The DSi's been out for months in Japan, though. And the SDK was surely made available before the release of the hardware. Making DSi-exclusive retail software simply isn't a priority for most developers, since the DS Lite has a much larger user base.
The DSi will have to make do with DSiWare and the occasional casual title until it's sold more.
It's not as much about the SDK as it's about common sense. Lots of developers lack it.
The DS is perfectly capable of putting 3D graphics on both screens, but it's just not a good idea most of the time. Heck, I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one game that does it. But for gameplay it's not a good idea, as the quality of the graphics would go down considerably.
Oh, you know what game could totally be released for the DSi?
Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII.
It's a Japan-only cellphone game that used the phone's camera to synthesize Materia. The Materia would turn out differently depending on the colors in the picture. And that's really only the beginning of what creative developers could do with a camera-oriented game. Imagine a Pokémon game where the sounds and pictures you capture and upload to Nintendo's servers would reward you with the monsters that are deemed the best matches to the content you sent.
The DS doesn't play GB and GBC games, though. And I wouldn't be surprised if they end up releasing Wonderswan and GameGear games as well.
Oh, yes. The "third pillar" thing. I didn't believe that for a second. It was clear as day from the very beginning that it was their insurance in the case of the DS failing.
It's not the same with the DSi, though. The DS was always backwards compatible with GBA games, so it had always every right to call itself the successor to the GBA. The DSi, however, both adds and removes functionality. While the original DS was always a clear upgrade, the DSi is also very clearly a sidegrade. It can't replace the DS Lite, but it offers things that the Lite doesn't.
It's not about too much "shit" going on. It's not about too many calculations. I'm talking about if a game tries to keep more than 4 MB of data in its RAM. It doesn't have any virtual memory to shuffle data to, so what it'll do is either freeze up because it can't load the data it needs, or it'll do so because it's trying to write to a memory address that doesn't exist.
Makes me wonder if the DS has some kind of a BSoD for situations like that.
Technically... Halo 2 isn't a DX10 game. It's very much DX9. It's just programmed to not allow itself to be run on a non-Vista system. There's a crack out there to take care of that.
Really, though, the main market for Game Boy on the Virtual Console will lie in the titles you're not likely to find at GameStop anymore. Classic Game Boy games. Super Mario Land and such. Hell, maybe they'll even put the unreleased DX version of Metroid 2 up there at some point. That'd be sweet.
I did want to get a DS Lite at one point, but I wasn't able to justify the purchase until around the time when the DS was announced... and at that point I realized it would just be a waste of money, what with the backwards compatibility. So in a sense, the DS was my GBA SP.
And the Game Boy micro didn't play classic Game Boy games. How silly was that?
Awesome.
