Nice work.
I always thought it was a huge inconvenience to change my wifi settings to a weaker encryption, just to use the DS.
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I’ve been playing through Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem on my DSi XL and I just have to say this is probably my favorite Nintendo handheld. It’s just right in size. It’s not too big and not too small and the screens are so bright and vibrant with excellent viewing angles. I absolutely adore it! Thank you for this thread and all that was written about these machines up above. It’s really been a revelation.
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I found an OG DS thumb strap in a drawer this week. I had totally forgotten that was even a thing.
Note:
In addition to providing a handy way to carry your Nintendo DS, the wrist strap has a special “thumb stylus” that can be used instead of the pen stylus.
What to Do:
- Thread the thin loop of string through the wrist strap attachment post on the back of the Nintendo DS.
- After the loop is fully threaded, open it and pass the strap handle through the loop.
- Pull the remainder of the strap handle upwards to secure the wrist strap to the unit.
- Place your thumb through the end of the wrist strap so that the thumb stylus is under your thumb, and move the slider to lightly tighten the wrist strap.
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Yep… it’s just like using an analogue stick for Mario 64…
said no one ever
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This is once again playable online, and that caused me to look into the other DSiWare I bought back in the day.
And… be still my beating heart!
A little bit of… Touch Golf (aka True Swing Golf Express) jumps straight into my list of favourite games: Golf and a Challenge mode alongside the main game!
I unlocked the credits the other night, and will give it a few more hours to see if I can get 100%. I’d say it’s actually better than the retail game due to the refined interface and controls, and overall tighter focus. Pure gold.
Bah, another DSiWare game I regret not picking up last year before the store’s closure! It’s interesting how the translations of retail DS games ended up including numerous improvements over the original games despite missing some content.
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My DSi XL seems to have an unstable cartridge slot. It just corrupted my save game on my True Swing Golf cartridge.
I have the same issue. Whenever I was travelling with my DSi XL I would notice the system would shut off while it was in my pocket about fifty percent of the time. originally I thought a ribbon cable had become loose but it’s definitely the game card slot - moving the game card in a little will ‘turn off’ the system.
I’ve spent the evening “going digital” and ripping the games I’m currently playing.
But I’d really like to solve the physical slot issue.
If you have a CFW 3DS and a CFW DSi, then you can buy on 3DS and transfer manually to DSi. Long live DSiWare! Not sure about which DSiWare games are still available on 3DS.
https://dsi.cfw.guide/dumping-dsiware (also I just added this to the DIY ripping thread)
Thanks for this. Alas I don’t have either yet, though I do have a spare DSi XL and a spare 3DS (lent to a friend though) that I can get homebrew on.
There are some cool Japan-only DSiWare games which I picked up for my Japanese 3DS - games which were originally boxed releases but put on DSiWare because they were hard to buy in modern games.
One of them is Koropata (Coropata on the box), iirc.
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I may have gone overboard in the last two gens.
I managed to not grab any 2DS systems and I think I deserve some credit for that. 
I will take a photo at some point but between me and my wife we’re at:
two DS lites
two DSi XL
one regular 3DS
three 3DS XLs
two new 3DS XLs
one 2DS
Damn, I love the DS(i) line. I’m only missing that sweet, sweet XL at this point.
I think it’s important to clarify that my publicly stated 2019 resolution is to buy less games, not necessarily less hardware to play those games. 
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I can’t understate how much of an improvement those DSi XL screens are after using a regular DSi for a couple of weeks.
Managed to pick up a couple of games I was looking for in Japan (but unfortunately not English of the Dead, which I still want): Okaeri! Chibi Robo and Umihara Kawase Shun Kanzenban. But I didn’t have a DS with me so I found a mint condition DSi for 2000(!) yen. I almost feel guilty for using it given how new it still looks and feels.
Coming back to the DSi XL has been a revelation though - Umihara Kawase Shun has almost constant scrolling of backgrounds and movement of sprites and it already looks heaps better, with none of the obvious ghosting from the DSi and much more natural colour reproduction.
I find it interesting how the Nintendo DS is the last system to support hardware sprites, despite launching about a decade after PS1, N64 and Saturn, which were also the first popular systems to start generating sprites differently.
With 3D games on DS with sprites (like Radiant Historia) I’m guessing those aren’t drawn in the traditional way?
On 3D systems sprites are drawn as “billboards” rather than on 2D systems where they are drawn as a bunch of “tiles”. Indeed DS was the last system I know of that provided optimised tile hardware (actually it provided two approaches to 2D and one for 3D).
Billboards - great way to put it! I couldn’t think of a good one. Yeah, I’m guessing the DS does that too in games with 3D backgrounds and sprites. I remember when Octopath Traveler glitched out and showed only white billboards for all sprites. Like the temporal antialiasing ruining the sprite pixel art it looked so off…
Game development is so foreign to me. I wouldn’t think that would be something dependent on the hardware of modern systems. I’d think, instead, that it would be dependent on whatever engine you are using. But it shows how little I know about how video games are made.