Yay patent dissing time. With US patents I am told the only way is to destroy every part of them (EU ones you can undermine the foundation and watch it fall over) so I may have to instead settle for giving it a good kicking. Using the link from the OP
1. Device in which I can plug something in to gain more processing ability. How do the NES/SNES enhanced cartridges count here, the segaCD/32x on the megadrive? If they are going to try to tell me a network device and a wireless option make it a radically different device (though I might be able to dig up some IR controller stuff and consoles mentioned had various flavours of modem and networking, not to mention other systems of similar vintage) then that is rather petty.
2. They are going to tell me remote processing counts and wireless does to. I might be prepared to hear claims on how the figured out some way to make high bandwidth, low latency, low overhead communications to be useful to a modern computing setup, assuming they want that rather than opting for the computing types that do not need such things (supercomputers are often split this way-- massively parallel and sequential or just data unrelated to each other that needs crunching). Otherwise the GBA plugging into my gamecube and doing its own processing in games counts for prior art in my book.
3. "3. The gaming system as recited in claim 3," As I am looking at claim 3 is that a typo?
"wherein the one the one or more processors of the game console are further configured to: identify additional supplemental computing devices within a threshold network distance of the game console, the additional supplemental computing devices including the another supplemental computing device; determine a network distance between the game console and each of the additional supplemental computing devices; and select, for use in assisting the game console in locally executing the game, the another supplemental computing device based at least in part on the determined network distances."
So you ping something and then figure out if you want to add it to your cluster? Unless you want to take the shared host duties of some network games to their abstract roots then I am going to struggle to think of a purely game related example here. Outside gaming it is a fundamental part of cluster computing and would seem that they are possibly considering the unrelated thing.
4. I am not sure if this is a copy of 3 or not. I will diss it in the same way.
5. So the expansion does not have to be a handheld and just a computer device of some form. Hold on a minute while I call my server farm and tell them they do not need to have a monitor and keyboard in every server.
6. Exhibit 1 your honour. My docking station for my laptop that allows an expansion card with processing and memory.
7. So you mean when I was playing with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles on the GC and all the GBAs were doing their own thing like in 2. and speaking to the console which was managing it all that was actually a patented tech from 2015?
8. Wait I take back 7. Apparently there is a distinction between local controller protocol which has repeats, error checking and identification and networks which has packet repeats, error checking and identification. Oh wait.
9. Actually do wait as apparently a broadcast beacon (or SSID to use their words) is something radical.
10. Apparently a queuing system for computing resources makes this all different.
11. Apparently my nice printer having a time of day lockout for others I have shared it with is patented 2015 Nintendo tech. If I have to do games (though my printer is a nice embedded device like a game console) then I wonder if any of those mobile phone connection using things for the PS360/PSbone have parental controls.
12. So if I put a CD in my computer, run the program on it and it speaks to other devices on my network to pull data from it which then tell it when it is done. Or again Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, which came on a nice small shiny disc, sent GBA executables to my GBAs from a gamecube which then in turn said yeah we have it all, no need to send any more.
13. Hmm. Did any system link games on the xbox also allow online play at the same time? Alternatively did anything link with the GBA link cable but also speak to a GC at the same time?
14. Again so you pinged another device on a network, possibly also a bandwidth test, and acted accordingly? That is some radical thinking there.
15. Hmm they appear to have shifted to using latency as a term rather than "distance". Hopefully this does not mean anything as I was treating distance much like a road planner might consider 30km of 50kph road to be the same as 15 of 25kph even if they end up in the same place. That said if we are choosing between the data crunching or massively parallel and serial stuff then I will change here. All still obvious to anybody that has built a cluster before though.
16. If I may allow myself to slip into marketing moron speak, so you made a local cloud? The compensation line is interesting, though I can not see it being much more than a points/send your character off to earn exp... type system, or at least that system being prior art for that part of it.
17. So you also want it to count if you plug the cloud into the computer over USB but still have it available over the network to others?
18. Does this mean I can bring my games round a friend's house to use on their machine? Didn't steam do exactly this with their account sharing thing?
19. I guess this means amiibos, or if you prefer you can also bring your DLC over as well as your game. If this means I can get second hand DLC then consider me slightly more interested.
20. "wherein the compensation comprises points that are redeemable for items from a marketplace or information for display on a social network" bets on the latter is what happens more. Earning points for sharing resources. Other than the exp stuff for things like Dragon's Dogma I am going to struggle here. There are any number of computing resource pools that reward people for contributing resources though.
21. For games I will struggle a bit here, unless you want to count are your friends online things, to think of something that "[executes code] causing display of an indication of one or more supplemental computing devices that are available for use by the game console". On the other hand again it is a fundamental of cluster computing. I have a rather nice video encoder that looks and sees the machine is both on and on screensaver and thus is free to help me encode using my network and segmenting the file.
22. So you mean programs can undertake to figure out what ping/bandwidth they find acceptable. All these radical concepts.
23. So when I also have a cluster with something else attached over usb/firewire (though firewire might count as a type of network) and a program manages to figure out how best to distribute the task it was something that Nintendo had thought up in the future? I am such a user of patent infringing tech.
24. So parental controls, or stopping extra tasks when my computer battery runs low/goes on battery, was again something that future Nintendo thought up?
25. So you can say I will share with you if you share with me. I would look up more here but my torrents seem to be hogging my bandwidth right now.
So yeah the continuing adventures of the madness of the USPTO returns and Nintendo have done nothing special here, though I am slightly less disgusted than the last patent of Nintendo that I dissed I would ponder what might happen here but it would be like the time people discovered the GC link up and the options there (we got Crystal Chronicles and four swords), the time people decided second screen was going to be a thing despite LAN play effectively doing that for years and we go basically bugger all but a few wii u gimmicks and the inspiration speech from the cable guy and we instead got xbox live headset users. So yeah I could imagine some kind of super cluster with dynamically evolving AI as people traverse the real world and possibly also have some kind of streetpass that is actually useful -- my device speaks to a random passer by and sees they also like street fighter (or smash brothers as it is a Nintendo console), and they seem to win by doing these moves more often which the base AI does not do like that, said character in my game now tries that out on me when I get back. Or even something as simple as AI calculation is a pain but there is a nice free computer over here which I can kick it to. However I have to be a realist and think that such a thing might happen for some hackers (or see the wonderful stuff done with kinect, we get I guess gunstringer and that awful kinect Steel Battalion) or maybe mobile phone games like those that use the real world but it will ultimately not amount to much.
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