At the recent Toy Fair in New York, Nintendo Executive Vice President in charge of Sales and Marketing, Peter Main, did mention Nintendo's next-generation hardware but only noted that it would be released by at least the end of 2000. But Minoru Arakawa, President of NOJ, has released more info on the next-generation system. The Dolphin will supposedly run on DVD (Digital Video/Versatile Disk) instead of cartridges, cutting down the cost of games. Silicon Graphics, Inc. developed the N64 chip-set, and originally filed a suit against ArtX to prevent them from developing and producing the Dolphin chip set. But the two companies came to an agreement and ArtX continues development.

But in order for the new system to be a success, Nintendo must do a variety of things. First, they must loose the cartridges.The were the best invention for video games about 13 years ago. But now CD's are the cheapest, and most efficient game achievements.

Second, a high speed modem is needed. Sega's Dreamcast is equipped with a 28.8 Kilobyte modem for game play with a friend, even if he's 200 miles away! If Nintendo even wants to get close to beating Sega, They should definately equip the Dolphin with a 33.6 modem, at barely any extra cost.

Third is their target advertising. With their previous systems, Nintendo marketed directly at young children. But, as they found out with the N64, games like Goldeneye and Zelda: Ocarina of Time attract people of all ages. They should stay away from fuzzy, cute character games like Diddy Kong Racing and Conker 64. Because now the gaming world mostly consists of teens and young adults. I don't know how many 16-year-old's want to drive a chimp around in circles; not a lot I can assure you.

Fourth, they need to add a bit more memory. The N64 had a very low 4 Megabytes of random access memory (RAM). Thats not enough to run the program that used to type this up with. Even with the 4MB Expansion Pack, the memory is still only 8 Megabytes. With the cost of RAM dropping, there would be no excuse for there not to be more than 21MB in the new system.

Now we have some quotes from Nintendo insiders gathered from across the net. IGN64 is always on top of everything.

"We are developing a more advanced video game system, but we are not providing any specifics at this time."

"Management is claiming better graphics than the Playstation 2, and supposedly it will run on DVD, but that's still a big maybe at this point."

"The buzz is that the system is a lot easier to program for than the Nintendo 64, and it appears Art-X [the system's graphics chip provider] managed to slap out a nasty chipset for pretty cheap."