RIP Nintendo DS and DSi

[A Black Falcon]

You're right, the DSiWare store was just announced for future shutdown, not shut down already. I remembered that wrong.

As for me, I never got a DSi, so that doesn't apply to me; I stuck with my original DSes until I finally got that New 3DS XL last year. But for future-preservation purposes, I very much hope that all games on the DSiWare service have been backed up so nothing gets lost. As I said though I'm sure that's going to get MUCH harder in the future platform-wide. There are, of course, many cases where single games have been rendered permanently broken because their servers were taken down, but whole game-download services haven't for the major popular online systems... yet.

The 3DS is fully capable of playing all DSi games (they aren't emulated, the hardware is basically the same, just more powerful), but the real question is just what will and won't end up on the store

Indeed, for preservation purposes that last point is the key one, that not all DSiWare games got re-released on the 3DS eShop. Maybe on a quality standpoint this doesn't matter much as you are probably right that most such games were most likely no good, but from a preservation standpoint it does.

As for quality, though, did Nintendo care about quality at all, so long as games functioned and didn't include certain types of particularly objectionable content? Seems unlikely. Do any of the console manufacturers, now, for games on their download services, though?

The good news is, every game that's actually worth playing is available on the 3DS store, except for Four Swords Anniversary, a game Nintendo foolishly is keeping in the "artificial scarcity" pile.

Ugh, yeah, it's such a pain that Nintendo has refused to re-release that in any way... such a bad move.

DS games run just fine on the 3DS, except for the blurred scaling. That can be disabled so it keeps the intended resolution, but that shrinks the image by a good amount.

Yeah, playing DS games on the N3DSXL REALLY blows up the picture to painfully blocky levels, but the big screen is nice, so... plus and a minus, there.

Also I agree that the original DS has a nice d-pad. The N3DSXL's is okay, but the original DS's one was comfortable and works well, why did they ever change it? Size?

he flash memory on the DSi won't hold out forever. I'm actually worried about that, as I wonder if the system will even be bootable when that fails, but frankly it'll probably be a good long while before that's an issue. I don't use my DSi's flash nearly as often as I do an SD card, and my oldest SD card is still going strong. Flash drives in PCs get a lot more use, so they might actually fail in their use lifespan, but I expect this'll last at least as long as the battery backup in my Zelda cart (still works as of today).

Yeah, while this is an issue, how much the flash is actually being overwritten is key, and if it's something only for DSi games and not much else then it'd probably be fine for quite a while. If it's in with the system data then it'd last less long, but how many writes can the chips Nintnedo is using these days last, anyway? I really have no idea. But yeah, I would expect it to last longer than a PC SSD, that's surely being written to more...