CNN asks: Next Game Boy this year?

[Clashman]

See, to me it would seem more sensible to add most of those things to DS than GBA, given that DS is the current "flagship" handheld for Nintendo.

 

[PC-Engine]

Well DS was really an experiment to see if the touchscreen and dual screen interface could open up new avenues of gameplay. It's too big for a media player since the small screen doesn't justify the large size. A GBA SP sized media player would be perfect. For a PDA DS is about right with stylus imput and dual screens and higher price.

 

[Clashman]

I don't know about that. An SD slot seems to make a lot more sense to me in a PDA-like device than in a pure gaming one. Plus, DS is already more capable as a multimedia machine, isn't it? No need for beefing up the hardware. And I don't think the size would be too big for a media player. Sure the screen could be bigger, but it's already almost the same size as most PMP's already out there. Bigger than the Archos Gmini 400, I think. Granted, so is the player, but that hasn't stopped too many people, in my mind. It doesn't make sense to include those functionalities in GBA if you aren't going to include them in DS, too. Because I think a lot of what DS has going for it, as a PDA-like device, is a "Games+" marketing approach. If you include multimedia on GBA, you're going to force people to decide which multimedia functions they want more, MP3 and Video capabilities, or PDA functionality.

It may well happen. I just don't think it'd be a particularly good idea.

 

[PC-Engine]

Nintendo could easily release little addons for the DS like the PlayYan player. It would be pretty stupid to release a new DS 1.5 with those features built-in since the DS is already $150.

The SP is already $80 and will likely drop to around $50 if a new upgraded SP is released priced at that magical $100.

I can guarantee you that many many people would snatch up a cheap $100 media player let alone one that also plays enhanced GBA games. A lot of those people would just be buying it for the movie/music playback features and not even care about the gaming functions. At $100 it's an impulse buy.

 

[Lazy8s]

Thanks for the correction on the XScale. It's relatively bloated implementations had me taking its identity for granted.

 

[amk]

Actually I have.
PSP
PVR MBX

That's not to say I believe Sony's far-fetched performance numbers. But going on what I've seen of the PSP (around DC quality from the best looking titles) and what I've seen from the MBX (the Lite version in my Dell Axim X50v), I'd say the PSP is defintitely packing more gaming power.

Leaving aside issues of console v PDA system optimisations:

The PVR site implies that the Lite version has less than half the polygon throughput of regular MBX, and Lite has half the fill rate of regular MBX for the same clock speed. Fill rate scales linearly with clock speed, polygon rate doesn't.

So, comparing the Texas Instruments OMAP2, using regular MBX at 200MHz, to the Intel 2700G, using MBX Lite at 50-75MHz and part of the Axim X50v ...

The 2700G datasheet states 831K triangles per second (tps) processing capability, 84M pixels per second (pps) fill rate at somewhere between 50 and 75Mhz. OMAP2 gives polygon throughput at "up to 2 million". I can't see fill rates for OMAP2, but 500-600 Mp/s seems plausible. I can't see power consumption either.

The polygon throughputs for PSP in the GameSpot article seem a little fanciful. Maybe if the hardware did nothing but generate unfilled triangles in one big strip. Fill rate numbers are believable - and perhaps comparable to raw OMAP2 fill rate. How would they compare when we factor in PVR's pixel-perfect HSR? Does PSP use any overdraw reduction technique?

Comparing power consumption of OMAP2 to PSP's array of processors could be interesting too.

This Khronos presentation from Feb 2004 gives an example of MBX+VGP, with
-Sustained 2.5M triangles/second
-Sustained 240M peak 480M pixels/sec, Single-texture, bilinear MIP-map, 2x1 FSAA

It doesn't give clock speeds - from the date, I'm guessing 120MHz on 0.13um.

Anyway, I seem to have convinced myself that MBX "effective" fill rate absolutely murders PSP fill rate, when on the same process. The Register (stop sniggering at the back) reports that N-Gage 2 is expected to be OMAP2 powered. Hmm...

 

[Li Mu Bai]

Has this board gone completely to the asylum? cthellis states that DS software fell under expectations by about 33%. Why is that do you think? Key software titles like Meteos & NintenDogs got pushed back. Nintendo would not abandon this platform & further dilute their profits by introducing the GBA2 prematurely. The PSP outsold the DS by a mere 17k last week. In March the software charts will be DS dominated in JPN, probably the hw ones as well. A successful AU launch, a looming EU one as well, & it simply does not make sense monetarily. Cut the SP to $50-60 worldwide, & the words impulse buy wouldn't even be a suitable adjective. And let's not forget this:

January 12, 2005 - Nintendo will increase funding for Research and Development and advertising by five billion yen, according to a story published in Japan's Nikkei Financial Daily today.

The company's R&D spending will reach 22 billion yen, up 39% from last year. Nintendo intends to nurture software development for the Ninendo DS handheld system, which debuted in Japan and the US last year.

Nintendo's advertising boost is also related to the DS, which in Japan will see test play in retailers and television commercials featuring a popular singer.

Nikkei also reports that Nintendo will increase capital spending 76% to four billion yen, partly to support DS production.

In the meantime, however, there's been rumblings at Nintendo that indicate that the company will finally unwrap its DS online plans very very soon. As it goes, Nintendo left the keys to the WiFi car in the hands of the third-party developers, but the third-party developers didn't want to drive it without Nintendo making the engine. So, as a result, if we've been hearing things correctly, Nintendo will finally and very, very soon, reveal its own "Xbox Live" like service for developers to adopt. And the first game out of Nintendo to use this service will be one of those massively killer Nintendo brands that people have been wanting to play online for years...

Internet browsing, protocols, interfacing with PCs.
Square Enix and the PlayOnline service

Quote:
Other companies are already developing internet browsing interfaces and protocols, and Bandai revealed that it already has the DS successfully interacting with PCs. Square Enix also intimated that it is experimenting with enabling the DS to interact with its own PlayOnline service (which supports Final Fantasy XI, among other titles).

Credit to radioheadrule83 from GAF for the last quote. Yes Nintendo invests in establishing an online DS infrastructure (already providing 3rd parties with the tools btw) only to discard it by year's end? And SPONG is the original source? Come on now people, mid to late '06-to early '07 is a much more feasible as well as a believable timeline, dictated by continued hw sales & software performance, as well as 3rd party support. Many people forget that the next-gen development costs are upon us, & the DS development kits & cartridge costs are even less than that of the GBA's. Well it certainly doesn't take an Einstein to see what the more attractive platform will be economically.

 

[Lazy8s]

MBX is of expanded functionality: rendering precision independence from buffer depth, FSAA usage standard, high resolution image support, anisotropic texture filtering, VS 1.1 skeletal animation, DOT3 per-pixel lighting and Polybump, support for fractional tesselation and seamlessly differing level-of-details on adjacent patch edges.

 

[Lazy8s]

Iron Tiger:

But even the PowerVR Racer tech demo doesn't compare to something like Ridge Racers.

The difference in rendering performance between that 54MHz MBX-Lite and an MBX of the other, Pro, variety in Renesas's SH3707 is probably a factor of eight.