Nintendo 3DS hardware thread
- Thread starter brain_stew
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That is planned. The web browser is one of the apps usable from the home menu in-game, that functionality will be enabled in the May update.
I'll leave it to others to guess what that may imply for OS memory usage though.
The 3DS stolen a few months ago showed something like "Memory Mode: 96MB" while booting, so I assume the maximum is 32MB for the OS.
I'm sure the novelty would wear off quickly, but I've wanted consoles/handhelds to do this for awhile. Let's have access to almost every feature no matter what were doing and just multitask away.
Another post was made in the thread I linked earlier (on gbadev), indicating that 3DS in DS mode suffers from the same scanline dropout due to 3D limitations as the original DS. This means it's almost definitely using the original DS 3D hardware, since reproducing this would be almost impossible in any conventional 3D renderer, and I don't know why you'd want to.
DeadlyNinja
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So the custom ARM9+3D logic (I'd assume the 133MHz variant from DSi?) from the DS is there, and only the ARM7 is being "emulated". I could see that being used for I/O + OS + DS games, freeing the ARM11MP for 3DS games exclusively.
That would make the 3DS a 3-cpu system?
All we can really say with high likelihood right now is that the 3D hardware isn't emulated and the ARM7 isn't emulated with HLE. DS 2D is pretty closely coupled with 3D so I wouldn't expect it to be emulated.
It's possible that the ARM9 and ARM7 are both being emulated with a recompiler, but I personally don't expect it. My money is on the full DS hardware being present in some form. Now if this is true, whether or not any of this hardware is physically available in 3DS mode remains to be seen. It's possible that the DS video hardware in a tweaked mode (to handle the higher resolution) can drive the bottom screen, for instance.
128MB doesn't seem that luxurious for 2011 to me, especially considering that they want $250 for the 3DS. But it is laughably more than the Wii has.
I just picked up one of those Nook Color tablets and modded it. $250 gets you a 800 MHz CPU (@ 1.1 GHz thanks mods), 512MB RAM, some few gigs of flash I think, 7" 1024x600 LCD, PowerVR GPU, etc. 3DS has that neat 3D screen but the visuals are only somewhere in between N64 and Cube from what I've seen. Battery life of the 3DS is surely better while gaming than the tablets though.
I just picked up one of those Nook Color tablets and modded it. $250 gets you a 800 MHz CPU (@ 1.1 GHz thanks mods), 512MB RAM, some few gigs of flash I think, 7" 1024x600 LCD, PowerVR GPU, etc. 3DS has that neat 3D screen but the visuals are only somewhere in between N64 and Cube from what I've seen. Battery life of the 3DS is surely better while gaming than the tablets though.
To be fair, the FCRAM in the 3DS is likely a higher quality than the RAM included in most phones and tablets. It also has alot more RAM than the PS2, GCN, Xbox, and Wii at a lesser screen resolution even if you add up all the pixels of both screens of the 3DS. Considering the specs stated in IGN's 'leak,' I'm plesently surprised that the system has that much RAM.
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how well does your nook color run angry birds rio ? My samsung epic stutters at some points while playing it.
128MB is plenty for a handheld games system (its not a tablet/laptop, it doesn't have hundreds of MB taken up by OS and other programs) and is very luxurious compared to last gen. Its also very fast low latency memory.
You're way off on graphics capabilities, its a bit silly to make that kind of judgement based on launch games IMO.
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It's not a silly judgement, imho. All games I've seen so far (tech demos included) don't look any better than GC games, and many of them actually look a lot worse (at the same level as N64). There's even a quasi-1:1 port of ocarina of time..
For the record, the game has now been made available in 3 generations of home console systems and now again in a portable system. Talk about milking your existing ganes to death, sheesh...
Show me something with gameplay that looks as good as Mario Galaxy and I'll be proven wrong, but the resident evil titles still don't quite cut it as "above gamecube" graphics to me.
tongue_of_colicab
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I think its been too long since you've played any gc games. If just googled re4 gc and the 3ds re trailer and I can't see I think it looks a lot worse. Technically its probably more impressive than re4 from what I gatherd on this forum.
I would say the 3ds is probably quite capable of producing gfx as good as or better than the gc. Certainly its not like the system won't do anything better than the n64. Ofcourse some of the games out now look like that but that has nothing to do with what the system is capable of. Hell, the DS could pull off n64'ish gfx.
I would say the 3ds is probably quite capable of producing gfx as good as or better than the gc. Certainly its not like the system won't do anything better than the n64. Ofcourse some of the games out now look like that but that has nothing to do with what the system is capable of. Hell, the DS could pull off n64'ish gfx.
OoT 3DS is far from a port. It's based on a N64 game, that's what holds it back, but everything that had to be redone from scratch for the 3DS version is leaps and bounds beyond anything on N64. This is the store on N64, with prerendered background:
This is the same store, in full realtime 3D, on 3DS:
Also, except for the poly count, both Resident Evil games look better than GC or even Wii titles. The reason many games don't look nearly as good as they could is that most games only have up to twice the budget of comparable DS games, or are last minute DS ports. Graphics are expensive after all.
It is definitely more powerful than the N64, which I think is expected at this point considering DS was just about equal to a N64. Enhanced ports of N64 games don't exactly scream powerhouse though. But considering it has ~20x the usable RAM of a N64 and ~2x more than Cube it has no excuse not to at least wow with graphics asset quality. And of course there's the usual advancement of game making techniques over the past 10 years.
I don't buy the "don't expect much from launch games" thing because there have been plenty of launch games that have pretty much tapped out consoles before or at least provided a good glimpse into what you could reasonably expect.
I'd rather play games on a 7" tablet or my 9" netbook though because my eyes aren't too keen on small screens anymore. Nausea and headaches don't add to the fun. I also am not too sure about the 3DS 3D technique over the long term for me.
I don't buy the "don't expect much from launch games" thing because there have been plenty of launch games that have pretty much tapped out consoles before or at least provided a good glimpse into what you could reasonably expect.
I'd rather play games on a 7" tablet or my 9" netbook though because my eyes aren't too keen on small screens anymore. Nausea and headaches don't add to the fun. I also am not too sure about the 3DS 3D technique over the long term for me.
