Name of the Nintendo DS leaked? + other headlines

[Ed Oscuro]

Something from Gamasutra:

Nintendo DS Name Leaked?
[quote]According to the personal weblog of Martijn van der Meulen, product manager for EA Holland, the Nintendo developer site is now referring to the Nintendo DS portable as the “Nitro”.

"Nintendo has had a website for several years, for the people who develop games for their systems," explains van der Meulen. "On this website, and on the part where I don't need to log in for, the name Nitro is being communicated. The Nitro? I can't say too much about it (NDAs) but I’m sure it's pretty obvious now for some people."[quote]

Other headlines of interest:

Redstone Increases Midway Stake

Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone has increased his stake in Midway to over 40%. Redstone now owns an estimated $22.8 million shares in the company and has been a loyal supporter of the company despite its recent troubles. This latest investment no doubt arose after the company recently secured a new loan and revolving credit facility.

As some of you may know, Midway is currently working on an Area 51 first person shooter for the PS2, which is said to be very impressive with bump mapping and a stable framerate at 30 FPS (locked) on that system (60 on the XBox).

Jason Rubin To Leave Naughty Dog

Jason Rubin has announced that this Christmas’ Jak III will be the last game that he works on at developer Naughty Dog, which is owned by Sony. Rubin’s decision comes only days after he gave a controversial speech at the DICE Summit, where he called upon developers to unite as a community and criticized publishers for failing to promote talent.

"The speech was directed at the industry in general, not one company," explains Rubin. "But in the future, in order to realize the goals I outlined in my talk, I need to expand my reach outside of Naughty Dog’s parameters."

Activision Faces Insider Trading Class Action

A number of key Activision executives have been named as defendants in a class action lawsuit by a group of the company’s shareholders, who claim that false statements were issued in order to facilitate insider trading.

According to the claims made by the lawsuit, Activision executives issued false and misleading statements about the company's financial position and future prospects, thus causing the share price to rise and allowing them to sell their own personal stocks in the company at a large profit.

The document alleges that the named defendants - including CEO Robert Kotick, CFO William Chardavoyne and publishing president and CEO Ron Doornink - made around $483 million between them.

[Drexel923]

Jason Rubin To Leave Naughty Dog

Jason Rubin has announced that this Christmas’ Jak III will be the last game that he works on at developer Naughty Dog, which is owned by Sony. Rubin’s decision comes only days after he gave a controversial speech at the DICE Summit, where he called upon developers to unite as a community and criticized publishers for failing to promote talent.

"The speech was directed at the industry in general, not one company," explains Rubin. "But in the future, in order to realize the goals I outlined in my talk, I need to expand my reach outside of Naughty Dog’s parameters."

I wonder what kind of connections can be drawn between this and what he said during a G4 interview:

Nintendo had the drivers and the hardware, not to mention the franchises to make it number 1. They just didn't use them like I would have used them. It has always been my dream to work with the guys at Nintendo on a dream project, and if things keep going the way they are, I just might get my wish! *he winks at the camera*

As for the DS name being Nitro, I hope its only a project name like the Dolphin was for the Gamecube.

[Captain Wrong]

Wasn't Nitro the name of a hair metal band?

[Ed Oscuro]

As for the DS name being Nitro, I hope its only a project name like the Dolphin was for the Gamecube.

Hehe, that seems to me a relatively minor thing, but yeah, "the DS" is a much snazzier name

[Kejoriv]

Nitro?! What a bad name.

[tholly]

Nitro?! What a bad name.

yea your right...but at least they most likely wont keep that as the final name for it.

[ubersaurus]

Wasn't Nitro the name of a hair metal band?

Yes

http://www.anycities.com/nitroofr89/nitro.htm

[BHvrd]

Wasn't Nitro the name of a hair metal band?

Yes

http://www.anycities.com/nitroofr89/nitro.htm

Omfg, and I thought Poison was bad! That deserves a .

[Teddman]

More than the name has been leaked.. The specs have too! Here's a translated version of this internal Nintendo spec sheet for the Nintendo DS AKA "Nitro."

Credit for the translation goes to John Riccardi, originally posted at Gaming-Age forums.

[Ed Oscuro]

Quake level graphics? The processor isn't as fast as my old Pentium 200 machine which runs Quake pretty well, either.

[Drexel923]

http://gameboy.ign.com/articles/497/497843p1.html

Yeah I saw that spec sheet at IGN this morning (the link above). Some extra information which is pretty cool:

Development sources have informed us that along with aiding in Project Nitro-native games, the ARM 7 will also be used for Game Boy Advance compatibility.

Will Nintendo still say the DS is not the next Game Boy? BS?

Both screens will be higher resolution than the GBA, 256x192 pixels compared to the current 240x160 resolution of the Game Boy Advance, and at least one of the screens will be touch sensitive. The unit will focus on 3D, with the ability to push as many as 120,000 polygons a second. The system's 2D abilities are comparable to the GBA, four scrolling backgrounds with 128 on-screen objects.

Touch Screen...could be interesting.

Wonder if the extra info not on the spec sheet will pan out.

[ddockery]

Quake level graphics? The processor isn't as fast as my old Pentium 200 machine which runs Quake pretty well, either.

Clock speeds are highly overrated. Your argument might make sense if they were using Pentium CPUs, but they aren't.

As for Nitro being a bad name, it is, but what game system doesn't havea bad name. Gamecube, Dreamcast, Playstation - they're all bad. Or unoriginal and just named after the company like NES, SNES, N64, Atari everything etc. There are a handful of decent ones, I always like the Jaguar myself.

[Ed Oscuro]

Quake level graphics? The processor isn't as fast as my old Pentium 200 machine which runs Quake pretty well, either.

Clock speeds are highly overrated. Your argument might make sense if they were using Pentium CPUs, but they aren't.

Or, you know, we're looking at a processor which doesn't have MMX, doesn't have all the instructions my Pentium 200 has, runs at LESS than HALF its speed, and on a double-A battery to boot. x_x

That said,I wouldn't be able to tell you how many polygons show up on average in a scene from Quake and I actually have a feeling it was less than 120K. Still...I've done some thinking about this, whereas you've just gone and parroted what everybody on this forum has said before, so you could cut the attitude when it's obvious you have nothing to add or use against my comments (which, when all is said and done, I left a question mark by because I'm not sure).

[Captain Wrong]

Wasn't Nitro the name of a hair metal band?

Yes

http://www.anycities.com/nitroofr89/nitro.htm

That's the one I was thinking of! Thanks for the assist, uber!

[leonk]

Quake level graphics? The processor isn't as fast as my old Pentium 200 machine which runs Quake pretty well, either.

Clock speeds are highly overrated. Your argument might make sense if they were using Pentium CPUs, but they aren't.

Or, you know, we're looking at a processor which doesn't have MMX, doesn't have all the instructions my Pentium 200 has, runs at LESS than HALF its speed, and on a double-A battery to boot. x_x

That said,I wouldn't be able to tell you how many polygons show up on average in a scene from Quake and I actually have a feeling it was less than 120K. Still...I've done some thinking about this, whereas you've just gone and parroted what everybody on this forum has said before, so you could cut the attitude when it's obvious you have nothing to add or use against my comments (which, when all is said and done, I left a question mark by because I'm not sure).

??? You can't compare mhz to mhz between different processors.

If you take a SPARC processor from a SUN server that might run at only 500Mhz and compare it to a 2Ghz P4 CPU.. the SPARC processor will smore the P4 in raw processing power!

Power consumption is also not something that can be compared.. you can use a transmeta CPU (that runs on a lot less than AA battery) and have it equivalen to a P3 in CPU power!

Heck, look at the Neo Geo.. what is that? 16Mhz? 24Mhz tops??

The only reason why we have such high PC Mhz ratings is:

- a marketting ploy
- the amount of crap our OS's take up - if we all had the same MB, the same RAM, the same video card, the same NIC, etc.. then we won't need as much power to get the exact same performance. (hence why the XBOX has only a P3 CPU and can do so much!)

[Ed Oscuro]

The only reason why we have such high PC Mhz ratings is:

- a marketting ploy
- the amount of crap our OS's take up - if we all had the same MB, the same RAM, the same video card, the same NIC, etc.. then we won't need as much power to get the exact same performance. (hence why the XBOX has only a P3 CPU and can do so much!)

Ahh, you are much more civil and try to give me some reasons!

Well, consider this:

The Nintendo DS has 4 MB of RAM, the original Quake uses 8 at the very minimum (though surely the cartridge format and today's texture compression will make that difference nearly worthless).

As for OS being a big factor, well, no, that's not the main reason the XBox is better. The main reasons the XBox is so powerful is mostly due to its streamlined memory design and smaller resolution (still 640x480 on most TV sets, though the machine does well at higher resolutions under progressive scan thanks to the good graphics chip in the machine!). At the very core of it, your OS takes up a little bit of RAM while playing games in Windows XP, and if/when the game uses Windows XP services it'll call them. Otherwise, Windows XP takes up (almost) 0% processor time when you're running a game in fullscreen. The XBox has some minimum OS functions for games to utilize as well, so there isn't much of a difference there to speak of.

It's specialization, not lack of clutter, that makes dedicated games machines so fast! My concern is that the specs are more like yesterday's consoles. That said, if the new machine is considerably cheaper than the Sony PSP, has a touchscreen () and has good games that perform well, Sony might have just walked into one huge battle they are ill prepared to win.