Patents sometimes can be a great source of information on upcoming products, other times they can be furphies or subterfuge in order to throw people off the scent. So what to make this new patent filed by Nintendo then?
A new patent discovered this week, but filed earlier this year is for a ‘stationary’ game system. There’s not too unique about the patent or the language used in it, it’s very broad and vague but there is one part that stands out.
The example system is not provided with an optical disk drive for reading out a program and/or data from an optical disk.
Whatever this system is, it won’t have an optical disc drive in it and instead will load data via network or via card based memory (SD cards). It’s also possible this means games (or just software) could be loaded on cards much like the Nintendo 3DS is now.
It also mentions a controller with its own screen, multiple memory sources including an internal drive and a hard drive built in to hold the operation system and games. There’s also mention of an external optical drive, which could be used for backwards compatibility we suspect.
So is this new, network based, disc-drive less system the NX? There’s no one to be sure but it is going to stir up something thoughts.
What do you think? Would you go for a Nintendo system that had no optical drive?
Source: USPTO
Put a pin in it.
Preinstalled this time.