[Megathread] Nintendo Switch

[Tech614]

It sounds like.

Cartridges: work on the handheld and console.(Probably the majority of the nintendo made games for the system)

Console only games will still be disc based.(then mentioning a sibling system that does as an optical drive).(mostly 3rd party games with the odd big budget Nintendo game)

Cartridges are fine in the 8GB or lower range for games, you start talking 25+gb for current gen games and yea... nope third parties won't be having those manufacturing costs.

- - - Updated - - -

how will it be backwards compatible if i cant put in my wiiu disk?

Read the patent, the console without the optical drive is clearly the hand held variant... Unless you think they're going to have 2 versions of the home console, one with an drive and one without.

[Blackmist]

Looks like Wii U v2.

I thought Nintendo were going to try something innovative to make up for lack of raw grunt, but nope. Same old shit.

[Mechazod]

If Nintendo goes back to cartridge, long live the savior, I will make blood sacrifices in Iwata's memory.
If Nintendo goes download only, I will curse them to Hell and would probably die in a murder-suicide attempt at having one of my favorite video game companies of all time turning into final form Anti-Christ + Hitler x1000 and my mind, body and soul could not comprehend or accept such a reality and the only way I could find any form of peace would be a raving naked killing spree.

Don't fuck up Nintendo. Please.

[GennGreymane]

But what advantage would cartridges bring?

From my understanding they were more expensive and held less.

[Tech614]

Looks like Wii U v2.

I thought Nintendo were going to try something innovative to make up for lack of raw grunt, but nope. Same old shit.

Yea... because having a system that shares a library with their current handheld isn't innovative or anything.

Hell, if the thing has both Wii U and 3DS back compat along with the virtual console service it would probably instantly have the best single library on any home console ever AT LAUNCH even.

- - - Updated - - -

But what advantage would cartridges bring?

From my understanding they were more expensive and held less.

The advantage is it's easier to have the primary handheld/console games available in a single format, and a hand held with an optical drive is an engineering nightmare for sound and heat.

The home console only games are clearly still going to be on a disc, home console will have the cartidge slot and optical drive, hand held just the cartridge slot.

[Mechazod]

I am assuming by "cartridge" it will be similar to 3DS game cards. I play a lot of Vita games on my PlayStation TV and most of the time with games like Tales of Hearts and Freedom Wars I forget I am even playing whats suppose to be made for a handheld. Maybe my dream of having a DS/3DS game player for a large screen would actually come to fruition with the NX.

[Immitis]

But what advantage would cartridges bring?

From my understanding they were more expensive and held less.

i can buy a 100+ gb sd card for less than 20 quid on amazon.

cartridges would be fine nowadays its not the n64 days where cds were like 100x bigger

- - - Updated - - -

It sounds like.

Cartridges: work on the handheld and console.(Probably the majority of the nintendo made games for the system)

Console only games will still be disc based.(then mentioning a sibling system that does as an optical drive).(mostly 3rd party games with the odd big budget Nintendo game)

Cartridges are fine in the 8GB or lower range for games, you start talking 25+gb for current gen games and yea... nope third parties won't be having those manufacturing costs.

- - - Updated - - -



Read the patent, the console without the optical drive is clearly the hand held variant... Unless you think they're going to have 2 versions of the home console, one with an drive and one without.

i thought it said it was stationary

[johnhoftb]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...&postcount=567

This particular post in the NeoGAF thread "translates" all of the technobable for us common folk. Quoting the thread (the quotations are quotes within the post):

GAME CONSOLE NX

I simply "translated" the patent to the best of my ability, cutting out the fluff. There's a lot of fluff.

It's a game console! The example console has no disc drive. You connect it to a television and play video games.

The example is totally of a Digital-only console but this in no way restricts any other NX hardware to be exactly that, says patent. Digital-only can be made on the cheap tho, says patent.
Passage literally confirming NX device with disc drive (bolded is my notes):

"The first basic program 24(NX kernel) and the second basic program 25(NX OS) also operate in, for example, a game apparatus including an optical disk drive or a game apparatus not including the internal HDD 13.

Other hardware configs need not neccessarily include an HDD. (Like, say a portable device? Hmm?)

Has HDD, Internet, CPU, GPU, RAM, like a home console would

OS Kernel has it's own memory, and it's fast so the console can boot faster

Can check if the main OS has been tampered with by checking additional storage and restore corrupted high-security data

OS has full multitasking support

You can download games to the console

Games installed to HDD

Games have code for more than one hardware configuration and the hardware determines what code is the right one to run (NX is a platform like iOS, duh it has this)

External hard drives can be connected and you can install games to them

Can emulate different HDD read/write speeds primarily for games that have special code for external HDDs, can seemingly pretend that the HDD is an optical disc as well. SPEED CONTROL

Controller with rechargeable battery (Pro Controller?)

Interesting passages:

"The controller 3 is provided exclusively for the game apparatus 1. The controller 3 includes a processor 31, a wireless communication unit 32, an operation unit 33, a display unit 34, a battery 35, a connection unit 36 and the like."

"The operation unit 33 is constituted by a push button, a cross key, an analog stick, a touch panel or the like."

Controller with screen. GamePad support? Could be new controller, too. Will probably have at LEAST the functionality of the GamePad.
Can charge the GamePad equivalent by plugging it into the console.

Save files are stored on the HDD O_O OMG WOW

"It is to be noted that the internal HDD 13 can store various data such as, for example, stationary data, video data, sound data, text data, additional data of a game, or data obtained through communication."

Bolded could be interpreted as being the oft-touted "high texture download" option.

Can read/write SD cards. This allows for retail distribution or OS updates using SD cards. Really any data that you can think of putting on an SD card, can be used. No confirmation on anything.

[Tech614]

i can buy a 100+ gb sd card for less than 20 quid on amazon.

And for the same price you can get 20+ blank 50GB blue ray discs.

A blue ray literally costs a publisher $0.25 or less to print.

3DS and Vita carts are cheap, but those are 4GB which can go up to 8GB at a cost increase for special games. Making a 25-50GB cart, lol no 3rd party would get on board with Nintendo on that.

[Immitis]

so its looking like a hybrid with a disk version and probably a cheaper no disk version like how the wiiu had standard and delux versions.

can use disks and sd card type cartridges?

i almost always play my handheld games at home like a home console so id actually prefer playing them on the tv

[Tech614]

so its looking like a hybrid with a disk version and probably a cheaper no disk version like how the wiiu had standard and delux versions.

That still makes 0 sense as adding as the blue ray drives on the One/PS4 literally add $10 to the bill of materials(and is the reason MS got rid of their same idea of having a discless version for cheaper, as it really wasn't much cheaper at all). They're not going to be able to save people any significant money by buying the version with no optical drive.

The difference in the Wii U deluxe and standard versions was 24GB of flash memory, which costs a hell of a lot more then an optical drive.(and even that was just a $50 difference)

[Immitis]

That still makes 0 sense as adding as the blue ray drives on the One/PS4 literally add $10 to the bill of materials(and is the reason MS got rid of their same idea of having a discless version for cheaper, as it really wasn't much cheaper at all). They're not going to be able to save people any significant money by buying the version with no optical drive.

you could say the same thing about the wiiu, i doubt it cost them 50$ more for a small bit more memory which is still a shitty amount if you plan on buying anything other than indies

- - - Updated - - -

for the extra 50 i could get a 1tb hard drive for my wiiu

[Tech614]

you could say the same thing about the wiiu, i doubt it cost them 50$ more for a small bit more memory which is still a shitty amount if you plan on buying anything other than indies

Except that isn't just any memory. It's flash memory. That isn't cheap(nintendo using expensive ass flash memory instead of a normal HDD is another dumb issue for them). They didn't add 24GB to a mechanical HDD or an SD card here.

[Remilia]

NAND cost of manufacturing aren't really actually that high, but the cost of R&D is what makes the price high.
A single NAND doesn't perform that well and to get higher speeds you start running into yield concerns as opposed to a cheap high capacity but slow one. Only reason why SSDs are fast is because you have a bunch of NANDs stuck on a PCB and a controller to operate them all together.

It doesn't necessarily mean that you can't use them as a game card. You could use it to install a game onto HDD if they wanted to do that and then play off that. Blu-rays aren't that fast though either. It isn't a strange concept to do. It's just different.

[Poppincaps]

Uhh you do realize the 3DS and Vita both have physical media without have disc drives right?

Also if you read the patent, the system with no optical disc is compatible with a system WITH an optical disc. Patent also mentions a controller with a screen on it(which charges by plugging into the system via usb instead of having it's own separate AC adapter). Which means the Wii U lives on lulz to the haters.

The 3DS cartridges also only house 16GB of data which is not nearly enough for many triple A console games. They could do cartridges but I don't know why they would.

But regardless, the article that I read didn't mention another system. It merely stated that it had a focus on downloading games and wouldn't have a disk drive. So you can understand my frustration at such an idea.

[Phaere]

how will it be backwards compatible if i cant put in my wiiu disk?

Hardware level backwards compatibility is one thing that has been holding back Nintendo consoles imo. The Wii's cpu was simply an improved version of the GameCubes in orders to retain compatibility and the Wii U's cpu was an improved Wii. It's time for them to move onto to something newer and much more powerful.

Any newer more powerful part they put in whether x86 or ARM (similar to what they use for their 3DS but much stronger) will completely break the Hardware level backwards compatibility they've had up till now. The Power PC cpu they've been using are heavily outdated and weak 32 bit cpus. I feel the chip they've used up to this point is no longer worth trying to update anymore, it's simply to old and lacking many modern features.

They could stick a Wii U chip into any new console in order to be able to play Wii U games on it similar to what Sony did with early version of the PS3 putting PS2 chips in them. But that would bloat the size of the console and make it more complex which wouldn't be a good thing.

The 3DS cartridges also only house 16GB of data which is not nearly enough for many triple A console games. They could do cartridges but I don't know why they would.

But regardless, the article that I read didn't mention another system. It merely stated that it had a focus on downloading games and wouldn't have a disk drive. So you can understand my frustration at such an idea.

If they did go with cartridges they wouldn't be using anything like the 3DS's. It would probably be something similar to this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-334-_-Product which could fit a AAA game.

Ignore the price though (even though it is only $25). Nintendo is a large company they would probably get a discount, and buying things in bulk pretty much guarantees are hefty discount price wise.

[Immitis]

The 3DS cartridges also only house 16GB of data which is not nearly enough for many triple A console games. They could do cartridges but I don't know why they would.

But regardless, the article that I read didn't mention another system. It merely stated that it had a focus on downloading games and wouldn't have a disk drive. So you can understand my frustration at such an idea.

you can fit way more than 16gb on a 3ds cart if you really wanted to as plenty of 3rd party carts show, plus most nintendo games arent even 10gb except tropical freeze

[johnhoftb]

The largest game coming out on a Nintendo system is Xenoblade Chronicles X with 22 GB as a comparison and that game is an open world JRPG.

[Tech614]

you can fit way more than 16gb on a 3ds cart if you really wanted to as plenty of 3rd party carts show, plus most nintendo games arent even 10gb except tropical freeze

Fatal Frame V is 16 GB
Xenoblade Chronicles X is 22 GB
Tropical Freeze as you already mentioned is nearly 12 GB
Bayonetta 2 is 15 GB
Wonderful 101 is 11 GB

Probably more I forget about, but keep in mind these are ALL 720p games with 720p assets. Just the jump to 1080p assets alone can DOUBLE the install size(evidence look at the Halo/Gears/Last of Us/Uncharted remasters)

[Immitis]

i still say that cartridges are the way they should go.