In the game?
Nintendo's DS packs dual screens, wireless technology, and graphics into a sleek package. Does the underlying design satisfy the target market?
By Maury Wright, Editor at Large -- EDN, June 9, 2005
The latest version of the venerable Game Boy, the Nintendo DS, hit the shelves last December and promptly became a bestseller, even as Sony planned the March debut of its PlayStation Portable (PSP). The DS broke new ground with dual color screens, touchscreen capability, and wireless connectivity, all in a sleek clamshell design.
Still, the devil is in the details, and we wondered what Nintendo got right and wrong. The design lacks a dedicated graphics engine, and the wireless implementation is, for the moment at least, nonstandard. With two gaming stalwarts going head to head in the handheld space, EDN ponied up for a DS and promptly destroyed it for Prying Eyes.The mission? To uncover the design decisions that are translating to success in the market—and where Nintendo engineers might have made better choices.
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The Nintendo DS's sleek design and feature set made it an instant success at launch. "There have been no really new game systems in three years, and we're going into a holiday season without a Tickle Me Elmo," Richard Dougherty, an engineer-turned-analyst with The Envisioneering Group, said at the time.
Being the first new system after a long drought surely worked to the DS's advantage, but the device's robust feature set didn't hurt either. In fact, Nintendo claims it had to boost DS shipments to North America by 40% in early December. The company says it shipped 5 million units by the end of April and expected to ship an additional 5 to 6 million in the subsequent 12 months.
So make no mistake, the DS is a sustainable success, even in the face of the PSP. In April, various sources pegged PSP shipments at around 2.5 million. That's a million or so below Sony's published expectations, but the company is still pledging to ship 12 million by the end of March 2006. The buzz in both the gamer community and the OEM space seems to favor the more expensive PSP ($250), even though the DS boasts a much larger library of available games and sells for $100 less.
Dual-core ASIC drives design
An ASIC that integrates both ARM 9 and ARM 7 processor cores lies at the heart of the DS. No one (except Nintendo) knows for sure, but most presume that the ARM 9 serves as the primary CPU and applications processor while the ARM 7 handles multimedia tasks such as graphics and audio.
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The system includes dual slots for game cartridges. One slot accepts the relatively bulky cartridges designed for the Game Boy Advance (GBA). The second slot accepts the much thinner DS cartridges, which are essentially an SD Card format, although Nintendo appears to be using a proprietary adaptation.
The main pc board that hosts the ASIC and all of the other active chips occupies the bottom of the lower half of the clamshell, with the components on the side of the board that faces the case and away from the back of the lower LCD. The two cartridge sockets dominate the board, with the new DS slot situated on the edge at the hinge of the clamshell. The larger GBA cartridge connector faces in the opposite direction.
At first glance, the board appears to hold few components. A shielded module is clearly evident next to the cartridge sockets (refer to the picture directly above). It turns out that the ASIC, however, is mounted on the pc board directly under the DS-cartridge socket (the picture below shows the board with the cartridge slot removed).
RAM, flash, and cartridges
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The only memory chip in evidence on the main circuit board, also under the cartridge socket alongside the ASIC, is a 4-Mbyte (2M×16) pseudo SRAM from STMicroelectronics. However, the DS will boot, and in fact run PictoChat, a wireless-messaging application, with no cartridge installed. So evidently, the main ASIC includes embedded flash memory with a BIOS and some limited application code. According to several sources, game developers enjoy as much as a 1-Gbyte of address space to work with in the cartridges.
Display and touch interface
The DS integrates 256×192-pixel, 0.24-mm-dot-pitch screens in both the upper and lower halves of its clamshell case. The backlit, semitransparent, reflective-TFT LCDs can display 260,000 colors. The lower display also includes a touch-sensitive overlay driven by a Texas Instruments TSC2046 Touch Screen Controller IC, which is mounted on the rear of the main pc board, just under the flex-circuit connector. Players can drive the lower screen with a stylus or their finger. Nintendo's engineers also devised a plastic nib, connected via a strap, that players can wear on their thumb to operate the touchscreen interface.
The combination of dual displays and touch input would seem like a big win for Nintendo. The dual displays support many new game modes. For instance, a player could use the lower screen for navigation in a first-person-shooter game while the action takes place on the upper screen. In a racing game, the second screen could offer a high-level view of the track. Thus far, however, the gaming community seems less than enthralled with the DS user interface. Peruse some gaming sites and game-console reviews, and you will find many enthusiasts that would have preferred an analog joystick over the touchscreen.
Graphics, or lack thereof
By far the biggest complaint gamers have about the DS is its lack of a dedicated 3-D graphics engine. The resolution and color depth of the machine's displays are fine given their size, albeit far short of the PSP's level. Perhaps some people prefer the larger single display on the PSP. But the clear shortcoming of the DS is the lack of 3-D.
Nintendo hasn't said definitively what's in the ASIC and what handles graphics. It does appear that the flex circuits that connect to the LCDs come directly from the ASIC. Nintendo boasts that the DS offers better graphics than the Nintendo 64. But users are comparing the device to present-day consoles such as the Microsoft Xbox and PlayStation 2—and Sony has consistently boasted that the PSP matches the graphics performance of the Play Station 2.
Wireless networking
Wireless connectivity is perhaps the DS's most exciting feature. The integrated wireless link allows multiple players to compete in a game, even if only a single DS includes the requisite game cartridge. In addition, PictoChat allows as many as 16 nearby DS owners to share messages and even simple drawings.
The connectivity capabilities rely on an IEEE 802.11b implementation, although Nintendo added proprietary protocols and software to support multiplayer gaming and PictoChat. At this time, DS users can only connect with one another locally. Just before press time, however, Nintendo announced that it plans to offer multiplayer gaming over the Internet this fall. The company is partnering with IGN Entertainment and will use that company’s GameSpy technology to support the multiplayer action. DS users will be able to connect via home 802.11 access points or public hot spots. Nintendo will not charge users a fee for multiplayer gaming the way Microsoft does with X-Box Live. Instead game publishers may charge fees via GameSpy—similar to the way that multiplayer gaming works on the PlayStation 2.
The previously mentioned shielded module on the side of the pc board (refer to the second picture) appears to be the 802.11 interface. Under the shield (refer to the third picture above) you'll find a small pc board with three ICs, quite a number of analog and passive components, and a small antenna connector. The biggest of the chips carries a Mitsumi brand and must be the 802.11 baseband processor. The module also includes the STMicroelectronics 45PE20P 2-Mbit serial flash memory, and a wireless transceiver likely built by RF Micro Devices.
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An antenna wire connects to the 802.11 module and snakes through the hinge to an antenna mounted on a small pc board alongside the screen in the upper half of the clamshell. The antenna pc board includes nothing but a simple antenna loop and two contacts that connect with one of the two stereo speakers.
This antenna design clearly doesn't lend itself to meeting published range specs for 802.11. Nintendo specs 30 to 100 ft. With a dedicated ceramic antenna, the DS could easily support roaming around, say, an entire house from a central access point. But Nintendo to date hasn't provided a way to use the DS with access points. The pc-board antenna likely works just fine in the ad-hoc networks that Nintendo envisions for multiplayer gaming.
Electromechanical design
Electromechanically, the DS features a minimalist design. Dome switches for the various surface buttons for thumb control are fabricated directly on the back of the main pc board—the side that actually faces up in the clamshell. Two "fire" switches, located for fingertip control along the hinge, use traditional pushbuttons mounted on the main pc board. Along with the antenna wire, flex circuits passing through the hinge control the upper LCD, carry audio to the speakers, and power the screen backlighting.
What's missing?
In the end, the story of the Nintendo DS comes down to what it lacks—especially relative to the hot PSP. The absence of an analog joystick may not be a fair complaint, because the PSP doesn't have one either. The game-play experience on the DS does suffer from the lack of a 3-D engine. In fact, the lack of a graphics chip is clearly a bigger shortcoming than the unit's smaller and lower-resolution displays.
The DS also lacks a low-cost, high-density media format. Flash-based cartridges may be fine for expensive games, but spinning optical discs are much cheaper. Sony's choice of the UMD (Universal Media Disc) affords the PSP with 1.8 Gbytes of low-cost capacity that even allows the device to play movies. Students of gaming history may recall that Sony's choice of CD media played a big part in the success of the original PlayStation.
The teen and young-adult demographics also seem to appreciate the media-playing capabilities of the PSP. Nintendo supposedly will offer an add-on cartridge that will enable music and video playback on the DS. But the PSP arrived with media-playback built in—a fact Sony highlighted by including Spiderman on UMD with early PSP sales. The business case for UMD movies remains unclear, but kids certainly love the music and video.
Why can't the DS play music and video like the PSP? Nintendo hasn't revealed the speed of the ARM 7 and 9 processors, but some sources have pegged them at 33 and 66 MHz, respectively. The PSP, by contrast, sports a 333-MHz MIPS R4000 CPU along with a graphics engine and a media engine with integrated video-codec hardware. It's likely that the DS can't do video decode in software, whereas the more powerful PSP brings a codec to the party.
The DS does have one additional Mitsumi chip located just below the 802.11 module. That chip lies among a host of analog and passive components that would seem to indicate that it's some type of audio chip. We assume the DS could handle music decoding without additional hardware, but full media playback will require hardware in an add-in cartridge.
The hack
The DS is popular enough that a number of folks are out there are trying to hack the device. And some seem to have succeeded in running basic code on the handheld. Check out the blog at www.dslinux.com for information, or to try and boot Linux on your own DS.
As for our DS, it won't be booting anything anymore.
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Mr. Wright,
I would love it if you to took apart the XBOX 360 when it comes out. Regards,
Charles Buckley - 2005-9-6 06:52:00 PDT
