So this past Sunday my wife and I were perusing our Sunday paper with our adult beverage of strong-ass 8 o'clock coffee when my wife pulls out the Best Buy circular. To my surprise I hear her exclaim "DS Download Stations now at all Best Buy locations."

Looking at our DS units stored permenantly on the living room coffee table (one pink and one silver) our goal became clear: we must storm our local Best Buy with the intent to seek out a possible DS Download center and test out Brain Age. Our level of success was not guaranteed to be 100% since the ad also specified oxymorinically "May not be available at all locations." but we had to try.

We stopped at a few locations first since we had a full day's worth of errands to run, but soon we arrived at our Best Buy to find our trek was not in vain. Tucked neatly away into the Gamecube display was none other than the DS Download Station of lore complete with demos for Brain Age, Mario Kart DS, and a demo video for Metroid Prime. I (being the foolish absent-minded person that I am) of course left the house without my DS so while my wife was busily gagueing her brain's age I began my inspection of the station itself.



The download station was housed in a small square white plastic clamshell container with a single power cord entering the back of the unit and disappearing into it opaque innards. The only identifying mark of the unit is the stickers on the side and front.





But wait, the box itself had not been properly locked. Determined to peruse the box's secrets I had no choice but to investigate further. The display case had a gap just large enough for me to slip my fingers through and pull the box closer. I further made use of the demo Gamecube unit's microphone to pry the box open and to my surprise I found a stock phat silver DS unit!



Some more prying showed the DS station's demo software running on the non-interactive top screen and shown below:






The poor quality of my camera phone mixed with the high-lights of the store enhanced by the glare of the plexiglass case makes the screen hard to see, but sure enough you can see the program ds_demo_server.sr1 running happily awaiting wireless connections. The list at the bottom shows the current connections with the only one being my wife's pink-tastic DS.

I would have liked to remove the demo unit from the case and inspect it further (such as the option screen available by pressing L + R + (B?), but the DS was attached to the bottom of the container via some adhesive.

If this teaches us anything it's the following:

• The DS is capable of hosting a game with at least 16 client connections.
• The demo software runs on a standard NDS game cards (the GBA slot was empty and the tech support label says that one should try reinserting the game card to fix any problems, so process of elimination wins again)
• Any future DS station updates should be quickly and easily distributed via simple NDS game cards.
• A dump of the demo station card should be easily retrieved and disassembled for further functionality and testing.

All in all I give major props to Nintendo for this ingenious concept using relatively inexpensive and easily upgradable solution using readily-available components that will be phased out shortly in favor of the DS Lite soon enough.

That's some awesome sleuthing, Pock. Is it possible to transfer the stuff from your wife's DS to your own or must you go back to the store with your own?

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Well with the way it works you can download the game to the system's RAM and play the demo from there. The game only stays resident in memory until the DS is turned off or the demo is exited thus dumping you back to the main system screen.

As of a few minutes after leaving the store she exited the demo to get some Tetris DS time in while I drove to the next errand location, but before we left the store I had just closed the DS thus putting the system into sleep mode and keeping the demo in memory when the system was opened back up.

Apparently in the future there will be addons to games that will be available for download from these stations, but you will have to 1.) own the game and 2.) have the game in the system and running at the time of download.

I realy like the direction Nintendo is taking with this system. I haven't been this excited about gaming since 20 years ago when I unwrapped my NES on my birthday. Now if I can just keep myself calm enough to wait for the Revolution at the end of this year I'll be good to go.

Wow, now I really want to take my DS out of the closet and start using it again O_O This is the reason why I've always liked Nintendo, innovative gameplay experiences. Looking forward to the Revolution this fall.

That's pretty cool!

So maybe in the future the DS Linux hackers might be able to get it together so one could use a DS as a WAP or network bridge? That'd be nuts.

So wait, is this like a thing they have at stores that lets you download content to your DS, or is this something that will eventually be sold by Nintendo and is bieng used as a demo in best buy.

I'm not big on the DS, so I guess thats why i'm left in the dark.

I'm also a bit confused. Does this download demos from the internet? the Gamecube? the DS inside the Magical Box O.o.

In the case of the last that is indeed nifty... i guess

Wow. Turns out this thread got linked via Joystiq, so I expect some pretty hefty pageviews before the day is out.

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This unit basically serves to offer up demos for future and current DS games and content to any DS within WiFi range. The DS has the ability to wirelessly serve up and download limited portions of games from one DS to several others to instantly create a group of clients ready to play the game together. The beauty of this is that you can meet up with a bunch of friends who either do or don't have a copy of a game and still play that game with (typically up to eight) your friends.

Granted if you downloaded the game the program resides in RAM, so just like the demo described above you will lose the game once you turn off your DS.

This ability really sets the DS apart from every other handheld that I've used over the years as it is an economical way to allow a group of friends to play a multiplayer game together with minimal effort and cash outlay. Very groovy indeed.

So basically thats what the download station is doing. It's wirelessly serving up a game stored on the NDS game card. This game just happens to be a demo of future and current games available and a preview clip.

My apologies for the broken explanation. It's too early to explain things fully. I need my coffee first...

maybe we could get some Dses to fold! haha i noe its far-fetched...

Posted on Arstechnica
http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2006/4/11/3549

...at least he was nice enough to download the picture and re-upload it to his server.

Card dumped.
http://www.tardwater.com/drevil/dsd/
http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=9150&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

'Tis a good thing we're on the new host with all this guest traffic. Has anybody submitted this bit of detective work to any other big names like *ngadget?

Not I. I just dugg the story yesterday before I left work just to see what would happen. I think that's where all the links are coming from.

Digg frightens me sometimes.


Oh, and I've got a buddy who works at a retail establishment who promised me some clearer pictures of the unit and its interface screens.