them too, in terms of button quantity and layout, number of analog sticks (ranges from zero to two), etc.
So yeah, I'm sure someone will try it at some point, but it's not hard to see that this isn't a super appealing target for trying to stand up a paid app store. The best-case scenario I could imagine would be an all-you-can-eat Netflix-style affair where you pay $10/mo for access to a rotating catalogue of titles that are a mix of native ports, emulation under legal license, etc. On the other hand, if legal emulation was part of the pitch, it's hard to imagine it going anywhere without classic NES and SNES titles, and Nintendo would have basically zero incentive to legitimize such an effort by playing ball with it, when they're actively selling those titles under emulation on their own storefronts for their own hardware.
A new handheld will probably not be able to succeed without software. That's what killed Windows Phone.
The OLED screen is still unmatched by portable consoles IMO. Sure, somewhat higher resolution or higher refresh rates would be nice, but those infinitely deep black levels? Just amazing.
There are a few multiplatform games like Undertale for which I consider the PS Vita the best version.
If Sony and Nintendo would release their official SDKs for these dead consoles, maybe people would have less reasons throw them away. I don't understand why they're so defensive about it anyways.
The games were the last and only software I paid for with actual money, until I joined the FSF.
It's not perfect, but tons of games are fully playable and development is still very active.
EDIT: I'm already aware that the system has been exploited to death and back, so I'm mostly curious if people haven't already dumped everything.
I was able to hack mine(though I don't use it much anyway) fairly easily. My brother did it to his so he could dump DS carts onto the SD card for better portability.
I suspect 3DS hacking community will stay active for long time as it's the only cheap (second hand 2DS), wide spreaded, hacked portable console available.
to patch exploits.
However this all assumes that updates will stop, and I'm not so sure that Nintendo would even announce such a thing.
Hadn't been plugged in for years (I don't have a charger). Turned on and played a game. Amazing.
Or maybe are there any better ways to input text into a 3DS?
I had one for the original DS and obtained ROMs for the cartridges that I owned. It was convenient to have them all in one place when traveling without having to bring a bunch of cartridges with me.
As long as you can get them all for decent prices, I don't think there's much to regret, because if they're using any of the 3DS exclusive capabilities, you're not going to be able to reproduce the experience on any other console anyways.
Either it is, or it isn't. From there you can determine whether you should spend your money there or not.
Nintendo isn't stupid, if people stop buying their consoles and manifest wanting just the game for another platform they will eventually do just that; but their large customer base is saying that the price of the console is worth it and Nintendo deems it better that way so it will remain like that.
If I already have a PS5 (not out yet, but which is already purchase worthy) then I would say f--- yes to even a $100 Zelda (were it available).
The richness of games available would not be possible if Nintendo was not in the picture as a hardware manufacturer and had to target all their games at MS/Sony hardware.
Sony & MS have almost never tried any novel hardware and been able to tie it to unique gameplay that was actually successful. They've only tried to copy Nintendo's ideas, mostly failed, and then cancelled the hardware. See Kinect, Playstation Move controllers for PS3, etc.. it was all just copying the Wii.
A lot of the games on DS and 3DS would never have seen the light of day with their unique gameplay elements without Nintendo doing the experimental hardware required.