This was really cool to read, but I’m disappointed that the section on the touchscreen didn’t answer something I’ve long wondered about the Nintendo DS: what was the extent of the touch screen’s multi-touch capability?
My first encounter with the DS’s multi-touch capability was in a homebrew drawing program, Colors! (https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/Colors%21): I noticed that if I touched the screen with my finger at the same time as the stylus, the brush drew at the midpoint between my finger and the stylus. My second and last encounter with multi-touch was in the published game Hotel Dusk: Room 215. It had a puzzle where two switches were displayed on the touch screen, and the solution was to put two fingers on the touch screen and pull the switches at the same time. I tried dragging with just the stylus at the midpoint between the switches, and that didn’t activate it: I truly had to put both fingers on the screen for it to work.
My question: why wasn’t this capability of the Nintendo DS more widely used or advertised? Was there some technical limitation on the multi-touch feature that made it only work under certain conditions? Did it require some private API (that was somehow figured out by a third-party game developer and approved by Nintendo nonetheless)? Or was the only reason that most players didn’t have two styli, and developers didn’t want to encourage players to put their dirty fingers on the touch screen (which was, admittedly, prone to scratching)?
Thats actually a super interesting question and something that should not be impossible to work out. The touchscreen is connected to the mobo with a 4 pin connector. I don't see an IC on it so I assume it must be analogue signals coming out. I might see if I can work out the way to read data off it and see if there is an observable difference for multitouch
My first encounter with the DS’s multi-touch capability was in a homebrew drawing program, Colors! (https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/Colors%21): I noticed that if I touched the screen with my finger at the same time as the stylus, the brush drew at the midpoint between my finger and the stylus. My second and last encounter with multi-touch was in the published game Hotel Dusk: Room 215. It had a puzzle where two switches were displayed on the touch screen, and the solution was to put two fingers on the touch screen and pull the switches at the same time. I tried dragging with just the stylus at the midpoint between the switches, and that didn’t activate it: I truly had to put both fingers on the screen for it to work.
My question: why wasn’t this capability of the Nintendo DS more widely used or advertised? Was there some technical limitation on the multi-touch feature that made it only work under certain conditions? Did it require some private API (that was somehow figured out by a third-party game developer and approved by Nintendo nonetheless)? Or was the only reason that most players didn’t have two styli, and developers didn’t want to encourage players to put their dirty fingers on the touch screen (which was, admittedly, prone to scratching)?