> Notice how with their consoles, if the disc/cartridge fits in the console, the console will always play it, even between generations.
Well, that's not quite true. Both the Wii and Wii U have a standard-sized disc slot; on the Wii you can insert small GameCube discs into that slot and they'll play, but on the Wii U they won't. On the portable side, 3DS cartridges do have a tab to prevent them from fitting into a DS, but that wasn't the case for the handful of games exclusive to the brief-lived DSi.
Recent Nintendo consoles have also had compatibility issues with standard storage devices. The Wii supported SD cards, but wasn't compatible with SDHC cards, which are almost all cards with a capacity of 4GB or higher. This was eventually rectified with a software update... but the update only applied to the system menu, not to games which could access SD cards themselves, including notably Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The Wii U, for its part, supports storing games on external hard drives, but doesn't provide as much power over USB as most hosts do, requiring the use of a USB Y cable and a separate USB power source even for drives that don't normally require external power.
These carts play DS games, they do not play 3DS games.
Each time the console gets an upgrade (DS to DSi; DSxl; 3DS; etc) some of the carts stop working, and manufacturers use it as a marketing opportunity.
Cards usually tack '3ds' on the name. EG: "R4i3DS". But these just play DS games on the 3DS. (Some of them include GBA emulation functionality; nothing could play GBA games on the NDS cart slot until recently.)
You can play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games on a Game Boy Advance or SP or Micro, or even a SNES or GameCube with special hardware accessories. You can play Game Boy Advance games on a Nintendo DS or DS Lite. You can play GameCube games on a Wii, and Wii games on a Wii U.
There was a specific effort to include hardware from the previous generation in the next, for at least one step of backward compatibility. The GBA had a separate Z80 in addition to the ARM7TDMI to do that. The DS and DS Lite had dual processors and dual cartridge slots, but the DSi ditched the GBA slot. Thus, those were technically capable of running ROM images of GBA games if you found a way to load them and start the ARM7 processor in the correct mode. The 3DS can, of course, play DS and DSi cartridges, having both ARM11 and ARM9 processors.
So it is apparent that Nintendo has supported backward compatibility by essentially packaging two hardware systems into one box. That isn't what I would do, but that's what they did.
They burned goodwill with me for not writing decent SDKs for their hardware, such that about every game has to do a roll-your-own reach into the hardware. Which doesn't translate to the next generation of hardware. Stupid. Just write a damned SDK, and make the 3rd party dev shops hate you less.
I always keep my old cartridges, even though most of my old hardware is no longer capable. It's my proof of license, for when I download the ROMs to play on emulators.
Nintendo have typically been pretty good with backwards compatibility as newer versions of consoles come out. GBAs could play GB/GBC games. DS could play GBA games. 3DS could play DS. Wii could play GC games. Wii U could play Wii games.
The Switch is an outlier in that regard but mostly because the hardware is so different from previous consoles. It could never support the 2 screens required for DS/3DS or some Wii U games, nor is it big enough to fit Wii U disks anyway. But it wouldn't surprise me if the Switch 2 could play Switch 1 games.
Nintendo also typically put entire games on their cartridges, and day 1 patches are for bug fixes only and are optional. If you keep the cartridges and your console, you keep your games perfectly fine. Or you can go out and buy cartridges second hand. And digital downloads will also still function, like my 3DS still has my digital purchases even if the eshop is gone. I just can't purchase new games anymore, for a 12 year old system.
Looking carefully at the cartridge when they slide it in (0:53 in the video), it looks to be perhaps twice as thick as the 3DS cart. But it would be very easy to make both go in the same slot, just make the new carts ever so slightly thinner. I can't see if the controllers have all the 3DS controls, but it looks like it's at least close. And a modern chip, with the option to be at least partially designed for the task, could easily either emulate or ship with hardware support for running the 3DS, which still is not that powerful in modern terms. Losing the 3D support is all but a non-issue in practice. I don't want to predict this is the case, but I see no major technical reason why this couldn't run 3DS games fully backwards compatibly.
The only thing I can't see is whether the screen is a touch screen, which would be necessary. Which may also preclude using 3DS games in TV mode. (Unless they do something weird with Wiimotes or something. But I'm not sure that would play well enough to be worth doing.)
If it's backwards compatible with both 3DS and the WiiU, and perhaps even the Wii, this thing will come out of the game with an absolutely killer lineup. ('Twould be a pity there would probably no way to port the physical disks that you already own across, though. The 3DS games would just slip in, so they'd have an ironic advantage over "real" Wii games.)
I recall using a Nintendo DS to dump ROMs to a device in the GBA slot, which would then store it in memory, so you could then eject the cartridge in the DS slot and insert another device that could write to a MicroSD card. GBA and GB cartridges could be transferred directly from the GBA slot.
The difficulty there was in loading and running the software.
Once games distributed on discs, backing up for swap-free play became easier, but I still recall having to use the original Wii hardware to read discs and write their files to a specially formatted hard drive.
If you have the device designed to read the original game distribution medium, you can modify it, sometimes just with software, to read game files and write them to the medium of your choosing. The original console has to decode the data and get it to the CPU somehow, and if you can run your own code on the CPU, you can always dump, even if it is just by displaying a series of 2-d bar codes on a TV screen and taking photos of them.
It is also worth noting that you cannot trust a company like Nintendo or Sony to make a distinction between civil-illegal that results in a tort, where the company can sue you for damages (if they find out about it), and criminal-illegal that results in a crime, where the state can put you in prison (if they find out about it).
Is that how the wii u ran wii games? The 3ds also showed the old ds interface to configure ds games.
I’m not sure if either one actually just dropped a second soc in there though
I'm pretty sure you can buy most 3DS or WiiU games as downloads these days, if that's what you mean. Personally I like my 3DS carts. WiiU discs less so, 'cause I don't already have the WiiU in my hands/can't fit the discs in my pockets.
It also still supports the entirety of the original DS homebrew scene, including my favorite flashcard: the SuperCard DSTWO [0], which includes an onboard CPU and RAM for running software that's more powerful than the host DS! You could feel the chip bulging out underneath the label, and the cartridges went into the slot with an odd "squish" because of that. A ridiculous yet beautiful piece of engineering.
The official Nintendo cartridges never used more than 4 megabit of ROM. But many unofficial "backup solutions" integrated a microSD reader and had quite a bit more space available.
Nintendo has sold a great many NES and SNES Classics with non-working cartridge drives, and I'm sure a lot of the people buying those were geeks, so it must not go too strongly against it.
Yeah, I have a flash cart for my 3DS with all my old DS games on it. I can't leave it in the 3DS or it will drain my battery, because it's basically just another entire mini-console running in the 3DS.
From a user standpoint, when we speak of "cartridge" we're talking about the packaging - 8-track tapes were also called "cartridges". Calling any game cart "ROM" has been a little bit off in that old cartridges were PCBs that could contain arbitrary chips, custom hardware, battery-backed RAM, etc.
With the modern carts, it's all flash memory - both the game binary and any user data can coexist. That said, it's much less common than in the NES era, but not unheard of, to incorporate custom hardware on the cart. For example the DS Game Card[0] has an infrared variation. With this change the overall performance model now is guided around working with flash memory - you have big mass storage, longer load times, and don't get to do any fancy bank-switching tricks or rely on an additional co-processor or an extra RAM bank.
You sure? I could swear a friend of mine had something at least a year ago that allowed him to play just about anything he wanted on it. Maybe that was the older DS?
All attention, please. Nowadays, Nintendo 3DS console updates to the newest fireware version 4.0.07. All of the players do not have to worry about the compatibility. All the following 3DS cards are working with the Nintendo 3DS V4.0.07 and Nintendo DSi V1.44 perfectly.
Well, that's not quite true. Both the Wii and Wii U have a standard-sized disc slot; on the Wii you can insert small GameCube discs into that slot and they'll play, but on the Wii U they won't. On the portable side, 3DS cartridges do have a tab to prevent them from fitting into a DS, but that wasn't the case for the handful of games exclusive to the brief-lived DSi.
Recent Nintendo consoles have also had compatibility issues with standard storage devices. The Wii supported SD cards, but wasn't compatible with SDHC cards, which are almost all cards with a capacity of 4GB or higher. This was eventually rectified with a software update... but the update only applied to the system menu, not to games which could access SD cards themselves, including notably Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The Wii U, for its part, supports storing games on external hard drives, but doesn't provide as much power over USB as most hosts do, requiring the use of a USB Y cable and a separate USB power source even for drives that don't normally require external power.
reply