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StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (Read the staff posts before commenting!)

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omniryu said:
And that's a question I wanted to ask... so with the FDE, and all the other features to take work off the CPU and GPU. How much of the CPU can be dedicated solely for gaming? No loading, No assisting other rendering component? How much?
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It's still issuing commands of what to draw to the gpu as well as keeping track of any simulations (ai, physics, etc)
 
Foltzie said:
Setting aside latency, not having control over the hardware leads to other issues. Project Keystone was their solution, but they couldn't get the hardware under $129 w/ a controller. . .

With the current AppleTV at $129 I wonder if that project comes back in the future.
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The cost is the controller. The box is cheap because it's only moving parts are the connectors for power, video, and (maybe) network. The hard part is setting up a super minimal OS. Honestly, if they can go the Amazon Fire TV route without going deeply in that direction, they can do their own app store and subsidize a lot of it that way.

I have had many so many android TV boxes, and I used to swear by Nvidia Shield, but the hardware is old enough now, that the $20 ONN TV box I have is beating it most of the time. Only place where that's not true is where neither have hardware support for a codec.
 
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Serif said:
It was more like an overall QoL enhancement.
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If my memory doesn't betray me, the biggest reason was due to the super stable 3D, wasn't? But internally, and now knowing 3DS sales cycle, I wouldn't doubt New 3DS was also meant to be a silent platform relaunch, with enhanced CPU power for developers to be able to more easily port Wii games to 3DS ( OG 3DS GPU is basically equivalent, if not better, than Wii GPU in raw performance. But the slow CPU and sliggtly lesser amount of RAM meant that they couldn't port the more taxing games to the system). Except that New 3DS never was able to stablish a big enough userbase for developer to create exclusive software for it and whatever GC/Wii ports pipeline Nintendo had thought about never materialized, sans for some late GC/Wii ports.
Mr Swine said:
8GB is back on the menu boys!

Joking aside I just hope it’s 12 or 16GB
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Hahaha. But yes, what I tried to convey with the reports is more that whatever amount Nintendo has chosen for RAM and Storage is probably locked and final, as prices for these components are on the rise.

Assuming Nintendo choose and sourced their components some quarters ago, it means they bought and contracted supply of RAM and Storage at cheaper prices.
 


There is a nice section on FSR3 vs DLSS.

Both have issues on Avatar:

  • FSR3 has ghosting and artifacts
  • DLSS has jittery images (clouds and water, on lower resolution). Ideally tweaking it to Preset C fixes some of the movement issues.
 
Ghostsonplanets said:
If my memory doesn't betray me, the biggest reason was due to the super stable 3D, wasn't?
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I consider this, along with faster loading times, amiibo support, and new C-stick and trigger controls, to be part of the overall QoL enhancement. All of these were highlighted in the initial reveal, and the upgrade was still appealing to those who never enabled 3D.
 
Goblin_knight said:
Finally got my hands on a switch after almost 7 years... joy cons feel kinda small but I like it! Now I'm really looking forward to the switch 2 pls release before November that's all i ask.
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Damn you wait this long.
 
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Serif said:
I consider this, along with faster loading times, amiibo support, and new C-stick and trigger controls, to be part of the overall QoL enhancement. All of these were highlighted in the initial reveal, and the upgrade was still appealing to those who never enabled 3D.
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I hated the New 3DS in practice (long story) but conceptually it's probably my favourite... Idea, as handhelds go. New 3DS, non-XL, is my favourite handheld from a design perspective. It's just so neat.

I hope NG Switch takes what they learned from it and OLED Model. Like the finish used on New 3DS or 2DS XL, which is better wearing than the Joy-Con. A better kickstand. Hopefully a reasonably replacable battery.

Speaking of! Batteries in Nintendo Switch seem to last an adequate amount of time, especially next to smartphones designed around a 2 year update cycle. Though I will say, my original 3DS and my New 3DS XL both got spicy pillows after four years.
 
Gingerbread Man said:
True, but:
  • Intelligent Systems has GB and GBC as separate platforms on their website. The company developed the SDK for Nintendo handhelds up to the 3DS;
  • During an Iwata Asks, Ishihara from TPC said that Nintendo DS was the first console with two different Pokémon generations (Gold and Silver weren't GBC exclusives, but they were marketed and programmed as GBC games first and foremost);
  • While Smash Brawl had GB and GBC games grouped together, Smash Ultimate had GBC as its own platform in the Terry video;
  • GBC was its own platform on 3DS Virtual Console. Games were more expensive and had their own banner;
  • After a short cross-gen period, most GB games released by Nintendo from 1999 onward were GBC exclusives. Moreover, both in the West and in Japan, third-party developers released a ton of exclusive games from key IPs (new Resident Evil and Metal Gear titles, the Dragon Quest remakes, etc.). This does not apply to DSi or New 3DS. You can count their retail exclusive on one hand, and while DSi had DSiWare games, a lot of them were re-released of physical DS games (like Elektroplankton splitted into 10 DSiWare titles);
  • Nintendo didn't really advertise DSi extra power to the the general public, nor to the devs. DSi was a DS with camera, not a more powerful DS. GBC, on the other hand, was noticeable more powerful (for the time), it wasn't just a Game Boy with colors. Letting a dev chiming in:
8u8csII.png


So while there are some similarities between GBC and DSi/n3DS, there are also a lot of differences, and I am more inclined to see the GBC as an almost-a-proper-successor than a glorified revision.
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After reading this, it's definitely new gen. Thanks 👍
 
Individualised said:
The GBC to the GB is like what the Sega Mark III was to the SG-1000. It's a generational leap with a focus on backwards compatibility.
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It is not a generational leap, we would be considering the N3DS which was a larger leap a generational leap at that point.

The GBC to the GB was as much of a leap as the DSi was to the DS.
 
redmutineer75 said:
New 3DS had 15 games that couldn't be played on 3DS. Game Boy Color had 145 games that couldn't be played on Game Boy. There's a point where a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.
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New 3DS had a lot more than 15 exclusives, but, like the DSi, they were mostly not at retail.

The actual difference between the GBC and the layer revisions is that the GB was much older, due to a previously failed attempt to replace it, and, outside of some experiments in Japan, there was no digital distribution to "hide" the exclusive titles in. The system filled fundamentally the same role of just trying to keep things going for a while while a proper successor was prepared.
 
Pokemaniac said:
You've got all that sort of stuff on the DSi and New 3DS, too.
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What we have in the DSi and n3DS are additional features, not replacements like what the GBC did. A DSi and n3DS can access those newer features like the camera (DSi), additional RAM (+ VRAM in n3DS), etc, but they still follow the structure of the DS/3DS so the same build can be used, using a single check at boot to determine if it's running on a DS/3DS or DSi/n3DS, and storing that result. With the GBC, it does a similar check based on the cart header, but it directs to one of two binaries for the dual-compatibility carts because of how different the structuring is to the GB. This is much older hardware we're talking about.

Take for instance handling palettes.

The GB has 1 set of 4 shades for the BG, and 2 sets of 3 shades for OBJ/Sprites (+1 for the transparency), utilizing registers from 0xFF47 to 0xFF49 for manipulating them. The shades are pre-assigned. For GBC, it's completely different, having 8 sets of 4 colors for the BG, and 8 sets of 3 colors for the OBJs. Those 3 registers are not functional at all on the GBC. Instead, 4 registers from 0xFF68 to 0xFF6B are used. 0xFF68 and 0xFF6A are used for indexing into the BG/OBJ palettes, whereas 0xFF69 and 0xFF6B are used for inserting the color data to where the indexes are set (or reading).

Then there's tile maps

The GB uses simple 32x32 tile background maps that are either unsigned or signed 8-bit values to reference up to 256 tiles. The GBC not only uses this, but also requires another map that for each tile, references 1 of 8 color palettes (as the GB tile maps have just the 1), as well as which tile VRAM bank it'll grab from (meaning up to 512 tiles can be referenced), tile horizontal/vertical flipping, and OBJ/BG priority. The GB and GBC use the same Sprite Attribute Table (OAM), but the 4rd byte of each for GB games only uses the upper 4 bits. The lower 4 bits are GBC-only that determine the bank and palette (bit4 is unused in GBC-mode).
 
The thing with the GBC is that it wasnt JUST the moderate increase in performance, it was also the fact that regular Gameboys had screens that rapidly became less and less usable due to the dot matrix screen losing sharpness over time (with upping the contrast wheel only working for so long) while the gameboy pocket relying on AAAs instead of AAs meant it had horrendous battery life, so one of the big benefits of the GBC was being able to play original gameboy games on a handheld with a decently sharp screen and decent battery life.
 
Discostew said:
What we have in the DSi and n3DS are additional features, not replacements like what the GBC did. A DSi and n3DS can access those newer features like the camera (DSi), additional RAM (+ VRAM in n3DS), etc, but they still follow the structure of the DS/3DS so the same build can be used, using a single check at boot to determine if it's running on a DS/3DS or DSi/n3DS, and storing that result. With the GBC, it does a similar check based on the cart header, but it directs to one of two binaries for the dual-compatibility carts because of how different the structuring is to the GB. This is much older hardware we're talking about.

Take for instance handling palettes.

The GB has 1 set of 4 shades for the BG, and 2 sets of 3 shades for OBJ/Sprites (+1 for the transparency), utilizing registers from 0xFF47 to 0xFF49 for manipulating them. The shades are pre-assigned. For GBC, it's completely different, having 8 sets of 4 colors for the BG, and 8 sets of 3 colors for the OBJs. Those 3 registers are not functional at all on the GBC. Instead, 4 registers from 0xFF68 to 0xFF6B are used. 0xFF68 and 0xFF6A are used for indexing into the BG/OBJ palettes, whereas 0xFF69 and 0xFF6B are used for inserting the color data to where the indexes are set (or reading).

Then there's tile maps

The GB uses simple 32x32 tile background maps that are either unsigned or signed 8-bit values to reference up to 256 tiles. The GBC not only uses this, but also requires another map that for each tile, references 1 of 8 color palettes (as the GB tile maps have just the 1), as well as which tile VRAM bank it'll grab from (meaning up to 512 tiles can be referenced), tile horizontal/vertical flipping, and OBJ/BG priority. The GB and GBC use the same Sprite Attribute Table (OAM), but the 4rd byte of each for GB games only uses the upper 4 bits. The lower 4 bits are GBC-only that determine the bank and palette (bit4 is unused in GBC-mode).
Click to expand...
Some games may have effectively shipped separate binaries to deal with the differences necessary to draw full color images, but it's a lot more likely that most just had separate drawing functions. The PPUs were different, but these things weren't exactly fully programmable, and cartridge space was not especially abundant.
 
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ILikeFeet said:
It's still issuing commands of what to draw to the gpu as well as keeping track of any simulations (ai, physics, etc)
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Well, I consider AI and physics as gameplay. The meat and bones.
Well, what it looks like to me is that trend in games is density and if the CPU can handle that stuff we should be ok, right? I mean when was the last time we had lateral thinking in the gameplay department that would be hard to handle?
 
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As there's 11 days left of 2023,

I often ponder whether similar discussions take place in the same volume as this thread or forum. While X at times do provide you with a glimpse of that, I don't have much barometer on what conclusions or speculations they've made based on the info so far on their respective message board/social platforms. What do they expect? 🤔
I've seen some crossover at times, but never parallels :p. It's of course very difficult to do, due to language barriers and community sizes may not be equivalent to an primarily English speaking platform. Moreover, there's likely not going to be much different analysis.


In other news, seems like oneplus has also adopted a 32-bit to 64-bit translator; Tango

The Tango binary translator consists of several components:
  • Dynamic translator - The dynamic translator is the core component of Tango. It wraps a 32-bit ARM process and runs it as 64-bit process by translating all of the instructions into AArch64 code.
  • Pre-translator - The pre-translator performs off-line translation of executable files to generate persistent caches of translated code. This enables improved application start-up times and reduced memory usage.
  • OS integration - Finally, OS integration allows Tango to provide a seamless user experience. Tango has OS integrations for both Android and GNU/Linux.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure about the performance details, but it's an interesting development, one that's of no benefit for the A78, as it has 32-bit support. A715 is when native 32-bit support got dropped, but for the future future ^^.

 
Pokemaniac said:
New 3DS had a lot more than 15 exclusives, but, like the DSi, they were mostly not at retail.

The actual difference between the GBC and the layer revisions is that the GB was much older, due to a previously failed attempt to replace it, and, outside of some experiments in Japan, there was no digital distribution to "hide" the exclusive titles in. The system filled fundamentally the same role of just trying to keep things going for a while while a proper successor was prepared.
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I mean, most of those exclusive 3DS games were Unity shovelwares, and a lot of "exclusives" DSiWare games were re-packaged DS titles. From the Iwata asks of the "exclusive" Brain Age DSiWare games
Iwata: Kawamoto-san, does Brain Age Express feel like the third game in the series to you?
Kawamoto: It doesn't really feel like Brain Age 3. It's more like we gathered Brain Age into a form fit to download into your Nintendo DSi and walk around with. I hope people who haven't played Brain Age before this will use Brain Age Express as an occasion to give it a try.
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They also repackaged for digital distribution Electroplankton, 42 WorldWide games and other titles. They weren't new games, they were the old games sold in digital chuks. GBC on the other hand had Resident Evil, Dragon Quest, Rayman...

But even without looking at the kind of the exclusives, GBC games replaced GB games. In late 90s/early 00s nobody, from Nintendo to a smaller-scale European publisher, was producing GB games anymore. Everything was only for GBC. In layman's terms, the major difference between GBC and DSi/n3DS is that Oracle of Ages/Seasons couldn't be played on OG GB, whereas Spirit Tracks and Tri Force Heroes could be played on launch-day DS and 3DS.

A better comparison for DSiWare and 3DS exclusives could be the Famicom Disk System or the Satellaview. When the FDS was released, they still produced Famicom games, but there were also FDS exclusive games. The FDS was an extension of the Famicom platform (which also offered hardware enhancements), not a replacement. Due to the handheld nature of DS and 3DS, their extension was also a hardware revision. The GBC, on the other hand, effectively replaced the GB.
 
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bmfrosty said:
It should be noted that Microsoft really wants to get out of the $500 console business and wants to change the business model to streaming. Arguments on technical merit of such an endeavour is currently the big question and the part that's not really solved. They want the business model to be that they sell you a controller that talks to whatever device is hooked to your TV and you pay a subscription for gamepass games, and buy non-gamepass games individually, then they run the games on whichever Azure hardware fits the bill.

The big hurdle is latency, and apparently RFC9330 improves that a huge amount.
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If Microsoft manages to do a next gen console like that, especially under $400, it could seriously push Sony to rethink their business model.
casualreader said:
Did I read correctly that a last piece of the Pokémon DLC will be released on Jan 13 ? Not sure why they did that... But maybe some suggestions as to what will come next?
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No, it’s an Epilogue to the first part that they accidentally included the DLC…
 
Gingerbread Man said:
I mean, most of those exclusive 3DS games were Unity shovelwares, and a lot of "exclusives" DSiWare games were re-packaged DS titles. From the Iwata asks of the "exclusive" Brain Age DSiWare games

They also repackaged for digital distribution Electroplankton, 42 WorldWide games and other titles. They weren't new games, they were the old games sold in digital chuks. GBC on the other hand had Resident Evil, Dragon Quest, Rayman...

But even without looking at the kind of the exclusives, GBC games replaced GB games. In late 90s/early 00s nobody, from Nintendo to a smaller-scale European publisher, was producing GB games anymore. Everything was only for GBC. In layman's terms, the major difference between GBC and DSi/n3DS is that Oracle of Ages/Seasons couldn't be played on OG GB, whereas Spirit Tracks and Tri Force Heroes could be played on launch-day DS and 3DS.

A better comparison for DSiWare and 3DS exclusives could be the Famicom Disk System or the Satellaview. When the FDS was released, they still produced Famicom games, but there were also FDS exclusive games. The FDS was an extension of the Famicom platform (which also offered hardware enhancements), not a replacement. Due to the handheld nature of DS and 3DS, their extension was also a hardware revision. The GBC, on the other hand, effectively replaced the GB.
Click to expand...
Several GBC games were also GB games repackaged with color support. They just had to be new cartridges because that was their only means of distribution.

Describing DSiWare as just repackaged DS games is also really selling the format short. There were plenty of original titles like Shantae: Risky's Revenge, X-Scape, and Aura-Aura Climber, just to name a few.

The number of exclusives was certainly influenced by the old age of the platform, as the GB wasn't ever intended to last as long as it did (an issue that DS and 3DS didn't really deal with), but the actual successor to the GB platform was very clearly the GBA. Even the failed Atlantis that caused the GB to last so long in the first place bore more resemblance to the GBA than the GBC.
ziggyrivers said:
No, it’s an Epilogue to the first part that they accidentally included the DLC…
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It's probably intentional. They're not planning to patch the game again until "late January". What we're probably seeing is the first Mythical Pokémon designed with no regard for any sort of tie-in since Mew.
 
Pokemaniac said:
Even the failed Atlantis that caused the GB to last so long in the first place bore more resemblance to the GBA than the GBC.
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Atlantis was the GBA, they were even using the Atlantis and AGB codenames interchangeably at one point. So in that way yes the GBA was always intended to be the "true" successor to the DMG
 
The lineage of Game Boy inter-compatibility, that has just been discussed, really highlights the pervasive association of "Nintendo" and "no BC" as just mind numbingly stupid.
 
Individualised said:
I'm not trying to be mean but it's like you completely ignored the entire conversation that took place before my post.
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I don’t need to consider that when the company who outright created the product considers it one line, a third party developer having opinions on it is irrelevant. They didn’t make the console. Hell, they outright consider the GBA a separate line entirely from the GB family of consoles. Third parties don’t even agree on what it is, MVG for example doesn’t see it as a successor but as a Pro system to the GB family and not different in any significant way to be called a successor.

Why should I consider it a successor when it isn’t doing anything different from the DSi and the N3DS in terms of performance upgrades, changes, exclusive content and exclusive hardware features? If I did then I wouldn’t call the 3DS the “DS2”, that would be the “DS3” and the N3DS would be “DS4”.


some may see this as semantics, but I’m taking Nintendo’s way of classifying and ordering the consoles over others because they made it, others making those consoles work for them that aren’t Nintendo don’t matter in my opinion because they are adjusting for two devices where one is faster and has more RAM.
 
necrolipe said:
Probably in March this thread will be a chaos and Famiboards servers will ask for help
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I can’t tell if this is chaos from “why hasn’t it happened” or chaos from “it’s happened.”

I suppose only the latter will tank the servers so
 
chocolate_supra said:
That video is a very apt metaphor for how my hype is gonna go, actually.

Switch 2 announced = celebration on Endor

Switch 2 then shown to have monochrome buttons = Hayden Christensen appearing in place of Sebastian Shaw
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Hayden Christensen is the least of the problems with that re-release. They got rid of the Ewok song :mad:
It's like if Capcom dropped a new Resi 1 Remake trailer at a NSW 2 Event with you-know-what basement track.
 
Enton said:
Hayden Christensen is the least of the problems with that re-release. They got rid of the Ewok song :mad:
It's like if Capcom dropped a new Resi 1 Remake trailer at a NSW 2 Event with you-know-what basement track.
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No hate against the Ewok song but the new song always gets me in the feels
 
Enton said:
Hayden Christensen is the least of the problems with that re-release. They got rid of the Ewok song :mad:
It's like if Capcom dropped a new Resi 1 Remake trailer at a NSW 2 Event with you-know-what basement track.
Click to expand...
I actually grew up with the Special Editions so the new Victory Celebration is the one that hits my nostalgia instead of Yub Nub.

Sorry. 😅
 
ReddDreadtheLead said:
I don’t need to consider that when the company who outright created the product considers it one line, a third party developer having opinions on it is irrelevant. They didn’t make the console. Hell, they outright consider the GBA a separate line entirely from the GB family of consoles. Third parties don’t even agree on what it is, MVG for example doesn’t see it as a successor but as a Pro system to the GB family and not different in any significant way to be called a successor.

Why should I consider it a successor when it isn’t doing anything different from the DSi and the N3DS in terms of performance upgrades, changes, exclusive content and exclusive hardware features? If I did then I wouldn’t call the 3DS the “DS2”, that would be the “DS3” and the N3DS would be “DS4”.


some may see this as semantics, but I’m taking Nintendo’s way of classifying and ordering the consoles over others because they made it, others making those consoles work for them that aren’t Nintendo don’t matter in my opinion because they are adjusting for two devices where one is faster and has more RAM.
Click to expand...

Wait, what? How could MVG think that? That’d be like saying the SNES is just a Pro NES, and not a real successor.

The GBA is literally a generational leap in performance over the GB/GBC, even down to the type of bit processor it was using.
 
BingBong43 said:
I suggested this idea earlier too! People seem to think there isn't any way Nintendo would release anything more than a basic dock. Not sure why though.
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What you're replying to doesn't seem to have anything to do with a fancy dock, just increased use of multi-system connection.
Shoulder said:
Wait, what? How could MVG think that? That’d be like saying the SNES is just a Pro NES, and not a real successor.

The GBA is literally a generational leap in performance over the GB/GBC, even down to the type of bit processor it was using.
Click to expand...
I think you're reading that line as about the GBA because GBA came up in the previous sentence, but it's intended to still be about GB->GBC.
 
Shoulder said:
Wait, what? How could MVG think that? That’d be like saying the SNES is just a Pro NES, and not a real successor.

The GBA is literally a generational leap in performance over the GB/GBC, even down to the type of bit processor it was using.
Click to expand...
Not GBA, the GBC as a pro to the GB. Sorry I didn’t make it clear.
 
Well Nintendo, looks like you made it. Five, going on four days till Christmas and no Switch 2 leak to interfere with Switch 1 holiday sales. Mission: accomplished on that front, now lets bring on 2024 and get to it.
 
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