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StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (New Staff Post, Please read)

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kvetcha said:
Every home console is now using Blu-ray drives. All physical copies of games are on Blu-ray. All of those drives and discs gather royalties.

How about you figure it out?
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I find it annoying how Series X and PS5 don't seem to support game disks above 50GB, the old Blu-Ray standard, when they both have drives capable of reading the 120GB BDXL format, which unlike 50GB would actually fit most games...
 
Concernt said:
I find it annoying how Series X and PS5 don't seem to support game disks above 50GB, the old Blu-Ray standard, when they both have drives capable of reading the 120GB BDXL format, which unlike 50GB would actually fit most games...
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That’s very weird. Licensing?
 
Concernt said:
and since GameCube and N64 were actually 480i, really you're looking at more pixels on 3DS than you were in split-screen Double Dash.
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Most GameCube stuff supported 480p. But it's still true that 3DS's 400x240 top screen in 2D is more than a quarter of 480p.
 
Hermii said:
Well, Sony invented fuckin Blu-ray, so I doubt they are lacking any rights.
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They’re a member of the consortium, yeah, but they still pay royalties on the licensing. Still, it is baffling, on the surface.

It could come down to larger discs having slower max read speeds? It’s hard to find much data on the matter.
 
Pokémon OLED restock and Zelda OLED on the horizon. Nintendo is REALLY pushing special editions right now. Reminds me of the end of 3DS.
 
AlwaysOnDeck said:
Sony created bluray, as in they developed the format.
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It was developed in cooperation with several other companies (Panasonic, Phillips, TDK). Sony was a major contributor but they are not solely responsible for the technology or the format.

Gerald said:
PS5 use Ultra Blue-Ray Format
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Which is an extension of Blu-ray and still pays royalties to the same Consortium.
 
kvetcha said:
It was developed in cooperation with several other companies (Panasonic, Phillips, TDK). Sony was a major contributor but they are not solely responsible for the technology or the format.


Which is an extension of Blu-ray and still pays royalties to the same Consortium.
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Still, Sony probably gets a discount, compared to say MS who had nothing to do with the Blu-ray tech.
 
Hermii said:
Still, Sony probably gets a discount, compared to say MS who had nothing to do with the Blu-ray tech.
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My assumption is that they are still required to pay the licensing fees, but they receive a portion of those fees back as royalty via the BDA. But who knows, maybe it is just a direct discount, as you say.
 
Given disc drives still suffer from read speeds and there's probably an added cost to higher capacity discs, it's probably not worth the expenditure
 
oldpuck said:
Another day, another reference to T239 in Nvidia documentation.

I've checked the source, and the referenced partition files don't exist. However, there is a tool for verifying firmware packages before flashing, which has some stubbed out references to T239 and TH500. I've lost the thread on TH500 - is that the Atlan-that-was? Or a separate Grace+Hopper chip?
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Is there anything significant within the reference?
 
Goodtwin said:
Is there anything significant within the reference?
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In the docs, not really. I just have google alerts set up for these things, which means I catch them sometimes at odd times, not when they actually go up (as LiC pointed out). I think we've scraped all the relevant data out of the Linux stuff already. If they dropped complete Drake support, I doubt we'd learn anything new.
 
Quoted by: LiC
1
oldpuck said:
In the docs, not really. I just have google alerts set up for these things, which means I catch them sometimes at odd times, not when they actually go up (as LiC pointed out). I think we've scraped all the relevant data out of the Linux stuff already. If they dropped complete Drake support, I doubt we'd learn anything new.
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Well, DVFS tables would certainly be interesting.
 
kvetcha said:
It was developed in cooperation with several other companies (Panasonic, Phillips, TDK). Sony was a major contributor but they are not solely responsible for the technology or the format.
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You're gonna need to update Wikipedia, and the history books, because Sony created bluray. I don't know what to tell you.
 
AlwaysOnDeck said:
You're gonna need to update Wikipedia, and the history books, because Sony created bluray. I don't know what to tell you.
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Sony commenced two projects in collaboration with Panasonic, Philips, and TDK,[15] applying the new diodes: UDO (Ultra Density Optical),[16] and DVR Blue (together with Pioneer),[17] a format of rewritable discs that would eventually become Blu-ray Disc (more specifically, BD-RE).
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en.wikipedia.org

Blu-ray - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
kvetcha said:
It was developed in cooperation with several other companies (Panasonic, Phillips, TDK). Sony was a major contributor but they are not solely responsible for the technology or the format.


Which is an extension of Blu-ray and still pays royalties to the same Consortium.
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Nice try, Sony would never work with Phillips after the CD-i/Playstation debacle.

Raccoon said:
en.wikipedia.org

Blu-ray - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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well I'll be damned
 
Random aside: Hey, remember eUFS 4.0 was announced last year? I randomly remembered to check if any phones have been made with it by now, and indeed, it seems like there have been a few.

Looking at this, seems like a fair amount of the first phones using this have some trouble hitting the ~4 GB/s sequential read max. CPU-side limitation at the moment?

Fun aside to the aside: Taking a gander at random read, well, I do see steady improvement over the generations, but the rate's relatively slow. NAND flash's intrinsic limitations, eh?
 
Concernt said:
I find it annoying how Series X and PS5 don't seem to support game disks above 50GB, the old Blu-Ray standard, when they both have drives capable of reading the 120GB BDXL format, which unlike 50GB would actually fit most games...
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Both PS5 and XSX can read 100GB Blu Rays. For XSX in particular most games until now haven't because having one SKU for crossgen limits them to the OG Xbox's 50GB but in the future you will see 100GB discs there.
 
0
Nintendo Switch firmware 16.0.0 dropped. A major version number change but no listed features or improvements, maybe there's changes under the hood? Will have to wait for datamines.
 
So far there's nothing interesting revealed in 16.0.0. Kernel diffs aren't up yet, which is where we'd see if any of the unusual changes to 15.0.0 are being further developed or are now utilized on the current hardware. One thing we do know is there is still no evidence of any revisions (OLED Lite, TV-only, etc.) coming.

I will note that 15.0.0 and 16.0.0 are the first time that two major version updates have gone by with no features added. 12.0.0 also didn't have any user-facing features, but all the updates on either side of it did. So with the 336 days since 14.0.0 passing by with no functionality added, maybe I'm crazy, but it's almost like the Switch is in its final year now, or something.
 
Concernt said:
Nintendo Switch firmware 16.0.0 dropped. A major version number change but no listed features or improvements, maybe there's changes under the hood? Will have to wait for datamines.
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What..? I saw the article about it, and it was very clear that this update contains...

~ s t a b i l i t y~
 
One potentially interesting thing showed up in 16.0.0 (kernel diffs still pending). It relates to a much older piece of info which I don't think I've seen discussed before. I'll just put both the relevant values here, which come from the audio module in FirmwareDebugSettings:

Name​
Versions                ​
Default Values                                                                               ​
builtin_microphone_volume10.0.0+0
builtin_microphone_analog_boost_gain16.0.0+5

As you can see, the first of these "built-in microphone" settings was added all the way back in 10.0.0, released in April 2020. The second was just added in 16.0.0.

I can't decide whether the fact that a similar setting existed in 10.0.0 makes the new addition more or less interesting! Personally, I don't see Nintendo adding a microphone or camera to their next hardware, but this is at least an interesting setting to take note of.
 
LiC said:
One potentially interesting thing showed up in 16.0.0 (kernel diffs still pending). It relates to a much older piece of info which I don't think I've seen discussed before. I'll just put both the relevant values here, which come from the audio module in FirmwareDebugSettings:

Name​
Versions                ​
Default Values                                                                               ​
builtin_microphone_volume10.0.0+0
builtin_microphone_analog_boost_gain16.0.0+5

As you can see, the first of these "built-in microphone" settings was added all the way back in 10.0.0, released in April 2020. The second was just added in 16.0.0.

I can't decide whether the fact that a similar setting existed in 10.0.0 makes the new addition more or less interesting! Personally, I don't see Nintendo adding a microphone or camera to their next hardware, but this is at least an interesting setting to take note of.
Click to expand...
would a microphone add on make sense?
 
Quoted by: LiC
1
ILikeFeet said:
I'm still not betting on Drake going beyond 500MHz in handheld mode. I'm sticking with Switch clocks for now: 460MHz handheld and 921MHz docked. the Adreno is going to throttle below 680MHz at some point because Android prioritizes the cpu
Click to expand...
Switch docked clock is 768MHz.
Personally I think the idea of them using the same clock speeds as the regular Switch is a tiny bit pessimistic, I think they’ll have modest increases, but nothing crazy.
 
Concernt said:
I find it annoying how Series X and PS5 don't seem to support game disks above 50GB, the old Blu-Ray standard, when they both have drives capable of reading the 120GB BDXL format, which unlike 50GB would actually fit most games...
Click to expand...
PS5 supports discs above 50GB for sure. Xbox Series X, not sure yet since MS usually ships big games on 2 discs (flight simulator).
 
0
LiC said:
One potentially interesting thing showed up in 16.0.0 (kernel diffs still pending). It relates to a much older piece of info which I don't think I've seen discussed before. I'll just put both the relevant values here, which come from the audio module in FirmwareDebugSettings:

Name​
Versions                ​
Default Values                                                                               ​
builtin_microphone_volume10.0.0+0
builtin_microphone_analog_boost_gain16.0.0+5

As you can see, the first of these "built-in microphone" settings was added all the way back in 10.0.0, released in April 2020. The second was just added in 16.0.0.

I can't decide whether the fact that a similar setting existed in 10.0.0 makes the new addition more or less interesting! Personally, I don't see Nintendo adding a microphone or camera to their next hardware, but this is at least an interesting setting to take note of.
Click to expand...
A microphone would make sense on the joycons as a gimmick or way of communication in online games

Edit: I think one of Nintendo's goals with the [REDACTED] should be getting rid of the online app for communications features
 
Concernt said:
I'm not sure I believe it. That would be a significant price drop WITH a game included. Not sure Nintendo would do that...

Unless...

They're clearing inventory?
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That's how much it is on Amazon.fr currently without the game, but I'm sure there will be big deals and offers this year, particularly Mario games.
 
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The base one without a game is currently 290€ here. 269 + game would be a steep discount, but then again its seemingly cheapere in france as it is.
Meaning it would essentially be a bundle ...somethign they usually did waaay earlier. Doesn't really say much more, except maybe that ... switch is in its late years? not something we did not know.
 
Ced Naru said:
Is that just high on copium or is that message explicitly mentioning "Xbox and PlayStation gamers" but don't use "Switch", only a broader "Nintendo players" ?
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1) switch is old. You don't really designate support to "switch" when its assumed than it at most a third of that time the next platform is there (that they probably already know of? I mean activision)
2) With playstation and xbox, it always is called that. with nintendo, it always changes.
3) gamers and playeres is just so that they don't have wort repetition.
(Grammarly or some other assisted writing tool probably would suggest such a change to)

This could be as an Game Streaming Service, this could mean when the next console is released, this could mean "we will somehow push a 360p version to the switch for now"... not much to read into.
 
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