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Re: A Free Software Inquiry regarding Nintendo DS


From: Ingo Ruhnke
Subject: Re: A Free Software Inquiry regarding Nintendo DS
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 20:34:03 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.1007 (Gnus v5.10.7) Emacs/21.3 (gnu/linux)

Zen Lunatic <lunaticster@gmail.com> writes:

> But I never thought this meant the games were free software. What do
> you think? Should the DS be praised by free software users because
> it allows users to download for gratis the games wirelessly from
> other users who wish to versus a user in a game?

Aehm, no. That is really nothing more than an implementation detail on
how multiplayer works. The games are still copyrighted as always, you
don't get the code, nada. Beside from that, this feature is all but
new, the GBA already had the same (but less usefull due to not enough
RAM) and even in the PC world there have been a bunch of games
(Warcraft2) that had seperate multiplayer installs which allowed to
play against other people on the LAN without buying a game for each
and every player. In the end the whole thing is useless for
singleplayer, the game only get transfered into the RAM, so no matter
what it goes bye,bye once you reset the console, beside from that it
doesn't allow singleplayer in the first place.

The NintendoDS could be an interesting toy to run Free Software on it
if somebody manages to figure out how the upload of software to the
NintendoDS works via a normal WLAN connection, but thats it.

Nintendo never was much open about their hardware and they have even
tried successfully to outlaw flash-cards for their devices.

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