Tag: nintendo

Nintendo DSi On Sale in US

April 5th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Hardware 3 comments - Tags: , , , ,

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Nintendo starts selling it’s new offering into the portable gaming market today, the Nintendo DSi and successor to the Nintendo DS.

It’s not the first time the DSi has been on sale however – it launched in Japan in Fall. The successor to Nintendo’s insanely-popular DS, which sold over 100 million units, offers a number of improvements over its older brother.  Most importantly however is the fact that over 850 Nintendo DS games will be fully compatible with the DSi.

Other signifigant improvements include the ability to purchase and download games from the DSi store. Two cameras also make an appearance, a 3.0 megapixel camera for the front and a 0.3 megapixel camera facing backwards. The DSi also saw a RAM upgrade to 256mb and now supports a SD slot for AAC music files. Crucially, the DSi doesn’t support MP3 files. The iconic double-screen design of the DS has also seen a size upgrade in the DSi – at the expense of battery life, which is reduced when compared to the older DS.

The new console will cost around $170 and comes in blue and black (no white for US customers). Nintendo also stated that the reason the DSi didn’t debut in the US earlier was thanks to the current Nintendo DS still selling so rapidly that they were afraid of damaging the DS’ sales!

Nintendo are planning to compete directly with the Apple iPod touch, which is busy eating into DS games sales.

nVidia adds PhysX to the Wii

March 19th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Hardware One comment - Tags: , , , ,

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Now that sounds rather ridiculous.

The Wii, arguably with the hardware of a last-generation console (with brilliant motion-sensing capabilities), isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of nVidia’s process-intensive and super-realistic PhysX platform. The PhysX engine allows developers to create very, very realistic physics simulations. Either way, nVidia has provided a PhysX SDK to Nintendo Wii developers as “a key to our cross-platform strategy”.

It’s rather ironic however. The PhysX platform is designed to execute on nVidia GPUs (as a GPU can do a lot more processing than a CPU, making it idea for physics-work), but this only works on PCs. On consoles, such as the Wii and PS3, which nVidia also recently made it’s PhysX API available to, will still need to use the CPU for all the physical processing involved.

“Based on all the processing cores in the GPU, we can do a lot more processing on the GPU than the CPU. That doesn’t mean the CPU isn’t a great place do processing but we can just take more advantage of an Nvidia GPU,”

Seems like second-guessing the decision to promote the API on consoles to me.