Enlarge/ The 7″ screen of the Switch OLED (top) seen next to the 6.2″ screen of the original Switch.
Sam Machkovech
Nintendo’s follow-up to the aging Switch—which is widely rumored to be aiming for release later this year—will sport an 8-inch LCD screen. That’s according to Omdia analyst Hiroshi Hayase, who is cited in a Bloomberg News report focused on the upcoming handheld’s potential effects on the market for “amusement displays” over the next few years.
An 8-inch screen (measured diagonally) would put the Switch 2 near the extreme upper end of portable gaming screens historically. Among mass-market devices, only the recently launched PlayStation Portal (8-inch screen) and Lenovo Legion Go (8.8-inch screen) have broken past the 7-inch barrier for dedicated gaming handhelds.
That said, the 6.2-inch screen on the original Nintendo Switch also set portable gaming records when it launched in 2017, easily surpassing the once-luxurious 5-inch screen of 2011’s PlayStation Vita. The 2021 launch of the Switch OLED increased the diagonal screen measurement to 7 inches, a screen size that has since become somewhat standard on subsequent portable gaming devices like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally.
The Switch OLED achieved its screen size increase over the original model primarily by reducing the thickness of the black bezel surrounding the screen itself. An 8-inch screen on a Switch 2, on the other hand, would likely require the console’s physical footprint to increase. At a standard HD aspect ratio, an 8-inch (diagonal) screen would measure 7 inches (horizontal) by 3.9 inches (vertical), or a bit wider than a standard Switch without Joy-Con’s attached (about 6.8 inches wide).
Enlarge/ The 6.2-inch screen of the Switch seen alongside the 5.5-inch screen of the Switch Lite.
A potential return to an LCD screen for the base-model Switch 2 might also be disappointing for players who have gotten used to the brighter colors and deeper contrast of the Switch OLED (or the recently launched Steam Deck OLED). But OLED screens cost 20 to 25 percent more to produce than similarly sized LCD screens in the smartphone market on average, according to analystreports. And since the Game Boy’s 1989 launch with a low-resolution black-and-white screen, Nintendo has often eschewed support for the best display technology available in favor of lowering hardware costs (and consumer prices).
In November, Digital Foundry engaged in some informed speculation on the potential hardware power of an upgraded Nvidia chip that it thinks is the “best candidate” for use in a Switch follow-up. Reports from over the summer suggest developers have been shown demos of the upcoming hardware supporting modern graphical effects like ray tracing and DLSS.
Other reports from later in the summer suggest the new console will still include some sort of cartridge slot for physical media. Thus far, though, Nintendo has offered only vague answers to whether the next Switch will be backward-compatible with games designed for the current model.
Enlarge / Is this Super Mario Kart or Where’s Waldo?
Here at Ars, we’re big fans of emulators and ROM hacks that actually improve on the limitations of classic games in some way or another. Today, though, we’ve found ourselves enamored with a Super Mario Kart ROM patch that easily makes the game much, much worse.
Longtime Super Mario Kart hacker MrL314 calls Resident Evil Kart “the worst thing I have ever created,” and it’s not hard to see why. As implied by the title, the ROM patch replaces Super Mario Kart‘s usual over-the-shoulder tracking camera with something more akin to the awkward fixed-angle “perspective shots” of the original PlayStation 1 Resident Evil games. The perspective automatically jumps between these fixed cameras around the track as your racer moves from section to section, forcing you to judge turns and obstacles from very skewed angles.
Back then, he said, “this thing is a NIGHTMARE to play, but honestly I might actually release a polished version of it, since it is kinda cool honestly.” On Wednesday, he followed through with that plan, releasing a final version of Resident Evil Kart to the public as a ROM patch (which requires an original, unheadered, US Super Mario Kart ROM to be playable).
Watch where you’re going!
After playing the newly released public version of the hack this afternoon, we feel that MrL314 is, underselling just how difficult the fixed camera angle makes the game. The vagaries of the Super Nintendo’s Mode 7 scaling mean your racer is often reduced to a small blob of pixels that only give a vague indication of their true position and orientation on the course (a combination with that high-resolution Mode 7 mod might have helped on that score). Then, just when you’ve kind of gotten used to navigating from one perspective, the camera suddenly jumps to a new location and angle, forcing you to realign yourself on the fly.
Enlarge/ A new perspective makes this ghost house even scarier.
Still, after a little practice, I found this “Nightmare” mode wasn’t impossible. With a few practice races, I could finish in first place on the first two Mushroom Cup tracks (at 50cc, at least) before finally giving up on Ghost Valley 1 and its destructible side barriers. Players who find it all too overwhelming can also cheat by glancing at the fixed, three-quarters Super Off-Road-style map view on the bottom half of the screen.
If nothing else, Resident Evil Kart makes us wonder what other classic games might take on new life just by changing their camera angles. Already, we’ve seen versions of Super Mario Bros.played from a first-person perspective and Virtua Racing played from the game’s dynamic “Live Camera” perspective. But how about reimagining Star Fox 64 as a top-down shoot-em-up or a first-person, VR version of Bubble Bobble? The sky’s the limit here, people.
Sometimes, a great song can come from great pain. The Game Boy Advance (GBA), its software having crashed nearly two hours ago, will, for example, play a tune based on the game inside it. And if you listen closely enough—using specialty hardware and code—you can tell exactly what game it was singing about. And then theoretically play that same game.
This was discovered recently by TheZZAZZGlitch, whose job is to “sadistically glitch and hack the crap out of Pokémon games.” It’s “hardly a ready-to-use solution,” the modder notes, as it requires a lot of tuning specific to different source formats. So while there are certainly easier ways to get GBA data from a cartridge, none make you feel quite so much like an audio datamancer.
TheZZAZZGlitch’s demonstration of re-creating Game Boy Advance ROM data using the sounds from a crashing system.
After crashing a GBA and recording it over four hours, the modder saw some telltale waveforms in a sound file at about the 1-hour, 50-minute mark. Later in the sound-out, you can hear the actual instrument sounds and audio samples the game contains, played in sequence. Otherwise, it’s 8-bit data at 13,100 Hz, and at times, it sounds absolutely deranged.
“2 days of bugfixing later,” the modder had a Python script ready that could read the audio from a clean recording of the GBA’s crash dump. Did it work? Not without more troubleshooting. One issue with audio-casting ROM data is that there are large sections of 0-byte data in the ROM, which are hard to parse as mute sounds. After running another script that realigned sections based on their location in the original ROM, the modder’s ROM was 99.76 percent accurate but “still didn’t boot tho.” TheZZAZZGlitch later disclaimed that, yes, this is technically using known ROM data to surface unknown data, or “cheating,” but there are assumptions and guesses one could make if you were truly doing this blind.
The next fix was to refine the sound recording. By recording three times and merging them with a “majority vote” algorithm, their accuracy notched up to 99.979 percent. That output ROM booted—but with glitched text and a title screen crash. After seven different recordings are meshed and filtered for blank spaces, they achieve 100 percent parity. That’s about the halfway point of the video; you should watch the rest to learn how it works on physical hardware, how it works with a different game (an ARM code mystery in a replica cartridge), and how to get the best recordings, including the use of a “cursed adapter” that mixes down to one channel the ugly way.
Enlarge/ Valve took a look inside Portal 64, saw itself inside near something involving Nintendo, and decided to shut down the experiment.
Valve/James Lambert
Any great effort to generate appreciation for Nintendo’s classic platforms, done outside Nintendo’s blessing, has a markedly high chance of incurring Nintendo’s wrath. This seems to apply even when Nintendo has not actually moved to block something, but merely seems like it might.
That’s why, one week after announcing that his years-long “demake” of Valve’s classic Portal to the Nintendo 64 platform had its “First Slice” ready for players, James Lambert has taken down Portal 64. There’s no DMCA takedown letter or even a cease-and-desist from Nintendo. There is, as Lambert told PC Gamer, “communication with Valve” that “because the project depends on Nintendo’s proprietary libraries, [Valve] have asked me to take the project down.”
Ars contacted Valve and Nintendo for comment and will update the post with any new information. Lambert could not be reached for comment.
It’s far from the first time Valve has taken preemptive action to avoid Nintendo’s involvement. In mid-2023, a Wii/GameCube emulator, Dolphin, halted its planned release on Valve’s Steam platform after Nintendo contacted Valve and requested the emulator not be released. In that case, the Dolphin emulator’s weakness to potential action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions was its use of a proprietary cryptographic key from the Wii. Rather than argue about keys, BIOS files, and other matters in court, Dolphin gave up on Steam, while keeping the project alive elsewhere.
Valve has seemingly been silent on Portal 64 until now. Playing the game required access to a Steam-purchased copy of Portal, with one of that game’s data files then patched by Lambert’s software to work inside Nintendo 64 emulators. Lambert wasn’t charging for his project, although he did have a Patreon to further his work on it. Lambert told PC Gamer that he thought “Valve didn’t want to be tied up in a project involving Nintendo IP,” and he didn’t blame them.
The “Nintendo’s proprietary libraries” at issue inside Lambert’s project appear to be Libultra, the official SDK provided to those developing Nintendo 64 games on Silicon Graphics machines (and later other platforms). There exists an open source N64 SDK, libdragon, but Lambert told PC Gamer that he wouldn’t move over to that without assurance that it would appease Valve—and, by proxy, Nintendo. Lambert has many more N64-related and adjacent projects to work on, judging from his YouTube channel.
Enlarge / An Analogue Pocket running Super Mario World on an openFPGA core with the scanline filter enabled.
Andrew Cunningham
We’ve got a soft spot for the Analogue Pocket, the premium portable game console that melds 2020s technology with the design of the original Game Boy. Since its release, Analogue has added some new capabilities via firmware updates, most notably when it added support for emulating more consoles via its OpenFPGA platform in the summer of 2022. This allows the FPGA chip inside of the pocket to emulate the hardware of other systems, in addition to the portable systems the Pocket supports natively.
But aside from finalizing and releasing that 1.1 firmware, 2023 was mostly quiet for Pocket firmware updates. That changed in December when the company released not one but two major firmware upgrades for the Pocket that slipped under our radar during the holidays. These updates delivered a combination of fixes and long-promised features to the handheld, which Analogue has been re-releasing in different color palettes now that the original versions are more consistently in stock.
The most significant update for OpenFPGA fans is the ability to use display filters with third-party FPGA cores. Part of the appeal of the Pocket is its 1,600×1,440 screen, which is sharp enough to perfectly re-create the huge chunky pixels of the original Game Boy screens. By default, most FPGA cores now get access to a similarly high-quality CRT screen filter named after the Sony Trinitron TV, adding a touch of retro-blurriness to the sharp edges of 8- and 16-bit games. I’ve seen lots of bad, unconvincing scanline filters in retro game re-releases, and this isn’t one of them.
The basic Trinitron filter is available by default for “suitable” cores, which in our testing tends to mean “home consoles that were meant to be connected to a CRT TV.” FPGA cores for portable systems like the Game Boy or Game Boy Advance, which shipped with old but scanline-less LCD screens, don’t have the filter available. Third-party FPGA core developers will need to add support for additional screen filters themselves, something that most developers still haven’t done as of this writing.
A zoomed-in photo of the screen with no filters enabled. It’s sharp and crisp, and even zoomed in with a good mirrorless camera it’s difficult to make out individual pixels on the Pocket’s screen.
Andrew Cunningham
The same scene with the Trinitron CRT filter enabled. Subtle scanlines, visible CRT “pixels,” and just the right amount of blurring makes the picture look more period-accurate.
Andrew Cunningham
Zoomed out, scanlines off.
Andrew Cunningham
Scanlines on, default “integer” scaling used. This is the most accurate aspect ratio, but it leaves a black border of unused pixels around the screen.
Andrew Cunningham
Scanlines on, Integer+ mode used. This eliminates the black border and, to my eyes, looks just fine on the Pocket’s screen and makes the effect of the scanline filter easier to see.
Andrew Cunningham
The Trinitron filter looks good on the Pocket’s screen, but it’s subtle; you may appreciate the scanline effect more and notice its downside less if you’re playing while connected to a TV with the Analogue Dock. And at least on the NES and SNES cores I tested it with, it has the undesirable side effect of shrinking the game picture down on what is already a fairly small screen. This default setting can be tweaked without visibly degrading the image quality, at least not to my eyes; just switch from the default Integer scaling mode in the display settings to Integer+.
The screen filters are probably the most interesting and requested new feature for the Pocket, but both firmware updates have many other smaller fixes and additions. Firmware version 1.2 fixes numerous issues with sleep/wake and save states for various games, allows FPGA cores to use cartridge adapters, and lets FPGA cores know when the Pocket is in a dock; when docked, it also adds support for additional controllers and fixes issues with others. Version 2.0 adds support for custom color palettes for Game Boy games, allows FPGA cores to switch aspect ratios when docked, and fixes a “video issue with some openFPGA cores and resolutions” when docked.
To update the Pocket’s firmware, connect the device’s microSD card to your computer and drop one of the firmware update .bin files into the root directory (make sure you delete any older firmware files first since the Pocket won’t delete old update files once it’s done with them). Next time you boot the console, it should install the firmware update and reboot. As usual, when performing any software or firmware update, it’s best to ensure the console is fully charged or plugged in before you start the process.
There’s a rumor going around that Nintendo is making a VR headset in partnership with Google. The rumor is still unconfirmed, but when the world’s oldest extant gaming company finally thinks it’s time to make a dedicated XR device, you know it’s going to be something special. Having seen how far the technology has come though, it raises a question: why hasn’t Nintendo made a VR headset yet?
Nintendo basically has a singular MO, and it does it well: create broadly accessible hardware to serve as a vehicle for its exclusive swath of family friendly games. Ok, it’s more complicated than that, but it’s a good starting point to understand why Nintendo hasn’t made a proper VR headset yet, and probably won’t for some time yet to come.
Wait. Didn’t Nintendo have that Virtual Boy thing in the ’90s? And what about Labo VR for Switch? Those were VR headsets, right? Yes, and no. Or rather, no and kind of (in that order). I’ll get to those in a bit.
In short, the reason Nintendo hasn’t made a real VR platform like Meta Quest has a lot to do with risk aversion, since the company generally prefers to wait until technologies are more mature and have proven market potential. Over the years, Nintendo has also become increasingly reliant on big singular projects which, while not always exactly cutting-edge, have allowed it to comfortably exist outside of the PlayStation and Xbox binary.
Lateral Thinking with ‘Withered’ Technology
Much of Nintendo’s market strategy can be attributed to Gunpei Yokoi, the prolific Nintendo designer best known for pioneering the company’s handheld segment. Yokoi is credited with designing Nintendo’s first handheld, Game & Watch, which at its 1980 launch made use of the cheap and abundant liquid crystal displays and 4-bit microcontrollers initially conceived for calculators. Among many other accomplishments, Yokoi is credited with designing Gameboy, creating the D-pad, and producing both Metroid and Kid Icarus. His last project before leaving the company in 1996: Virtual Boy. More on that later.
Yokoi’s career at Nintendo spanned 31 years, covering its transformation from the then nearly century-old Japanese playing card company to worldwide video gaming powerhouse. His philosophy, mentioned in his Japan-only book ‘Gunpei Yokoi Game Hall’ (横井軍平ゲーム館), sums up the sort of thinking that vaulted Nintendo to the world stage; Yokoi coined the phrase “lateral thinking with withered technology,” outlining the company’s strategy of using mature technology which is both cheap and well understood, and then finding novel and fun ways of applying it to games. That’s basically been the case from Game & Watch all the way to Switch and Switch Lite.
And it’s not just handhelds though. Nintendo consoles don’t tend to focus on cutting-edge specs either (as any former Wii owners can attest). For Nintendo console owners across the years, it’s more about being able to play games from a host of recognizable franchises such as Mario, Zelda, Smash Bros, Pokémon, Pikmin, and Animal Crossing. Since the success of Wii, it’s also been about creating new types of games centered around novel input schemes, like how the Wiimote lets you bowl in Wii Sports, or how Joy-Cons let you grove on-the-go in Just Dance. In short, Nintendo is really good at serving people with what they’re already used to and baking in novelty that owners can engage with or equally ignore.
Virtual Boy Failure, Labo VR Experiment
When Nintendo sticks to its principles, we usually get a DS, Switch, Gameboy, Wii, Game Boy Advance, 3DS, NES, SNES, Game & Watch, Nintendo 64—10 of the top 20 bestselling video game platforms in history. When they don’t, we get Virtual Boy.
Accounts hold that Yokoi was rushed to finish up work on Virtual Boy so the company could focus on the launch of Nintendo 64, which is partially why it failed. Timed right at the peak of the ’90s craze, Nintendo released what essentially was no more than a 3D version of Gameboy—a 32-bit tabletop standalone console that just so happened to have stereoscopic displays, making it no more a VR headset than Nintendo 3DS. Besides relying on some objectively useless stereoscopy, being shaped like a headset, and having ‘Virtual’ in the name, that’s where the comparisons between it and virtual reality stop.
Image courtesy Evan-Amos, Wiki Commons
Note: Every time someone refers to Virtual Boy as a VR headset, or pretends to wear it like one in a YouTube thumbnail, I scream into an empty paint bucket, hoping the residual fumes will calm my nerves.
There was no head tracking, motion controllers, or even games that wouldn’t have played equally as well on a standard Gameboy. Moreover, its red monochrome displays were criticized for giving players eye strain, nausea, and headaches during gameplay. Its awkward tabletop stand also didn’t articulate enough to adjust to each user’s height, making users strain their necks to play. The nail in the coffin: it was priced at $180 at launch in 1995, just $20 less than Nintendo 64 which arrived one year later and promised to deliver true 3D graphics (something which Virtual Boy couldn’t do, despite supporting stereoscopy!).
Still, I don’t think Nintendo tied Virtual Boy’s failure to the larger failure of VR at the time, but rather recognized what happens when it innovates in the wrong direction and abandons its core principles. Nintendo’s successive handhelds focused on keeping the pocketable form-factor, and typically offered a generation or two of backwards compatibility so consumers could easily upgrade. Gameboys to follow were truly portable, and offered all of the games you wanted to play on the bus, train, plane, wherever.
But what about Nintendo Labo VR for Switch? Well, it was a pretty awesome experiment when it was first released in 2019. The DIY accessory pack made of cardboard actually got Nintendo involved in VR for the first time, and it did it with the same family friendly flair the company seems to bring to everything it does.
Image courtesy Nintendo
It’s a fun little kit that uses Joy-Cons in some unique ways, but with only a few high-quality native VR ‘taster’ experiences to play with, it’s basically a one-and-done deal that Nintendo critically hasn’t iterated on beyond its initial release despite a generally good reception from its target market.
Granted, Nintendo did provide Labo VR support for a number of first-party titles, including Super Smash Bros Ultimate, Super Mario Odyssey, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but this just provides basic 3D viewer support, and doesn’t convert these games into any sort of full VR experience.
To boot, Labo VR actually has Unity support, meaning third-party developers can create games and experiences for it; the fact is the headset and slot-in Switch form-factor just isn’t built for long-term play like a standalone or PC VR headset though. It’s front-heavy, doesn’t have a strap, and just isn’t the basis of a modern VR platform. It’s a toy more than a platform.
Switching It Up with One Big Platform
The big question is: when? When will Nintendo feel like VR is mature enough to enter in full force with something like a standalone headset, replete with a host of beloved Nintendo franchise games? If past performance predicts future outcomes, it’s pretty unlikely we’ll be seeing such a device in the near term.
The company has spent the better part of the last decade recovering from the failure of Wii U, the company’s least successful video game console to date (next to Virtual Boy). Going headfirst into the XR niche soon with a dedicated hardware release doesn’t seem plausible given how focused the company has become on melding both handheld and console product development with Switch.
Fun Labo VR adds-on aside, Nintendo has expressed some skepticism of VR in the past. Speaking to TIME, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto said in 2014 that VR just wasn’t the sort of broadly accessible player experience the company was trying to crack with Wii U:
“When you think about what virtual reality is, which is one person putting on some goggles and playing by themselves kind of over in a corner, or maybe they go into a separate room and they spend all their time alone playing in that virtual reality, that’s in direct contrast with what it is we’re trying to achieve with Wii U. And so I have a little bit of uneasiness with whether or not that’s the best way for people to play.”
Granted, the technology has changed a great deal since 2014, the same year Oculus Rift DK2 came out. With mixed reality passthrough becoming a standard on standalone headsets such as Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro, Nintendo would be crazy not keep tabs on the technology, albeit with same hesitation it has mostly shown in the past with its adoption of cutting-edge technology.
Nintendo VR patent | Image courtesy USPTO, via Levelup
In fact, the company is actively creating patents around mixed reality systems that focus on cooperative gameplay using players both in and out of a headset. Above is one such patent from 2022 showing a multiplayer game based on some sort of proposed tabletop platformer.
Unlike a lot of the tech companies out there trying to spin up multiple products and maintain large, interconnected platforms, Nintendo’s main MO is to gamble on one big thing that will probably come with additional functions and a few input quirks. Whether that’s some sort of additional headset peripheral or not… you never know. In the end, the more inclusive nature of mixed reality may change some minds over at Nintendo, although you can bet whatever comes next from the Japanese gaming company will be another experiment, or similar add-on that uses mature hardware in a new and different way.
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What is certain is Nintendo isn’t in any rush, as both hardware and software sales of traditional games still far outweigh VR games. Still, you can’t help but wonder what a Nintendo headset might look like, and what a full-throated XR release from Nintendo would do for generations of kids (and adults) to come.
