Nintendo Engineers Talk DS Lite

Nintendo has an online magazine in Japan and their April edition had an interview with two of the men involved with the Nintendo DS Lite, Kazuo Yoneyama and Tomoyuki Sakiyama. They are a part of Nintendo’s Technology Development Department. This is where engineers create hardware out of artists’ renderings. They seemed to have put a lot of thought into the weight and how the system balances when held – in other words, comfort. They wanted to keep the screen size and button placements basically the same. Having everything working well together pushed them to order custom-made parts for the DS Lite. The screen and speakers are custom-made. It’s a very hard decision for them to use custom parts because of the costs associated with them. The batteries in the DL Lite are 20% more powerful than in the regular DS to power up the new brightness levels. Durability was also of utmost concern.

They summed up their thoughts by commenting on how important it was to create durable products so that customers can spend their money on software instead of replacing hardware.
Nintendo has an online magazine in Japan and their April edition had an interview with two of the men involved with the Nintendo DS Lite, Kazuo Yoneyama and Tomoyuki Sakiyama. They are a part of Nintendo’s Technology Development Department. This is where engineers create hardware out of artists’ renderings. They seemed to have put a lot of thought into the weight and how the system balances when held – in other words, comfort. They wanted to keep the screen size and button placements basically the same. Having everything working well together pushed them to order custom-made parts for the DS Lite. The screen and speakers are custom-made. It’s a very hard decision for them to use custom parts because of the costs associated with them. The batteries in the DL Lite are 20% more powerful than in the regular DS to power up the new brightness levels. Durability was also of utmost concern.

They summed up their thoughts by commenting on how important it was to create durable products so that customers can spend their money on software instead of replacing hardware.