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Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

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Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#161

Post by worthless-trash »

mikepurvis wrote: post #103
hadlock wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of support for 3DS and (probably) switch means I am moving over to the Steam Deck for my next console, probably early next year. Losing my entire switch library, basically forever, when the Switch 2 (or whatever they call it) is released seems like throwing good money after bad.

Nintendo has been getting greedy in recent years with the paid rereleases and HD ports. However they had a terrific track record on backcompat for years in the handheld space. GB -> GBC -> GBA -> DS -> 3DS, every one supporting at least one generation back's physical media. Nintendo understands the value of the Switch library and I think would be very cautious to release successor hardware that didn't play the existi…

Nintendo understands, Nintendo dont care.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#162

Post by alkonaut »

So long as it’s very clear when I’m buying a product that it’s dependent on a service, I’m ok with my games and content disappearing and my devices being bricked after N years. It’s an environmental tragedy but at least I can choose to buy a different products. Games and devices need to come with some SLA that guarantees that it’s up for 99.9% of the time for the coming (day) 5 years. Added bonus if the producer promises that after the SLA period or in the case of the company becoming defunct, all server software will be made available publicly.

But the key realization here is that when we “buy” games these days we just rent them. If we aren’t happy with that then we should simply not take part in the transaction.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#163

Post by easyThrowaway »

indigo945 wrote: post #143
prmoustache wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ones? Apart from DOS games and windows 3.x which I would treat separatly the only graphics api I could think of was Glide for which there are modern wrappers like nglide.

Parts of DX5 and previous, such as the "retained mode", are missing from current versions of Windows entirely. Much of the remaining implementation is buggy and introduces render artifacts. Open source projects such as dgVoodoo offer a solution to run old games, by re-implementing old DirectX and Glide on top of current DirectX [1], similar to how Wine runs DX games on Linux on top of OpenGL or Vulkan. [1]: https://g…

dgVoodoo2 unfortunately is not open source, and its author has stopped regular development (keeping it at small maintenance fixes) some time ago. I can only hope that projects like WineD3D for windows[1] can make up for it in the long term, but we're one breaking Directx update away from going back to the start.

[1]https://fdossena.com/?p=wined3d/index.frag

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#164

Post by croutonwagon »

Geezus_42 wrote: post #74
croutonwagon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue Microsoft is one of the better ones with respect to backports and longer term support. Others (cough google cough) are on the other end of that spectrum. I would imagine Nintendo is somewhere in the middle. That said, i still grabbed Digital copies of games. Plan is i can put multiple switches on an account and when they are traveling (ie: not connected) my kids can play games without having to cop 2 co…

You can only share games between accounts on your "home" switch.

Yeah. It’s gonna be two switches on a single account.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#166

Post by easyThrowaway »

slowhadoken wrote: post #78
easton wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless it’s a 32-bit Mac come January or a machine running windows Which I’m fine with, but it’s not like Valve is magical somehow. If your machine isn’t still getting Chromium builds they can’t build Steam for it, you still need to buy new hardware. And the game consoles (less) often let you play old games on new hardware.

My Deck just runs all those old windows games using proton. I mean, Windows subsystems runs Linux. You don’t even need VMs anymore. It’s not magic it’s just portability.

Steam Deck compatibility is spotty at best for DirectX-8 games and older.

A few of those have been updated by the publisher to ship with DDrawCompat, nglide or dgvoodoo, but at large they require some tinkering to get them in a running state.

Excluding those who will never, ever work again due to copy protection systems (e.g., all those Games for Windows Live that never received a patch, those EA games still shipping with Securom) of all my games, circa 15-20% of them crash on boot. Nearly all of them are pre-Dx8 games, which basically run correctly only running on a recently unsupported configuration by steam, Windows 7 32bit.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#167

Post by ndiddy »

prmoustache wrote: post #114
grumbel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam will drop Windows7/8 support January 1, 2024[1], Vista and XP support got dropped a long time ago. Meanwhile they still sell Win95/98 games on the Steam store, which won't run well or at all on a Windows10/11. So not exactly perfect either as far as backward compatibility is concerned. [1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4784-4F2B-1321-80...

> Steam will drop Windows7/8 support January 1, 2024[1], Vista and XP support got dropped a long time ago. Meanwhile they still sell Win95/98 games on the Steam store, which won't run well or at all on a Windows10/11. Why wouldn't they work well? Every time backward compatibility is mentionned, Microsoft Windows is praised as the best example of it and people brag they can still run everything they used to run in 199…

This isn't really true beyond basic Windows GUI only programs. For example, most 2D Windows games made before the mid-2000s used a rendering API called DirectDraw. On Windows 8 and newer, DirectDraw goes through some sort of fallback rendering path and these games won't run at more than around 30 FPS with bad frame timing. The same thing happened with games that used 8-bit color with hardware palettes. Windows 8 and newer will only run at 32-bit color (the "run with 256 colors" compatibility setting was changed to just put a low color filter over the system graphics), so they are broken as well.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#168

Post by Libcat99 »

greeniskool wrote: post #39
Libcat99 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They require steam to be running, don't they? What happens if steam goes away?

It's trivial to bypass that check using a Steam "emulator"

There also often software to strip the drm out of direct purchase games.

The existence of drm removal tools does not make a product drm free, in the same way ms office isn't open source if you steal the source code.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#169

Post by LightHugger »

Libcat99 wrote: post #35
LightHugger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lots of steam games have no drm

They require steam to be running, don't they? What happens if steam goes away?

Nope. Adding the "steam has to be running" check is an optional step the game developer performs before they upload their game to steam. The dev can go out of their way to wrap their .exe in the steam DRM.

If the dev does not do this, there is no steam DRM. lots of games dont use it, remember kenshi as an example.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#170

Post by epiccoleman »

mikepurvis wrote: post #103
hadlock wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of support for 3DS and (probably) switch means I am moving over to the Steam Deck for my next console, probably early next year. Losing my entire switch library, basically forever, when the Switch 2 (or whatever they call it) is released seems like throwing good money after bad.

Nintendo has been getting greedy in recent years with the paid rereleases and HD ports. However they had a terrific track record on backcompat for years in the handheld space. GB -> GBC -> GBA -> DS -> 3DS, every one supporting at least one generation back's physical media. Nintendo understands the value of the Switch library and I think would be very cautious to release successor hardware that didn't play the existi…

> Nintendo understands the value of the Switch library and I think would be very cautious to release successor hardware that didn't play the existing titles.

I really hope so. The switch has such a great library, it would be an absolute shame if they abandoned it all. From the rumors I've heard they're sticking to a similar platform for the next console so hopefully backwards compatibility is reasonably likely.

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