How games were made on the Nintendo DS | MVG

A closer look at the IS Nitro Emulator - the Development kit hardware used to develop and debug commercial Nintendo DS games

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#NintendoDS #Devkit #Nitro

[rosalina-dev]

I love how the ethernet port is labeled "wireless".
Delightfully confusing.

[bigdumer]

One of my favourite stories from Dev is around the NDS dev kit. We had outsourced the NDS version of our console/PSP game to a small developer in Utah but they didn't have any (or not enough) NDS Dev Kits. So one one of our managers boxed up a bunch of kits and sent them from our studio in Vancouver, Canada to Salt Lake City, USA. A week later the guys in Utah let us know that the package had not arrived so we looked into it and the shipment was stuck at the border. We got our shipping/receiving guys to find out what was going on and they found out that the shipment had been flagged as hazardous material. What? Well, it turns out the manager who boxed everything up wrote "NITRO" all over the shipping box and that caught the attention of screeners at the US border. We were able to sort it out and the kits eventually made their way to the developers.

[volvo]

This "behind the doors of the studios" stuff is really cool, especially having a chance to see the stuff that helped make games that I never would have come across.

[Geoodees]

When the Swedish Distributor for Nintendo games did a few marketing campaigns (this one in particular was a competition in 'Best Nintendo Player'), they used this device to be able to show gameplay live on a screen. This was very mysterious for me, so being able to see what it actually was is interesting.

[rpavlik]

My hunch is that "Emulator" is used as in "In Circuit Emulator" - a tool used for debugging and developing embedded software/firmware, particularly in the days of mask rom processors. (You'd plug in the ICE instead of the processor, and it would act like the processor in the circuit) That said, most things labeled this are now used for just in circuit debugging of a flash micro, so there's no actual emulation happening because you can reprogram the micro. (E.g. I have an "Atmel ICE" that is just a debug adapter for AVR and ARM SWD)

[AgsmaJustAgsma]

That Arkham Asylum prototype's title screen looks glorious when blown into a bigger screen.

[lain]

Personally I own a PSP debugging test unit that is pretty similar. I would say the biggest difference is it can play retail games out-of-the-box as long as you have the firmware up to date.

[MarcoGPUtuber]

Wow. That was a fast video! You were excited to make this! It was fun sending this to you!

[Bazzooka]

Good memories of middle school coming back. Back then we had to do a week-long "internship" of sorts to learn about the world of work, and I did mine in a development studio working on DS titles: they had the same exact devkits that you're showing. It was my first time seeing the insides of game development; and the image of those devkits sitting on the desks next to the PC monitors stayed with me ever since.
Thanks MVG, great video as always !!

[angelinalewis]

"C" is the language, cygwin is a collection of tools as environment for programming in "C" under Win.

[StormBurnX]

At this point, it's sometimes more cost effective to buy one of these, than it is to buy a 3DS and mod it with a capture card. Mad jealous that you got a hold of one of these, absolutely incredible!

[FaridAnsari]

WOW...this brings back memory when I was working in a video game development studio many years ago as a Level Designer for Nintendo DS games (worked around 8 titles). If I recall correctly, at some point the dev kids got refreshed with the newer Nintendo DS Lite screen and I was happy to somehow get one assigned to me. :D
Unlike working on the "traditional" consoles at that time with longer development cycles, most of our Nintendo DS games took a year or less to make so a project never dragged for too long and before I knew it I was starting on a new project.

I still miss those days, it was a real blast to work in a small team and create something with your own digital hands. Too bad the pay was low so I had to eventually switch careers to something with better pay. Thanks MVG for the trip in the memory lane!

[ARocketsPocket]

I love stuff like this. Dev kits are always so interesting to me. Thanks for bringing stuff like this to us.

[enzoro]

the fact that this niche content was uploaded 3 years ago and it has 515k views shows how much people want to know about how stuff works. thanks for being different, the world needs more people like you

[TheMightyOverlord]

4:58 I love that one of the cable ports is labeled "wireless"!

[felipearellano]

Didn't know Intelligent Systems had a hardware department making Nintendo dev and debug tools, nice!

[beemoh]

As much as the explanation given in the video for the name of the device makes perfect sense, I like to think that everything else at Nintendo is labelled "ISN'T NITRO EMULATOR".

[Scadu]

I love the look of this thing, it's like a piece of industrial equipment. I've used MIG/MAG welding machines with thinner cables than that.

[paladingeorge]

Who knew Intelligent Systems was so influential on Nintendo as a whole.

[pinkwerewolf]

Thanks for sharing this! I used to work at a QA studio and would see some of the testers using this dev kit, but never got to personally check it out myself since I was on the PC games team. Made my day!