So DS Advanced has posted a patent they found on the US Patent & Trademark Office’s webpage of a touch-screen input technology that Nintendo made in July of 2004 and filed for a year later. It’s difficult to say weather or not the patent is for something coming out in the future, like a 3rd DS redesign, or if these schematics are some old plan, eclipsed by the DS Lite. The patent mainly details technology that gives players ability to use more than one input (I.E. two fingers or styli) to affect game play instead of just one.
Two things about this patent confuse me. Besides the omission of the X and Y buttons from the DS’s right side, is the fact that as far as I can tell, “dual fingered” input can be added to a track/touch device through software. My Powerbook G4 for instance, was released two years before Apple implimented two fingered scrolling in their Powerbook line, but all it took was some third party software to install it in my older machine. It should stand to reason that if a game wanted to use this kind of input they could have the software for it programed into the cart. Plus, isn’t finger-on-DS usage discouraged in the manual? Discuss!