Wal-Mart spills beans on new Nintendo DS (preorder for $199.82)

[CHAOSMAN]

price is dropped to $150 MSRP, so hopefull it will be adjusted where we preordered. Also new ship date Nov 21, check any gaming news site

 

[modedepe]

New price sounds pretty good, especially when the psp is rumored to go for twice that.

 

[pmoa]

not hot! the price is now 149

 

[hytek369]

no wonder GB SP went on sale

 

[MikeMike]

Originally posted by: TerryMathews

Originally posted by: Alexstarfire
Well let me see if I can work through the games. The DS can play GBA but not GB. GBA can play GB. Therefore wouldn't the DS be able to play GB games through the chain of command?

No. The GBA has a piece of code internally for it's StrongARM 7 processor that allows it to emulate the code intended for a regular GB and GB Color (Which are an 8 bit WD processor of some sort IIRC).

The Nintendo DS runs a StrongARM 9 processor (different code base) with code to emulate a GBA. Nintendo may not invest the effort to create an 8 bit WD emulator for a StrongARM series 9 processor; two layers of emulation would probably consume more RAM than the DS has.

Think of it like this (don't take this literally though): A PC can emulate a Mac at half-speed. A Mac can emulate a PC at half-speed. This doesn't mean that a PC can emulate a Mac emulating a PC and run it at 1/4 speed; it would be a lot slower.

the DS has the 9 and a 7 processor inside of it.

MIKE

 

[thawolfman]

$199 my @$$



Edit: http://www.ebgames.com/ebx/product/241868.asp

 

[tehtank]

There's no way the PSP will go for 300+ dollars like you guys are hinting at. That would give the DS pretty much no competition and it would continue to rule the handheld market.

 

[KJW]

Sony traditionally milks the early adopter market before bringing the price down to mass market levels. This not only increases early profits (necessary because the early manufacturing costs are higher), but also builds buzz since the machines are considered better than other, more affordable products. This is why Sony is brining it out early next year, so it can charge a premium through the summer before considering a price cut in time for the holidays.

$300 sounds right to me as a introductory price.

 

[formulav8]

Looks like the quality is on par or even better than the n64 graphics. About time

3-D: With the newly developed graphics engine, DS can reproduce impressive 3-D renderings that can surpass images displayed on the Nintendo 64. Games will run at 60 frames per second, and allow details like fog effects and cel shading.



Jason

 

[Ichinisan]

The graphics are easily better than N64. Somewhere between it and the Dreamcast.

 

[Ichinisan]

I go into a rage when I hear some clueless Sony fanboy bashing the DS in favor of the PSP

My opinion on the PSP:

Mechanical moving parts are failure-prone, waste battery power, and DO NOT BELONG in a portable system. The only thing limiting ROM size is cost. Even the Sony memory stick, which uses REWRITABLE FLASH MEMORY, has reached 1GB in capacity. There are multi-gigabyte CF cards. ROM chips don't even have to be rewritable, so the capacities could theoretically be much higher. The more transistors used, the higher the capacity. Intel/AMD CPU engineering drives the nanotechnology industry. That manufacturing capability will not be wasted as they move to smaller and smaller manufacturing processes. The future is solid-state.

Furthermore, you are not limited to a single chip within a cartridge. This is one of the advantages of a cartridge, which is not a fixed size like a CD-ROM. An array of ROM chips could be seen and addressed by the game system as a single enormous ROM chip. Many GBA games use special hardware to enhance their games. Boktai has a solar sensor, Kirby Tilt-n-Tumble has a velocity/incline sensor. There are also camera accessories and more. Many, many SNES games used an internal CPU to assist the game and achieve effects beyond what the SNES was capable of by itself. An Input/Output connector is almost always better than input-only optical drives.

Do you want discharge your battery while a game "loads"?

A portable game system is most useful for short breaks. This time would be wasted with mechanical media. If a cartridge is used, the ROM data is usually addressable as main system memory (even mapped together logically). This means that the entire game is already "loaded"!

The PSP uses a proprietary disc/cart, similar to a mini-disc...and it *does* introduce excessive load times while consuming massive amounts of juice by comparison (not just the motors, but the additional system memory).

Disc-based platforms require more system memory because resource data (like sound-effects) are not instantly-available as it is with a cartridge. The additional memory requirements suck even more juice. After Sony "finalized" the specs, they couldn't even guarantee 2 hours of play time. Since then, the developers demanded (and got) more memory to work with. Sony is going to have a power-hungry monster.

But it's not even power/fragility that worries me. It's time. My time is precious, and I'll be damned if my portable system requires me to waste a single minute of my short break while my game loads levels.

 

[Chadder007]

Originally posted by: Ichinisan
I go into a rage when I hear some clueless Sony fanboy bashing the DS in favor of the PSP

My opinion on the PSP:

Mechanical moving parts are failure-prone, waste battery power, and DO NOT BELONG in a portable system. The only thing limiting ROM size is cost. Even the Sony memory stick, which uses REWRITABLE FLASH MEMORY, has reached 1GB in capacity. There are multi-gigabyte CF cards. ROM chips don't even have to be rewritable, so the capacities could theoretically be much higher. The more transistors used, the higher the capacity. Intel/AMD CPU engineering drives the nanotechnology industry. That manufacturing capability will not be wasted as they move to smaller and smaller manufacturing processes. The future is solid-state.

Furthermore, you are not limited to a single chip within a cartridge. This is one of the advantages of a cartridge, which is not a fixed size like a CD-ROM. An array of ROM chips could be seen and addressed by the game system as a single enormous ROM chip. Many GBA games use special hardware to enhance their games. Boktai has a solar sensor, Kirby Tilt-n-Tumble has a velocity/incline sensor. There are also camera accessories and more. Many, many SNES games used an internal CPU to assist the game and achieve effects beyond what the SNES was capable of by itself. An Input/Output connector is almost always better than input-only optical drives.

Do you want discharge your battery while a game "loads"?

A portable game system is most useful for short breaks. This time would be wasted with mechanical media. If a cartridge is used, the ROM data is usually addressable as main system memory (even mapped together logically). This means that the entire game is already "loaded"!

The PSP uses a proprietary disc/cart, similar to a mini-disc...and it *does* introduce excessive load times while consuming massive amounts of juice by comparison (not just the motors, but the additional system memory).

Disc-based platforms require more system memory because resource data (like sound-effects) are not instantly-available as it is with a cartridge. The additional memory requirements suck even more juice. After Sony "finalized" the specs, they couldn't even guarantee 2 hours of play time. Since then, the developers demanded (and got) more memory to work with. Sony is going to have a power-hungry monster.

But it's not even power/fragility that worries me. It's time. My time is precious, and I'll be damned if my portable system requires me to waste a single minute of my short break while my game loads levels.

Word....Sony seriously missed the boat on the specs. They should have gone with something memory stick compatible. So you could load games and other files off of the stick memory from possibly even your computer.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Not to continue the thread hi-jack too much, but..

I understand the concerns of the load-times that would happen due to mechanical media in the PSP. But why can't the game's data be loaded into RAM, and that RAM keep it's data for a long time, for very low power? For example, my cheap quasi-PDA keeps data for several months at a time, on two tiny "memory backup" watch batteries.

Second, it seems that these handhelds are increasingly intended to be portable media-playback devices. I think that is the market that Sony may be aiming at as well with the PSP - more than just a "game machine". Look at what Nintendo and their licensees are doing right now with the GBA and "movie carts", that are nothing more than flash memory containing video files. That's actually kind of an expensive proposition, relative to disc media, even with the dropping price of flash. Plus, flash chips take power while they are running too.

So I don't see, at this time, whether either unit has a much greater advantage over the other. I think it depends on where the market demand goes. If portable media-playing drops off, then perhaps the advantages of the PSP in that area will be muted. Likewise, if it takes off, Nintendo (or rather, their licensees) will suffer through increases production/mfg costs to sell the same experience to their customers.

As far as a cartridge-based expansion port's usefulness, I just don't see it on a portable machine. Things like additional CPUs or cameras, don't make much sense from a power/weight perspective for a portable unit. None of those add-on that Nintendo has introduced for GB or GBA has ever sold well, and there's a reason for that.

It would be cool in either case, if you could just buy a low-cost USB flash drive, and plug it into the game unit to store games that way, but given the ease of possible internet-based "piracy", that will probably never happen.

 

[Ichinisan]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Not to continue the thread hi-jack too much, but..

I understand the concerns of the load-times that would happen due to mechanical media in the PSP. But why can't the game's data be loaded into RAM, and that RAM keep it's data for a long time, for very low power? For example, my cheap quasi-PDA keeps data for several months at a time, on two tiny "memory backup" watch batteries.

Developers were enraged over the restrictive memory in the original PSP spec and forced Sony to increase it. Sony probably used a conservative amount of RAM so that developers would not load huge levels and overall battery life would appear to be better. However, most developers would be forced to load more frequently, causing a serious drain. Increasing the memory also increases power consumption. Having enough capacity to store the entire disc would be absurdly expensive and perhaps as power-hungry as the mechanical media itself. Sony still couldn't even promise 3 hours at the E3 expo. Battery life has been the primary issue for PSP engineers. Your PDA probably refreshes a few kilobytes of low-density, high-latency memory. DDR memory (or whatever the PSP will use) will surely be much, MUCH more dense, responsive, and power-hungry.

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Second, it seems that these handhelds are increasingly intended to be portable media-playback devices. I think that is the market that Sony may be aiming at as well with the PSP - more than just a "game machine". Look at what Nintendo and their licensees are doing right now with the GBA and "movie carts", that are nothing more than flash memory containing video files. That's actually kind of an expensive proposition, relative to disc media, even with the dropping price of flash. Plus, flash chips take power while they are running too.

The GBA carts do not use expensive "Flash" memory. They use read-only Mask-ROM chips, which Nintendo has manufactured themselves since the '80s. It's should be somewhat profitable for Nintendo. Though I would *never* consider buying one of these cartridges, regardless of the content. If I liked a movie enough to spend money on it, I would buy the DVD. Buying a movie twice over is absurd. The thought of exclusive releases on the PSP (FF7:AC?) just infurates me. Why would I bother with another movie collection of a proprietary format with a limited selection which can't even be viewed on my television and probably costs more than the DVD versions?

 

[ondarkness]

the store floor models are out for u all to try at your local target, gamestop Worst Buy and eb's.
check em out. they are NICE. I just came from Worst Buy and it is sweet.