Topic: One-Cart Wireless Play Confirmed for DS

[TheYoungerPlumber]

Game Developer Magazine now has its E3 interview online, and Miyamoto confirms what we’ve all expected.

Gamasutra, Game Developers Magazine’s online division, recently posted its E3 interview with legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma, and lead DS hardware designer Kenichi Sugino.  The article is an interesting read, with discussion of game and hardware design, Four Swords, and the competition, but most newsworthy is Miyamoto’s comment on Nintendo DS’s multiplayer:

Miyamoto: "Whether you've got one DS and one game pack, and your friends have their DSes, you'll be able to download the game from the game pack in one DS wirelessly to your friends and you can all play together wirelessly."

While this was pretty much assumed already, it is good to hear Nintendo is continuing one of the GBA’s most innovative and convenient features.  With the DS’s rumored 4 MBytes of memory and its quicker LAN connectivity, it is likely we will see one-cart multiplayer comparable to current multi-cart games.  

[Syl]

I was under the impression this was pretty much confirmed.

Anyway, its good news to hear, espicially with that "ultimate games" compilation coming.  

[Koopa Troopa]

"Ultimate Games" compilation?

[TheYoungerPlumber]

I think he's talking about that card/traditional board game collection announced a little while back

[Koopa Troopa]

Ohhh... Yeah, I swear, that thing is going to sell systems like crazy.

[Bill Aurion]

Yes, this was expected...But it sure does feel good to have it confirmed, eh? ^_^

to the strong likelihood of non-neutered multiplayer...

[Ian Sane]

Meh, this doesn't really tell us anything.  I assumed that a feature that was on the GBA would stick around.  It would be a pretty dumb design oversight not to include it.  What I want to know is how much this will be used.  I was really excited when one cart multiplayer was annouced for the GBA but it turned out to be really lame.  The one cart mode usually was very restrictive and most third party games didn't offer it.  I want to know if with the DS we're going to get "real" one cart multiplayer in that virtually every multiplayer game will feature it and there won't even need to be multi-cart modes unless the developer is a total hack.  They aren't mentioning any restrictions right now, which looks promising, but I don't recall any of the restrictions of the GBA being mentioned right away either.  Wait and see I guess.

[TheYoungerPlumber]

The GBA has very little system memory--things are constantly loaded from the cart, and the transfer is so quick that it's almost like extra RAM.  In one-cart multiplayer, everything must fit in that 256Kbits or whatever of system memory.

The same is true for the DS, but with 4MB developers can probably get the entire engine in memory, at least for 2D games.  They'll still have to transfer level-specific data, but with a 11 Mbit (or faster) connection that shouldn't be too bad.

[KDR_11k]

Reverse engineer the format, mod your WiFi card, tada: Linux on DS.
At least it doesn't have any form of fixed writable storage (e.g. harddrive) or some bastard could make his DS send you a virus or the equivalent of a "reformat drive" command...