The original design of the DS had no backward compatability. It has GBA compatability out of hardware convenience. To give it anything more would drive up hardware prices (you'd need a GBC chip crammed in there), and the cost would be deferred to the consumer.

As an owner of every incarnation of the Game Boy since the original, I much prefer their final decision on the matter. I don't see how anybody with a GBA would feel otherwise.

And what's wrong with the cost being deferred to the customer? Z80s can't be THAT expensive. Besides, people are still buying PS3s at twice the cost of a Revolution. Would even fifty bucks (which I doubt) for the additional Z80 processor dissuade that many people? Plus, I'm a firm believer that

(Number of additional units that would be sold because of full backwards compatibility)>(number of units that wouldn't be sold because of a marginal price increase)

*I* would have been dissuaded. I'm not exactly in the best of financial situations AND I have an SP, which already takes care of my backwards-compatibility needs (which is...Pokémon Silver and....that's it.)

New adopters of the DS would, AFAICS, not be terribly interested in using something with a touch screen, microphone, two screens, and a nice greeting chime that changes on your birthday to play monochrome Tetris.

Silver? I got Crystal, and that's awesome...

Yeah, but if there was a Gameboy DS, you'd have traded in all of that SP stuff, right?

But we play monocrome Gameboy Classic games on GBA all the time. What's the diff?

AFIACS?

The second hand shop didn't have Crystal.

No, for a Gameboy DS would have allowed a link cable deal, and I wouldn't have to power up my Gamecube whenever trading Pokés. Or I'd hand down the SP to my mum. Or I'd just put it in a box, because I don't like throwing out anything.

I don't play monochrome Gameboy Classic games on my GBA because I only just recently got into teh consoles. (It was around the time I started getting my own money.) My point is, noobs tend not to look at, say, Metroid II and Metroid Zero Mission side-by-side and decide to go to SR-388.

As Far As I Can See, derived from As Far As I Know.

Well, Crystal is awesome. I know I already said that, but it bears repeating.

Well, I can't respect people who equate old to bad or primitive to bad. I enjoy the glory games of Apogee: Keen, Duke, Cosmo. I enjoy Number Munchers. Heck, the original Tetris! For that matter, I have a port of the original Mario Brothers. One screen, turtles and crabs and icebergs popping out of pipes, no story whatsoever, just play until you're out of lives.

This compatability thing leads into another pet peeve of mine. This whole XP-can't-do-DOS thing. Why hasn't Microsoft built in some form of DOSBox into all of their operating systems by now? Do they honestly think that no one knows how to use DOS anymore?

I don't equate old or primitive to bad, but that doesn't mean the new stuff is worse than the old, either. If you're introduced to something new, though, you'd think one would want to push the limits of what the new shiny shiny can do.

And I wholeheartedly agree that the XP/DOS compatibility thing is a tragedy...but AFAIK, Vista doesn't support 16-bit software AT ALL. Reason #9326540 not to upgrade.

I have Silver and Crystal. And Gold. And yeah, Crystal is awesome.

I don't have anything newer than a GBA/Gamecube around, but I rather like backwards compatibility. That's why I keep the old systems. I have one of the few NESes that you don't have to work black magic to run. It seems a waste to me to put an old game on a new system with no changes, by the act of simply changing the cartridge. So just make it backwards compatible and then we can play our old classic games whatever way we want.

Some of us LIKE playing Tetris DS on a green/grey screen with no back lighting! With the little beeps and stuff.

Vista = Windows XP 98 : We were lying when we said it was better than the last one.

Oooh, a cool thought struck me. If they had made Gameboy DS it'd be able to connect to Revolution, right? So the DS could be the Revolution Gameboy Player! Eventually running every Nintendo game ever through one console!

Except for Game and Watch and Virtual Boy.

EDIT: And the hanafuda cards. And the love hotels...

Who's to say you COULDN'T release Game and Watch on Virtual Console? It'd only be 100 Wii Points or so, but still...

Maybe I should have specified "console game." Game and Watch is closer to an arcade than a "console," in that it's dedicated to one game. Would we want all of those Pokemon Tomagotchis on Virtual console?

Virtual Boy...well, you could release them on Virtual Console, I suppose, and sell 3D glasses.

I've got one of those around somewhere. Little people jump out of a buring building, and then fall onto the pavement and die. There are also some firemen, but mostly I make them stand and watch, knowing that they'll be emotionally scarred for the rest of their tiny electronic lives, eventually turning to alcohol and entering a downward spiral that eventually culminates in their own deaths, shiverring under a bridge somewhere with a bottle of kerosene clamped in their frozen hands.

I can really see why it was so popular. :)

Reminds me of this OLD DOS game. I mean, code written on bear skin. The name eludes me, but basically a guy jumps off a building over and over. You move the paramedics holding the trampoline back and forth to make sure the guy bounces to safety. It even had a control to control the violence level. Set it to G rating and if the guy missed the trampoline he landed on the ground and those little imaginary birds would spin over his head. Set it to PG and he'd splat into a little virtual bloody mess.