Found this on Destructiod. Is it worth having your shiney new $250 3DS bricked by Nintendo themselves in pursuit of the R4 or any other means of piracy? You decide. http://www.destructoid.com/using-piracy-devices-could-brick-your-nintendo-3ds-195895.phtml
And you can't disable the wireless? Or refuse connections to networks/choose between networks? In short - no manual networking at all? Sounds crap to me if this is the case. On the actual DRM measure though, it's a tricky situation. People will want to say, intuitively, that this is just not acceptable; but since it only targets pirates, they can't legitimately complain of being deprived functionality without exposing their illegal interests. It will depend on whether the system works or not. If it works flawlessly, all the time, only targetting pirates and never making false positives, it's not so bad. If, on the other hand, it occasionally bugs out and targets innocent paying customers - as Steam's DRM, for example, has frequently done - then it's ******** and they can shove it up their arses. Time will tell. But precedent is not promising - we've yet to see a DRM implementation that doesn't periodically go HAL9000 and persecute the wrong people.
What happened to the days where "I've bought this amaligmation of plastic, electrical components and awesome, it is now mine, no-one else has the right to change it's basic parts except me." Oh yeah, I forgot, we're only the consumer. How silly of us to think we have rights for that. [/sarcasm] I think it's more the wasted oppotunities that can go by when hardware is unlocked (as it should be). For example the first Overclockers soldered chips onto motherboards if I'm not mistaken? But these days... that's illegal, apparently.
You don't understand, Brawl. Curiosity and innovation are evil, dangerous forces that make the marketplace dynamic and hard to control. Hell, if you had your way, the manufacturers would have no shared monopoly at all! It would be a disaster: third parties developing mods, enthusiasts creating unofficial patches, coders making better interfaces - customers actively improving products for everyone! It would be mayhem! Christ, it's not like leaving their products open to aftermarket engineering and alteration ever improved a company's lot, or made them money. Oh.
I saw this this morning and was going to report on it, but it turns out it's complete speculation. Nintendo hasn't confirmed it or announced it to retailers and there's no identified, reliable source cited in any of the articles I read covering it. The retailer that Detructoid points to is foreign and doesn't offer any official comment confirming that Nintendo added this functionality.
Hang on a second... a DRM system that doesn't harm consumers, but deters pirates? Have Nintendo stumbled upon the Holy Grail? Whilst I understand the arguments about hardware being open for tinkering and whatnot, I'm also very aware of the scale of DS piracy. As I've said in another 3DS-related post, I'm a trainee primary school teacher, and the children in my class had a toy day before Christmas. I'd estimate that half of the children that bought along their DS systems were using R4 carts. The DS attach rate must be well below what it could potentially have been. I can't say that I set a good example myself, however. I took my Wii in to hook up to the projector, and one of the more technical kids noticed the HomeBrew Channel on the home screen. As with any 'homebrew' enabling software, it undoubtedly leads to piracy whether that was the intention or not. I welcome the initiative to be honest. There are several other open systems on the market to use for personal projects, so why do people need to crack the DS?
Because cracking hardware leads to things you can do on your system. I can ask the same question as to why I skydive... because it lets me do things that I can't usually do? Cracking/Hacking/Modifying isn't something a company should have the right to refuse, If I buy a £250 piece of hardware and decide that it looks better with software x, y or z OR hardware a,b or c than stock, then I have the right to change that. Some legal doik with a pen in Japan/USA cannot tell me otherwise and should not have the right to do so. I understand protecting their intrests when it comes to piracy but please on this subject... ... in the past ten years piracy has increased insanely. However I wonder how many sales of games, music, media in general are made because people now have access to the music. Sure you always get the "Well it's free online!" argument, but for people like me who buy the game it shouldn't lead to DRM when sales are already through the rough, right? Especially considering the price of media has jumped 10% recently -.- As for using the Wii as an educational tool... good work
My wife has a DS and a R4 cart. The only games she ever played with any regularity were animal crossing, zelda and the brain training games which she purchased. The R4 has 100's of games and tbh they are all 99% utter rubbish. Nintendo's console's seem to have a far higher percentage of crap content compared to the others. For the 100's of games on her R4 she would not have bought any of them so Nintendo have not lost out. As for the supposed DRM exactly how much information is it logging?
lol why would I be angry you fool? I'm more standing up for the fact that you should have the right to modify anything you've bought.
Thanks for clearing that up Joe. +1 Actual Journalism. -10,000 Destructoid sensationalism. I do hope it isn't true. It's cool if the 3DS does keep a log of what you play (Similar to the Wii), but I'd hate for anyone's 3DS to actually be reporting back to HQ with your activity. BRAWL, I see where you are coming from on modifying, cracking and hacking your hardware. In my opinion though I draw the line on enthusiast/hobby persuing this yourself and releasing said methods to the masses in easy to do instructions for something like a console, that is built around it's own ecosystem. To what end does joeshmoe who doesn't know how to hack or crack his console need with someone elses work to open his system up? Definately not performance, and definately not to play a 10+yr old Doom and Quake. I have seen some cool things though, for instance with the PSP, despite the heavy piracy on it (Back in the 1.5 firmware days) there were a very small handful of people actually doing homebrew work. The single most awesome thing I saw the PSP doing was controlling your media center and audio for surround sound similar to the over priced Harmony Remotes from Logitec. But you had to sift through hundreds of Emulators and backup programs to find it.
I hit post to soon, damnit. You just justified my point perfectly Themax, that kind of thing might be wanted by say, one person and then another 2000 miles away, log online and sort the "how to" out. Just because a device isn't supposed to do one thing, doesn't mean it can't be modified to do the other. Experimentation even at the most basic level is fine in my eyes... hell look at the modding section after all!
Tbh, I reckon this is going to only deter 'weekend pirates'. Like the kids who download the odd song from iTunes. They'll hear about this and get shivers. If someone is determined to play a hacked/pirated/whatever piece of software then they will. Simple as. It's bad, but there's a small minority that will do it. In regards to it constantly connected to the WiFis, there's a switch on the back of the router? Yeah, it's called the off button. Flick it.
The irony is that it's things like this that prevent me from upgrading to a 3DS and I use my R4 for legit purposes. Quake DS was one of the first things I used my R4 for. The DS is actually a very vertasile platform (Wifi, mic, touch screen and a few other things) and it's easy to get homebrew that will get it to act as an MP3 player or a web-browser but I will agree that 90% of useage is for free games.
Thank you. Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou! This is the perfect answer for any DRM or piracy issue: don't buy it. No one needs to have a 3DS, Nintendo is not obligated to offer prospective customers anything. If they want to release a system like that then tough cookies. You either deal with it and buy one, or don't. Good! Use your power as a consumer! Teach them the error of their ways by not supporting something you don't agree with! On a side note, I've got an R4 card for my DS that I used to use for music playing. It's really nifty and I'd be sad to lose that capability. Wasn't in the market for a 3DS in the first place, though.
