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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

#201

Post by int_19h »

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…

Retained mode was deeply unpopular even back when it was supposed to be the flagship API, for good reasons (it was slow as hell), so the games that relied on it for support can literally be counted on both hands.

That aside, the only other old game API that I can think of that's gone for good is DirectPlay, which generally means no multiplayer for games that depend on it as the only option, but otherwise doesn't affect them.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#202

Post by int_19h »

ndiddy wrote: post #167
prmoustache wrote: post #114

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. 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…

DirectDraw is an incredibly simple API (it doesn't even have 2D primitives - just blitting rectangles of pixels from one surface to another). AFAIK the fallback is basically doing that in software - since this is plenty fast these days - and letting the compositor handle the actual screen update. There's no reason why this would result in 30 FPS even on 20-year-old hardware, and indeed I regularly play a DirectDraw game from 1999 on Win11 without such issues.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#203

Post by strix_varius »

hadlock wrote: post #99
saghm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of crazy how Nintendo has basically thrown out their entire service for consoles multiple times and started from scratch now. Can you imagine if Xbox Live or the PSN were thrown out and replaced with an incompatible new service after a single generation of use, let alone multiple times? Even ignoring the user experience, it feels like a massive waste of engineering work, with the benefit being...not having…

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.

After getting my steam deck, I stopped buying Switch games. I even re-bought a couple of favorites (Slay the Spire, Monster Train) since I find myself using the switch less and less.

The deck is similarly sized, of higher quality and power, more versatile, and just as easy to use. Plus the backbone of the deck is a long-lived downloadable game service that still has my games from over a decade ago. And of course, it's also an incredible emulation machine and a full Linux desktop.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#204

Post by slowhadoken »

nottorp wrote: post #198
slowhadoken wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Steam regularly, I don’t game on a Mac regularly. To be fair I don’t think most people use Macs for gaming. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. Apple has a tight grip on mobile gaming though, that’s a money maker for them.

> Apple has a tight grip on mobile gaming though, that’s a money maker for them. It's not gaming if it has IAPs. I've given up on even reading about mobile "games" when they all went IAP. I'm too poor to afford that.

I don't play many mobile games but I tested The Battle of Polytopia when it was in beta and I still play it today. So it's not a complete loss. Android has solid emulation scene though.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#205

Post by furyofantares »

croutonwagon wrote: post #164
Geezus_42 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

An account can only have one "primary" Switch, which is the only one that will play games without an online ownership check. Secondary switches need to be online to play games.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#206

Post by smaudet »

fluoridation wrote: post #171
averageRoyalty wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam is still a walled garden that can arbitrarily take away games at any time they want. Everyone who sells via Steam (including Valve) can and do sometimes turn off online services. Your garden might be wider, but there's still walls.

You can still back the games up, if necessary on external drives. If they have DRM it can be cracked. None of this is is possible on consoles (or if it is I've never heard of it).

There are efforts, yes, but you will be surprised just how hostile the major players are towards this (and how big brother they are). If you know any of this the illusion that Microsoft (or Nintendo/Sony) are anything other than unethical profit mongers quickly disappears.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#207

Post by smaudet »

b112 wrote: post #156
mnw21cam wrote: post #155

I don't understand this thing about shutting everything down. I have a VPS that costs me £1.20 per month, so at the very base level if it is a service that nobody is using, then its maintenance cost can be extraordinarily small. And if people are using it, and you have a significant cost because of that, then that's a clear indication that it's too early to shut it down. Seriously, internet server bandwidth is cheap…

It's the security aspect. Nothing runs on an island, so there's the entire OS layer, libraries, and everything else. These require regular security upgrades, as vulnerabilities are discovered. Eventually, things are deprecated. Python, php and so on, have versions that are end of life. And so, you have to upgrade to an entire new stack. Often that requires upgrade to frameworks, and therefore code. And beyond that, t…

Usually the "security" operates on a similar principle, it's not actually any more secure.

Upgrades are (usually) complete poison.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#208

Post by croutonwagon »

furyofantares wrote: post #205
croutonwagon wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

An account can only have one "primary" Switch, which is the only one that will play games without an online ownership check. Secondary switches need to be online to play games.

So you toss the “primary” in airplane mode and let the secondary check in to pass drm via hotspot when the kids are in the car.

At least that is the plan.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#209

Post by [deleted] »

zamadatix wrote: post #200
manymatter wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unrelated to the thread. The point was obfuscation of the fact that the profit is from a specific copyrighted work. I.e. selling 600 versions of a game each with a different default skin hides no income from tax authorities.

You're referencing profit instead of revenue, which the thread was referring to. Again, you can't hide revenue as easily. Splitting it up 600 ways doesn't solve the problem that game XYZ sold 10 million copies from the 600 subsidiary distributors. Nintendo could hide the profit that way, saying the subsidiaries took 100% of the revenue as costs, but the total revenue can't be hidden. It's either a reported sale or no…

[deleted]

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#210

Post by naikrovek »

doix wrote: post #45
naikrovek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, small protocols like this are pretty easy to write securely if you sanity check all of your inputs and bail if anything is wrong. I don’t know the Mii format but it can’t be large, and the only arbitrary input there is the name, I believe. Nintendo themselves are pretty good at writing secure stuff; it’s usually libraries or 3rd party games which have been responsible for the software exploits in Nintend…

Aren't pretty much all the wii exploits string parsing bugs? The original one was actually a name parsing bugs in the twilight princess(first party title) save file. And now people use the letter bomb exploit which abuses a string parsing bug in the letter system of the wii. I'd say Nintendo have a pretty bad history of writing secure format parsers.

> I'd say Nintendo have a pretty bad history of writing secure format parsers.

Those examples are very old at this point. You may be surprised to learn that Nintendo have learned from these, and are much better at this than they used to be.

The Switch is only hackable via hardware; no software methods work, and the only one that did was caused by a hardware problem on Nvidia’s part.

The original Wii exploit was to use tweezers to short two circuits at a special time. The software that revealed led to the software exploits which are used today.

The Wii U was exploited by its backwards compatibility with the Wii.

If marcan wants to tell me I’m wrong, I’ll believe him, but until then I’m convinced that Nintendo is far better at this than they used to be.

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