But Kotaku writer, I hear you ponder, the Nintendo DS was incapable of getting anywhere near a resolution you’d call “high”, how could this be? The answer: emulation.
Via this /r/games thread, the latest beta version of the Drastic emulator for Android has a feature that lets users test out high-res rendering for 3D objects in games. You’ve no doubt seen similar things before, whether on official HD remasters or other emulators, but there’s something about the scale involved with the DS that makes it fascinating. It’s one thing making good-looking GameCube games prettier; it’s another to bring clean lines to games that had previously known only blur and giant pixels.
While the HD clean-up only benefits 3D objects—textures are of course unaffected—there are still plenty of games where that makes one hell of an impact.
You can see more screens in this GAF thread. The Idolmaster ones, like the one below, are just insane.