Nintendo Battles Makers of the R4

eldavojohn writes "A neat little device called the R4 allows for homebrew on the DS ... and as micro SD prices fall, it is becoming easier and easier to put on these cartridges binary dumps of games people don't have the right to play. Which is why Nintendo will see them in court. Note, it's not just the console maker pressing charges, it's also Capcom, Koei, Square Enix, Tecmo, Bandai Namco, and Sega. Is this truly a case of fighting piracy, or is it also an attempt to stop homebrew from stealing the market?"

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[Tenebrousedge]

Well, I don't know anything about using R4 for pirating, but I do know that with the right homebrew software, the DS is a cheap portable art tablet par excellence.

Re:What is the R4?

[Anonymous Coward]

For the price of about 1 DS game, you can play DS games for free, all in the convenience of 1 cartridge.

Why hasn't someone/Nintendo made a download cart and service? Hell, make it usable from the Wii for gods sake!

They'd make a killing and they'd just have to keep up the server, and manufacture less.

Re:Seriously?

[Paralizer]

Don't lie to yourself, nobody's clamoring to buy this to play any of those games. This is designed for piracy. I guarantee >95% use it exclusively for getting non-homebrew games.

I suppose they should also sue anyone who makes the microSD cards since they are the medium stores any copyright code the R4 may use. Now let's expand that to include Sony, Maxwell, and all the other companies that make blank CD-R's and DVD-R's because they can be used to copy copyrighted material.

This is utterly ridiculous. The R4 is a development tool, if it can or can not run copyrighted code is irrelevant. I've had one of these things for a while and I have to say they are pretty awesome. (I'm a developer.)

These companies need to get over themselves and focus on making quality products consumers want to buy and stop blaming their shortcomings on piracy that only a tiny fraction of their potential customer base even abuse.

Homebrew is wonderful

[PIPBoy3000]

I decided to get an R4 chip for our Nintendo DS. The kids love it, as I loaded it up with things like Colors! [collectingsmiles.com], which is a touch sensitive drawing program. It also nicely plays music and home videos. My kids were both mesmerized by family movies I took of them from a couple years ago.

There is a long list [wikipedia.org] of homebrew software out there. And yes, you can even get your DS running Linux.