Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade • Hacker News Board

Re: Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade

#91

Post by mixedCase » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

coding123 wrote: post #48

Sorry about this, as it's an old argument that everyone here knows, but I wish Nintendo would stop making systems and just focus on their games on competing platforms. They do it for the money. So if I want to have the next Zelda, Mario/MK, DK I have to pay the 300 cost for the system first, then the price of the game ($60 on release day?) I mean, I get it from their perspective. Every Nintendo I purchase the number…

> I suppose that price is still worth it - not really

Either it is, or it isn't. From there you can determine whether you should spend your money there or not.

Nintendo isn't stupid, if people stop buying their consoles and manifest wanting just the game for another platform they will eventually do just that; but their large customer base is saying that the price of the console is worth it and Nintendo deems it better that way so it will remain like that.

Re: Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade

#92

Post by FillardMillmore » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #75

DCKing wrote: post #58

The 3DS, in particular the "New" models, I think are really recommended to pick up cheap. They are well built devices that are supremely hackable with access to lots of fun games. The 3DS library is good despite somewhat lacking in diversity. But the 3DS also has native compatibility with the entire excellent DS library, and after hacking it can also run the entire great GBA library without emulation (like Matroshka…

Yes! Don't forget you also get GameBoy Color and GameBoy games. IMO this massive library (N3DS, 3DS, DSi, DS, GBA, GBC, GB, SNES, NES) has at least 10 "must play before death" games in them (for people that care a lot about videogames, anyway). Of course all of this can also be achieved on a PC with a simple 10$ amazon controller and free emulators, if you're comfortable pirating games.

I'll be disappointed if Super Metroid doesn't make this list of yours.

Re: Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade

#93

Post by redisman » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

perardi wrote: post #38

I wonder what the game plan is for offering these games in the future. The dual-screen setup obviously doesn’t map to the Switch, so it’s not just a simple eShop port like you’d have for an old SNES game. I am mostly thinking about Pokémon. They’ve got this rich new Pokémon Home system to transfer between generations, but that’s reliant on having functioning older hardware. Now, there’s a massive pool of functional 3…

There were only a handful of games that really required it. Most people I knew only used the 3D effect as a novelty every now and then.

I wonder maybe a VR 3DS emulator could emulate it the best?

Re: Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade

#94

Post by wgetch » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #81

DCKing wrote: post #58

The 3DS, in particular the "New" models, I think are really recommended to pick up cheap. They are well built devices that are supremely hackable with access to lots of fun games. The 3DS library is good despite somewhat lacking in diversity. But the 3DS also has native compatibility with the entire excellent DS library, and after hacking it can also run the entire great GBA library without emulation (like Matroshka…

Beyond playing games, can you use them for anything else? How hard is it to program them?

While the majority of existing homebrew are either games or emulators, the systems are not limited to just playing games and there are a few options for programming them. devkitPro[0] provides a cross-compiling toolchain for 3ds homebrew development, if you are comfortable with C/C++ it is not all that difficult to program on the platform. There are several "portlibs" including SDL (SDL1 not SDL2 unfortunately) provided by devkitPro, which come in handy if you don't want to learn low level 3ds-specific APIs. There are also some homebrew game engines[1] that allow running Lua-based programs, though I haven't tried these myself.

[0] https://devkitpro.org/wiki/Getting_Started [1] https://www.3dbrew.org/wiki/Homebrew_Applications#Game_Engin...

Re: Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade

#95

Post by GhostVII » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #86

umvi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly surprised Pokemon is still around. The first one came out in like 1996, and it was initially addictive because there were a fixed number of pokemon to try to collect (150). But each iteration was basically a carbon copy of the previous gen with some map and monster changes. 7(?) gens later and now there are what 500? 600? More? I just don't understand the motivation to collect something now that you can…

> I'm honestly surprised Pokemon is still around. I'm honestly surprised chess is still around. It's basically the same game with the same rules from centuries ago.

Chess is not a game based around collecting a fixed number of items.

Re: Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade

#96

Post by tolbish » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

FillardMillmore wrote: post #92

komali2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Don't forget you also get GameBoy Color and GameBoy games. IMO this massive library (N3DS, 3DS, DSi, DS, GBA, GBC, GB, SNES, NES) has at least 10 "must play before death" games in them (for people that care a lot about videogames, anyway). Of course all of this can also be achieved on a PC with a simple 10$ amazon controller and free emulators, if you're comfortable pirating games.

I'll be disappointed if Super Metroid doesn't make this list of yours.

Super Metroid is available on Switch Online. Super Mario RPG would be my pick from here that is almost impossible to find legally.

Re: Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade

#97

Post by m-p-3 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

So it's a great time to run homebrews and emulators on it, as it's unlikely to be patched or updated.

Re: Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade

#98

Post by derefr » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #77

derefr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nintendo has never really wanted to discontinue a platform. Their vision was always that developers could support old and new platforms together through funky cross-compact measures. • Did you know that the SNES’s CPU starts up in a “NES 6502 compatibility” mode, sort of like x86-64 processors starting up in 16-bit real mode? It’s fully possible to design and build a game entirely for the NES as a 6502-assembler code…

> Since the market penetration of the NES was so high, many games in the early 90s were “dual-released” this way. I don't remember games that were released on both systems, do you have any example ?

It's a good question. I don't think anyone's ever put together a definitive list. I don't even remember any specific examples off-hand, just that some games would be mentioned as being dual releases in Nintendo Power coverage. (This happened a lot more with NES + GB or SNES + GB dual-releases, but these are obviously not "source ports" but rather ground-up rewrites, so not interesting here.)

But that doesn't mean that we can't figure it out! Grabbing the No-Intro databases (https://no-intro.org), and then intersecting the romset names between the NES and SNES lists, gives me this list: https://gist.github.com/tsutsu/0a9d7dbaa3cb7bb1929b31d7bc878.... About 82 games!

Of course, some of those are sequels that just happen to share a name; some are ground-up-rewrite-style dual releases; and some are just unofficial ports — people trying to recreate a SNES game on the NES or vice-versa, without access to the original code. But there are likely a good few in there that were SNES-enhanced-NES-code dual-releases.

If someone here is a gaming content-creator, there's a very unique deep-dive essay waiting to be written here, about how these games work. (Retro Game Mechanics Explained, I'm looking at you.)

Re: Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade

#99

Post by echelon » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

GhostVII wrote: post #95

echelon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm honestly surprised Pokemon is still around. I'm honestly surprised chess is still around. It's basically the same game with the same rules from centuries ago.

Chess is not a game based around collecting a fixed number of items.

Pokemon isn't based around collecting a fixed number of items.

There's strategy to pick an ideal team. To ev/iv farm if you're really into it.

There's a story, you can battle friends, you can make trades.

Pokemon isn't pog collecting.

Re: Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade

#100

Post by toper-centage » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

xena wrote: post #46

mattl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way things are going lately they’re probably already leaked.

The kernel source code was leaked too

The 3ds has so much homebrew stuff right now. At this point Nintendo stopping to release updates is a relief.