Original DSi Design Had Two DS Slots

[War]

"The Nintendo DSi, recently announced for a North American release in April, was almost a very different, very curious beast. According to a new "Iwata Asks" interview, it originally featured two DS game slots.

The original design for the digital camera-enabled Nintendo DSi, according to one of its designers, wasn't well received by the software developers at Nintendo, as the dual DS card slot design turned off game producers at Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis and Development Division. That meant going back to the drawing board.

'The response wasn't that great, and, to tell the truth, we'd sort of been expecting that,' said Masato Kuwahara from Nintendo's Development Engineering Department. 'According to the determined specifications, however, there was nothing we could do to stop it from turning out like that. We unveiled it to them, all the while doubting that it was going to be all right.'

Kuwahara says that the dual DS slot feature, dropped in the final version of the DSi, was added in response to fan requests. It meant a bigger, bulkier take on the Nintendo DS, one that Kuwahara says was met with developer disappointment.

Calling the design of the Nintendo DSi a 'source of some frustration for me,' due to the marginal change from the DS Lite to the DSi, Kuwahara and the rest of the design team say they hope the smaller, less obvious updates to the hardware will make gamers happy. That includes things like larger LCD screens, a matte finish for the outer shell and reset options that are more user friendly.

Get excited!"

Source

 

[ball2012003]

what would they do with 2 slots

 

[War]

-Holding two games at once
-Ability to seamlessly switch from one game to another
-Possibility of games that could span more than one cartridge?
-Possibility of connection between two games with one DS? (As in like getting special items or whatever when the other game is in the second slot)

I'm sure they could think up a lot of things to do with the second slot.

 

[Deleted-119707]

link games together? lol

damn, beat me to it...

 

[Green0scar]

I though they already said this I remeber reading about this before, anyway I dont really care for two slots.

 

[unknownworlder]

That would have been pretty intresting if you put two flashcarts in there.

 

[Hop2089]

That gave me old Sonic 3 & Knuckles vibes (hint think of a certain technology then think of it split in two with the same combining)

 

[XRacer101]

There's no point in 2 DS slots. Nintendo should have put a Game Boy slot, and kept the GBA slot.

 

[Orc]

I came into this thread expecting a DVDA joke.

More Iwata Asks: http://www.nintendodsi.com/iwataasks/vol1_page1.html

 

[Pizzaroo]

WHAT WERE THEY SMOKING WHEN THEY CAME UP WITH THIS? "Let's take out the GBA slot that we all know and love, put in a SECOND DS slot for no reason!"

 

[redact]

i heard about this a while ago, i just assumed they planned to make the dsi-only retail games a slightly different shape like gbc>gba so that people don't buy a dsi game and complain about it not working on their lite or phat.

 

[webyugioh]

here is something else I found interesting from the same interview:

Kuwahara
We adapted it for SD memory cards. To be honest, there was a time during planning when we weren’t sure how much that would enhance the possibilities of play, but in the end we were glad we had done it.

Iwata
What I remember most with regard to the SD cards is how forcefully Shigeru Miyamoto pushed for them.

Kuwahara
Oh, that’s right.

Iwata
Early during planning, software developers in favor of SD cards weren’t in the majority. If you use SD cards, the size increases, and at that stage it was difficult to visualize clearly what SD cards would bring to the system and what it would lack without them. But Miyamoto-san wanted to use them. When asked if he was certain, he said yes and promised that he would make the use of it. (laughs)

Kuwahara
Yeah, he did. (laughs)

Iwata
And—I’ll bring this up again later—he added the audio features with impeccable timing (laughs), and the end result still managed to be an amazing product. It’s just like Miyamoto-san to carry through on his word.

 

[shakirmoledina]

2 slots... ya i wouldn't see too much from it
what they have done so far is good but it could have been improved heavily

 

[ZenZero]

they could just NOT release it, that'd be a good change

 

[ZenZero]

they could just NOT release it, that'd be a good change

 

[imz]

There was an image of a game box containing 2 cartridges for Dragon Quest IX (below)

At first everyone shunned it off as fake but now I feel a little sceptical, maybe they planned it this way very early into production as news of a dual-cartridge DS was floating their way

 

[sa1amandra]

what about DSL owners? maybe the second slot is for storage. for DS and DSL owners, we'd probably will havta switch cartrages like switching disks. It says to switch, we then switch it. But it's gonna be pretty hard for Pirates to switch a cartrage, unless we just take out the flashcart and put the same one back in the the part 2 rom of the game

 

[minoplis]

Well, the Tiger Game.com had two slots, so you didn't had to change cartridges... to me, it's a stupid feature (and it could be a bit pricey too)

Sometimes I wonder if this part of the interview is about the existance of a possbile Slot 2 on the DSi, since they say about it becoming bigger and bulkier, the idea of the slot 2 and its GBA cartridges came to my mind on the same moment, sometimes I think it could be a translation error

 

[AtomicBlue]

This would had been pretty neat.

 

[iNFiNiTY]

Umm what were they even thinking. Of course it would be disappointing, making the HANDHELD console bigger than it should be due to a completely useless second slot.