- Released in 2004, this handheld brings two screens for gameplay and an exclusive touch screen. Plus, its stereo sound looks nice if compared to the poor GBA, which requires headphones for that. There are a ton of games and its popularity is very high, both USA and Japan sides of the merchants. ^_^
- Now, I have a PSP, one year old. I can play multimedia, as MP3 and video files, plus Internet access and its superb WiFi support. However, the DS is target for gaming only. I'd like opinions about this handheld, if I should spent my ca$h on it... or wait for another "rabbit" that Nintendo might pull out of nowhere, as the Big N did with the Wii and the GameCube systems.
DS: $130. "SuperCard" SD card to GBA slot adapter with "SuperKey" launcher card: $70.
DS gaming > PSP gaming for several reasons:
- Native titles for DS can use the touch screen, allowing games to be developed using close adaptations of idioms from mouse-based games for Amiga and PC. Compare the controls on March of the Minis for DS to those of Lemmings, a similar title for PSP.
- Nintendo's greater acceptance of 2D graphics allows for proven retro game designs and innovative game designs on smaller budgets.
- Better battery life.
- GBA back-compat in hardware.
- NES, Game Boy, and TurboGrafx 16 back-compat in GBA based emulation.
- Back-compat with a wide variety of Super NES, Sega Genesis, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and Lucasarts SCUMM titles in DS based emulation.
- Nintendo doesn't play cat-and-mouse with the DS homebrew community the way Sony plays cat-and-mouse with the PSP homebrew community, trying to lock us out in every firmware update. "PassMe2" from 16 months ago and "NoPass" from 10 months ago still work as of the firmware version shipped on the latest DS Lite. Plus Nintendo doesn't update firmware from within games, unlike Sony.
...and don't forget that there is a tetris attack clone for DS
clicky
Oh, thank you very much for now. ^_^
Due to the "obvious", a DS unit is quite expensive here (Brazil), around 2x higher.
You do $130 x 2.5 = R$325, and 325 x 2 = R$650. No, I never tried to import anything...
Anyway, the PSP is a nice handheld, I have the "freedom" of carrying it anywhere with my music, videos and pictures. Yes, I see the cat-and-rat game promoted by Sony and the homebrew, it's ridiculous. I already felt a DS on my hands for a short time. It looks nice, but as I said, it's for gaming, unless you purchase that GBA-slot adaptor.
Fx3 wrote:
Oh, thank you very much for now. ^_^
Due to the "obvious", a DS unit is quite expensive here (Brazil), around 2x higher.
Does Brazil have voting? Have you tried voting out the politicians who established some of the highest electronics tariffs in the world?
Yeah, Brazil's government is kinda =(
Not as much as a lot of south/central American countries though.
Anyway, assuming you're not burdened by electronics tariffs, the DS is a pretty nice system. Although most of the official titles that use the touchscreen are gimmick titles with which your enjoy may vary (I don't really like any of them, but different strokes, I guess,) the touchscreen itself is a nice addition, especially when using keyboard-based homebrew like DSLinux (no PSP-style cell-phone text-entry runaround, yay.) Homebrew itself is, as mentioned, much simpler, and the DS is a reasonably powerful handheld for homebrew purposes. Because of this, there's already a variety of nice unofficial apps for DS, like MoonShell (decent media player, don't know how it stacks up against the PSP, though) and DSLinux (which would be nicer if they had included the GCC toolchain in the distro itself rather than making you do your compiling on another computer. Imagine doing DS homebrew on the bus (it's easy if you try...)) There are also some pretty nice official games for it (Final Fantasy III, yay.)
So, if you have the spare cash, I'd recommend it.
Hmm, could you send one of us the cash so we could purchase one and send it to you, thus circumventing the tariff? Just curious.
I also wonder if the DS is worth the money, just like Fx3. At very first I hated it, because I felt the "two screens for twice fun" publicity was so bad I hated the DS at first. But now, I think it isn't all that bad, and some quite interesting games have been released for it (FF3, Children of Mana), along with another set of interesting games planned for it (DQ9, FF12 spin-off).
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There are also some pretty nice official games for it (Final Fantasy III, yay.)
Is it really woth it rather than the NES version ? I really DO love the NES version of it, you know. Unfortunately I cannot find any TKROM here, and I first want to finish FF2 before playing FF3 seriously, but FF2 is impossible and I always lose my saves.
The NES version is still my favorite, but the DS version is quite a nice remake, what with the 3d and all. And the really nice thing is that they didn't water it down like they did FF1&2 Advance; while the difficulty has been slightly adjusted to compensate for the fact that they couldn't have twelve enemies per battle if they wanted like on the NES, the overall difficulty remains about the same. I'd recommend it if you have a few spare bucks.
I hate most FF remakes until now.
At least FF1&2 Dawn of Souls it so ugly ! Fortunately I didn't bought it and just downloaded it because graphics are worse on the NES (even if it has more colors, all the cute characters are replaced with bland ones), the music is just striped down (it has instruments instead of square waves, wich isn't bad, but it lost all it's emotion), and the difficulty is ridiculously low.
FF4 advance looks very well translated, and the graphics are definitely better than the SNES ones, but gameplay sucks all the way. FF5 and 6 advance looks a lot better, but still, the music has horrible aggresive instruments instead of sweet instruments from SNES. I think I'll buy only FF5 because it's the only one I've no chance to ever have on the SNES without having it in japanese (wich suck, because I don't know japanese).
PS : Is it true that FF6 advance is the last GBA game that is released in japan ? Then it marks the dead of the greatest handled of all times ?
Bregalad wrote:
Is it true that FF6 advance is the last GBA game that is released in japan ?
So much for the DS being Nintendo's "third pillar".
Does that measn 'Yes' or 'No' ?
(sorry, you know, I'm not a native english speaker).
The answer was neither yes nor no, as I don't know whether or not future GBA releases are planned. But Nintendo always advertised the DS as not being a replacement for the GBA but a "third pillar" (
Google). If the DS were such a third pillar, then why would Nintendo kill the Game Boy line entirely as of this year?
Maybe it was the third pillar at first to have people still buying GBAs, and now it becomes the second pillar to have people who stick with the GBA until now still buy DS (N may be going to get me on the second point).
And if the DS would really be the third pillar, why would it play GBA games ?
I really enjoy my DS. The only official game that I own is Animal Crossing: Wild World. It is a lot of fun, too. You can connect locally with players in the same room, or connect over WiFi. The game doesn't get old because Nintendo sends items and messages when you connect over Wifi, and you can visit other people's "towns" to trade items and get things not available in your town.
Besides that, I use a flash cart that I had for my GBA in the other slot, and I play old NES games on it.
NC
The problem I see with the AC games is what do you have left to do once you've paid the 2M bells to buy the house and beat the game? Are there more missions?
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Besides that, I use a flash cart that I had for my GBA in the other slot, and I play old NES games on it.
I'll never ever play NES game on DS, because I play them on my NES (or my PC), and if I really want to try pocket NES I'll do it with my GBA.
Is it possible to homebrew for the DS ? I guess it is, because there is some emulators for it. Are there better NES emulators that are DS only (using the better resolution) ?
Bregalad wrote:
Is it possible to homebrew for the DS ?
Yes. The major skills used are GBA programming and OpenGL programming.
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Are there better NES emulators that are DS only (using the better resolution) ?
There is nesDS, which can run at the 8/7 pixel aspect ratio of an NES on an actual NTSC TV, but it lacks DPCM.
Wow, that rocks !!
I'm much more convicted by the DS now than before. Thank you tepples and commodore john for sharing infomation.
DS Homebrew is quite easy, really. Like PSP homebrew, it involves firmware flashing, but since there's no real firmware upgrades for DS it's not such a big deal (you don't have to re-flash it each time you upgrade.) I got the devkitPro package installed and successfully compiled one of the examples in under thirty minutes.
As for DS-only NES emulation, it exists, but it's still under development. You'll want to stick with GBA NES emulators for the time being.