Nintendo 3DS

[LuigiHann]

Who cares about black bars? The 3DS screen has more pixels on it than the DS Lite screen. Either the image is going to be stretched out, or the image is going to be letterboxed. There are literally no other options, given the hardware.

It would have been really nice if Nintendo had built the 3DS with a resolution that was exactly twice the resolution of the original DS, so it could have perfect pixel scaling with no blurring whatsoever, but then I'd bet dollars to donuts that people would still complain because the DS games look "blocky" or "pixelly." The only way to avoid any change whatsoever would have been to make the 3DS screens exactly the same resolution as the DS's, and that would have been a huge waste of potential.

Aside from the scaling, there may be some merit to the complaints about the colors being duller, but I feel like that effect has been exaggerated, since I haven't really noticed it in my experience. I just loaded up Ouendan on both my DS Lite and my 3DS in the default scaling mode, with brightness on the highest setting on both devices, and the title screen picture looks pretty much identical on both systems. It does seem like the DS Lite's backlight is slightly brighter overall, so that may skew impressions. Also, the 3DS's brightness settings have a "power saver mode" that you can turn off and on, and that mode makes colors a bit duller across the board. I'd have to check more games to have any real certainty, but my current very unscientific side-by-side test is not picking up any substantial differences.

Edit: Checking out Mario Kart DS now, since it's a more colorful game. Differences between the systems are still pretty negligible in the large screen mode, and the differences are almost completely nonexistent in letterboxed mode. The only thing I'm noticing is that colors that are already grayish on the DS Lite tend to become ever-so-slightly grayer on the 3DS, like the purplish-blue-gray BG on Mario Kart's menus are becoming a bit more of a regular-blue-gray, especially on the bottom screen. But the bright colors stay bright pretty consistently. I think it might just be the difference in the screen brightness.

[Friar]

I've listed my Soundtrack/box on eBay. Contributions would be welcome.

Now that I'm done being cheeky, I persuaded my sister to grab a 3DS today, and scored a tenner to boot to lend her Zelda, and my services as a zelda veteran to offer help as and when it is needed.

[JedExodus]

Originally Posted by Rather Dashing

It's not a "comparison", not in the same way you mean it, anyway. It's a reason not to take advantage of the many DS trade-in programs that could chop off a large portion of the system's price. If it played DS games perfectly, the trade-in(or trade-up) could POSSIBLY be justified. As it is, keeping a hold of the DS is a good idea if you want to actually have some satisfactory gameplay time with a dual screen Nintendo handheld made in the past decade.

Yeah, but that's not what I was on about at all squire. You were saying how the 3DS has a poor library compared to the DS, which was when I came in guns a-blazin' saying it hadn't even been out even six months and blah blah blah. Not this backwards compatability debacle.

I still have my DS Lite and I play my DS games on that because I don't like the black bars if I can avoid them, it feels akin to playing an old PC game that won't scale up to new fangled resolutions.

To go off on a bit of a tangent, I think what camp you sit in for the handheld affair depends on what kind of games you wanna play. I don't really wanna play Deus Ex* or something at the airport, i'd rather something that's easy to consume in small bites in my downtime when i'm out and about is just the ticket. If you want the full on console experience in yo' hot little hands then it's Sony for you. It's my fond hope that with the improved hardware the 3Ds can sorta do a bit of both, but it's all up to the developers to make the console worth your while really.

*everything at the moment is Deus Ex with me, I compared Mrs. Doubtfire to Deus Ex earlier

[GuruGuru214]

Originally Posted by Rawr

If that is indeed the case, I would have complained just as much to be honest, infact I'd have taken it back to the store and just used my DS lite! The problem is, it is a significant difference in quality between the ds lite and 3ds, having lined up both consoles side by side running the same game. You either have massive black bars, or blur and washed out colours on the 3DS. Fantastic. Both of which you don't get on the DS lite. So yeah, I think I'll stick to using my DS Lite for playing Ds games, thank you very much.

Also, isn't the used portion of the screen area smaller than the screen of the DS Lite when you use "black bars mode"?

[Elvenmonk]

Originally Posted by GuruGuru214

Also, isn't the used portion of the screen area smaller than the screen of the DS Lite when you use "black bars mode"?

That's actually because the DS Lite increased the screen size a bit when going from phat, more so in the width department.

@Rawr
I've used the function. Oh my god the colors were blurred out and washed to hell. There was obvious model problems and many more errors.Especially with PS1, it still even happened with PS2(not to the extreme of PS1 however). So, I disabled full screen use since it was terrible. Like, this way would actually affect gameplay for me when it came down to non-rpgs. It also got worse when you put smoothing on. The 3DS one hasn't yet affected any of my games gameplay like the PS3 one did.
Plus the XL was worse since it also stretched the touch screen. Try playing Trauma Center on that.

[Rawr]

Originally Posted by GuruGuru214

Also, isn't the used portion of the screen area smaller than the screen of the DS Lite when you use "black bars mode"?

It is, yeah, due to the resolution difference.

Originally Posted by LuigiHann

Who cares about black bars? The 3DS screen has more pixels on it than the DS Lite screen. Either the image is going to be stretched out, or the image is going to be letterboxed. There are literally no other options, given the hardware.

It would have been really nice if Nintendo had built the 3DS with a resolution that was exactly twice the resolution of the original DS, so it could have perfect pixel scaling with no blurring whatsoever, but then I'd bet dollars to donuts that people would still complain because the DS games look "blocky" or "pixelly." The only way to avoid any change whatsoever would have been to make the 3DS screens exactly the same resolution as the DS's, and that would have been a huge waste of potential.

Aside from the scaling, there may be some merit to the complaints about the colors being duller, but I feel like that effect has been exaggerated, since I haven't really noticed it in my experience. I just loaded up Ouendan on both my DS Lite and my 3DS in the default scaling mode, with brightness on the highest setting on both devices, and the title screen picture looks pretty much identical on both systems. It does seem like the DS Lite's backlight is slightly brighter overall, so that may skew impressions. Also, the 3DS's brightness settings have a "power saver mode" that you can turn off and on, and that mode makes colors a bit duller across the board. I'd have to check more games to have any real certainty, but my current very unscientific side-by-side test is not picking up any substantial differences.

Edit: Checking out Mario Kart DS now, since it's a more colorful game. Differences between the systems are still pretty negligible in the large screen mode, and the differences are almost completely nonexistent in letterboxed mode. The only thing I'm noticing is that colors that are already grayish on the DS Lite tend to become ever-so-slightly grayer on the 3DS, like the purplish-blue-gray BG on Mario Kart's menus are becoming a bit more of a regular-blue-gray, especially on the bottom screen. But the bright colors stay bright pretty consistently. I think it might just be the difference in the screen brightness.

Even on black bar mode I notice it quite a bit. It's possible it's due to the brightness difference, but either way, it seems to bug me far more than it does you, or the other people complaining at me for complaining.

To be honest I didn't even want to make a big deal out of this, I just mentioned it was my only disappointment(And that I'd solve it myself by using my DS lite) and everyone jumped on me like raving fanboys.

[Elvenmonk]

It's because this has been thrown around as another top reason to not buy a 3DS(from obvious people). It gets to be an annoying argument. There are solutions to it, which for some reason people tend to ignore or bitch about, despite every other console doing the same thing.

[MusicallyInspired]

Why can't they just make the 3DS run a regular DS game in the same resolution as a 3DS game? I mean, they're both 3D (as in 3D graphics API). It's not like any scaling is required. They could preserve the aspect ratio (without stretching) but still increase the resolution. For that matter they could also add anti-aliasing filters to the textures.

[Elvenmonk]

they do allow for a DS game to run in the 3DS resolution. Also when you add those filters you'll still notice stretching errors aswell. The problem here is people seem to complain about the 3DS running DS games in the 3DS resolution because it stretches them. However people complain about the DS games being run natively because it adds "those annoying blackbars".

[LuigiHann]

Originally Posted by MusicallyInspired

Why can't they just make the 3DS run a regular DS game in the same resolution as a 3DS game? I mean, they're both 3D (as in 3D graphics API). It's not like any scaling is required. They could preserve the aspect ratio (without stretching) but still increase the resolution. For that matter they could also add anti-aliasing filters to the textures.

Even the DS games that are all in polygon-based 3D tend to use massive amounts of 2D sprites that would look weird and blurry if upscaled. Probably something similar to the N64 games on the Wii virtual console, which isn't too bad I suppose.

[Friar]

Originally Posted by Elvenmonk

they do allow for a DS game to run in the 3DS resolution. Also when you add those filters you'll still notice stretching errors aswell. The problem here is people seem to complain about the 3DS running DS games in the 3DS resolution because it stretches them. However people complain about the DS games being run natively because it adds "those annoying blackbars".

But if I was to, say, emulate a game on my PC, it wouldn't look bad. In fact, as a friend showed me once, the games often look much better. He was running Mario 64 in HD. Given that HD resolutions most certainly weren't programmed into the original game, that upscaling was done by the Emulation software.

The same software also allowed the creation of save states, which is why I don't understand why the GBA games we're getting for free don't have those. Afterall, the VC is just an emulator, right?

[coolsome]

YAY I got my Zelda soundtrack!

[MusicallyInspired]

Originally Posted by Elvenmonk

they do allow for a DS game to run in the 3DS resolution. Also when you add those filters you'll still notice stretching errors aswell. The problem here is people seem to complain about the 3DS running DS games in the 3DS resolution because it stretches them. However people complain about the DS games being run natively because it adds "those annoying blackbars".

As I understand it, the 3DS merely stretches the regular DS resolution to fill the 3DS screen. That's not running it in the 3DS's native resolution like I suggested, which would avoid blurring AND blockiness. What you're saying is mere upscaling. I'm not talking about that.

[Guinea]

Originally Posted by Friar

But if I was to, say, emulate a game on my PC, it wouldn't look bad. In fact, as a friend showed me once, the games often look much better. He was running Mario 64 in HD. Given that HD resolutions most certainly weren't programmed into the original game, that upscaling was done by the Emulation software.

The up-scaling is indeed done by the emulation software, but it does that on a case by case basis. Super Mario 64 is the best or worst example you could give (depending on what you want to show) for the up-scaling, because all N64 emulators are optimized for that particular game, so saying that THAT runs great in HD doesn't mean much. Take a fairly unknown game, and see how that runs in HD.

Of course you can probably run a game and just tell it that the screen is now larger, and it might give you results, but due to limitations, the assumption that these games will never run on differently sized screens anyway and the attempt to get the most out of the hardware, there is also hard coded shading etc. in this which would lead to ugly results for a lot of games.

From what I heard, e.g. Wind Waker on the GameCube uses hard-coded pixel for pixel shading for the awesome depth-of-field effect, which would result in a visible grid if you'd simply up-scale it.

So pretty much the only choice they have is to up-scale the final image, or have black bars, or write an emulator that fixes these issues for every single game that ever existed on the DS, and that's in many ways not worth the effort.

You could also read this post as an argument why PC games are technically superior to console games, because those ARE designed with such things in mind, at least if programmed well.

PS:
A similar argument goes for the savestate problem you mentioned. And another reason is that a company like Nintendo wants to do their things professional and not just hack stuff in their games, which could lead to potential errors or security leaks for the sake of satisfying a few people.

[Friar]

I figured there would be a reasoning as such for the lack of upscaling. I think processing power has something to do with it too, with DS games probably being run by an inbuilt DS rather than an emulator, as emulators consume more resources.

Meh, it's a relative non-issue for me. Playing with the bars makes it clearer than it was on the DS anyway, so I don't mind. The load times are longer though, which is a bit of a pain. And not being able to switch between screen sizes at will (like you could on the GBA, by pressing l/r). It would have been nice to have the home button do this (seeing as currently it's only purpose with DS games is to close the software. Which can be done by pressing the powerbutton anyway...)

As for save states, that is essentially what the game suspension feature is in the VC games. In addition to the quicksave from the wii, you have the ability to create savepoints anywhere, which you can load anytime. Although, you are limited to one at a time. Meh, the game's are free (or £80 depending on your point of view), so I can't really complain but it would have been very nice to have them fully fleshed out like other VC titles.

[JedExodus]

So 3DS sales are up 726% since the price drop. I shoulda went and bought some shares when they hit the floor last month like I said I would *grumble mumble*

[Elvenmonk]

Originally Posted by Friar

with DS games probably being run by an inbuilt DS rather than an emulator, as emulators consume more resources.

This is confirme true because that's the reason why R4 carts work on the 3DS, because they're running an inbuilt 3DS. However the R4 carts can't run any 3DS games, VC, or anything new to the 3DS. Even the special R4 3DS is the same as an R4/R4i.

[DrRocketGenius]

Originally Posted by JedExodus

So 3DS sales are up 726% since the price drop. I shoulda went and bought some shares when they hit the floor last month like I said I would *grumble mumble*

The stock is still pretty cheap right now. I wish I bought mine for this low. >_>

[RetroVortex]

Full ambassador NES titles are:

Super Mario Bros.
Donkey Kong Jr.
Balloon Fight
Ice Climber
The Legend of Zelda
Wrecking Crew
Mario Open Golf
Yoshi
Metroid
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

A very solid lineup there.
Hopefully those other 5 GBA titles will be good.

Also apparently they go live 1st September and you have to re-download them via the Account Activity section.

(Its in the option screen on the 3DS store. Far left one)

[Elvenmonk]

what're the 5 announced GBA games?