Linux is a wonderful operating system family, if you want you can have conversations that look not unlike the following to the actually quite clued up observer.
One of the bigger criticisms of it is "I don't care, I just want my surround sound system to work" and that is actually quite valid.
I am seeing something similar happen to the 3ds. Now some of this might be good design on Nintendo's part, however I will get Hanlon's razor up in here and just assume it is them being incompetent about modern systems design.
The main two issues I see are
Ability to at least upgrade to an arbitrary firmware version offline. As there is nothing in place to prevent it then downgrades would also want to happen for the homebrew capable.
Ability to apply certain game updates in whatever capacity you so desire.
I look at something like the 360 where upgrading dashboards "offline" is a matter of copying a file to a USB drive (or somewhere it can see) and letting it run. 360 game updates/patches (called title updates aka TUs). There are sites to download them, you can clear them and you can put in whatever ones you want. It is not quite as easy as dashboard updates but well within a 10 step guide, online play does need the latest patches but that is OK too.
The hacker equivalents are not much worse, or in the case of title updates then even easier when you have FTP to the drive.
Now MS themselves provided a lot of that architecture but I see no great reason why something similar can not happen for the 3ds. Naturally you would also want to account for rednand/emunand.
Once more I have no real interest in the 3ds (weak hardware and somewhat undeveloped SDK compared to the competition, no games, poor hacking situation, not much better ROM hacking situation and no promise of anything better) but if someone is looking for a project then you probably could do worse.
One of the bigger criticisms of it is "I don't care, I just want my surround sound system to work" and that is actually quite valid.
I am seeing something similar happen to the 3ds. Now some of this might be good design on Nintendo's part, however I will get Hanlon's razor up in here and just assume it is them being incompetent about modern systems design.
The main two issues I see are
Ability to at least upgrade to an arbitrary firmware version offline. As there is nothing in place to prevent it then downgrades would also want to happen for the homebrew capable.
Ability to apply certain game updates in whatever capacity you so desire.
I look at something like the 360 where upgrading dashboards "offline" is a matter of copying a file to a USB drive (or somewhere it can see) and letting it run. 360 game updates/patches (called title updates aka TUs). There are sites to download them, you can clear them and you can put in whatever ones you want. It is not quite as easy as dashboard updates but well within a 10 step guide, online play does need the latest patches but that is OK too.
The hacker equivalents are not much worse, or in the case of title updates then even easier when you have FTP to the drive.
Now MS themselves provided a lot of that architecture but I see no great reason why something similar can not happen for the 3ds. Naturally you would also want to account for rednand/emunand.
Once more I have no real interest in the 3ds (weak hardware and somewhat undeveloped SDK compared to the competition, no games, poor hacking situation, not much better ROM hacking situation and no promise of anything better) but if someone is looking for a project then you probably could do worse.
