MangaON

Title screen of the Nintendo DSi demo shown at Jump Festa 2009.

MangaON (Japanese: マンガオン, sometimes stylized as MANGAON) is an unreleased digital manga distribution service for the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DSi developed by Sunsoft. The service would've allowed users to purchase and view manga on either console from the Shonen Jump franchise.

The Nintendo DSi version showcased at Jump Festa 2009 (Japanese: ジャンプフェスタ 2009) was released on January 4th, 2025.

Overview

General

A poster shown at Jump Festa 2009, teasing a number of features and characters.

MangaON would've allowed users to purchase, collect and read manga on the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DSi with the help of a comprehensive search system. Users would be able to arrange their own personal digital manga collection, with the service offering rare or out of print manga for purchase. While reading a manga, the application would use a "multi-view system", which would move the screen in the order the manga is supposed to be read. The Nintendo Wii version also promised to make use of the console's features, but what these features would've been is unknown. An interactable hub world was also teased in screenshots. The service was planned to be released in Spring 2009.

The Nintendo Wii version was presented as a way to read manga with friends and family, whereas the Nintendo DSi version boasted portability.

Demo Version

Screenshot of the manga viewer showcased at Jump Festa 2009.

The Nintendo DSi demo of MangaON was showcased at Jump Festa 2009. The demo allowed users to pick chapters between one of three mangas. Pressing A on the title screen would select a manga. Holding L and R while selecting a manga would result in the application starting an auto-demo, automatically cycling through all three mangas on loop. It's possible this was intended for booth consoles that were behind glass and could not be interacted with.

Users could manually continue to the next portion of a page by pressing A or go back by pressing B. After pressing A, the viewfinder will slowly scroll to the next panel of the manga. This can be skipped by pressing A again or reverted by pressing B. The user could go back to the title screen by finishing the chapter or pressing Select.

History

The Nintendo DSi booth for MangaON at Jump Fest 2009.

MangaON was officially revealed at Jump Festa 2009 with a demo booth reportedly being branded with the online manga site Jumpland. Posters were spread around the event, teasing features that would be available when the service launched. Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DSi kiosks were set up for the crowd to try out. The following three mangas were displayed at the event on all kiosks:

• Naruto - Chapter 5: 油断大敵!! (Unpreparedness is One's Greatest Enemy!!)
• One Piece - Chapter 6: 1人目 (The First)
• Dragon Ball - Chapter 45: 大空中戦！(A Great Mid-Air Battle!)

The service was quietly cancelled afterwards. The shutdown of Jumpland's website on May 31st, 2009 might've contributed to MangaON's cancellation.

Dumping

Photo of the development unit where MangaON's demo was found on.

On September 29th, 2023, a batch of Nintendo DSi NANDs from development units and kiosks was released by rmc with dumps provided by collection_nintendo. One of these NANDs contained a version of MangaON showcased at Jump Festa 2009. At the time of this batch's release, the ROM was found on a deleted portion of the console's twl_main partition, but was thought to be overwritten by a reinstallation of the system menu.

Fragments of the ROM were found at later dates. A bootable version was fully recovered by MrPinball64 and released on January 4th, 2025. Fragment offsets from twl_main's partition are as follows:

Build start: 0x699200
Stop: 0x7211FF
Resume: 0x91D200
Stop: 0x9291FF
Resume: 0x1B5D200
End of build: 0x2A551FF

Miscellaneous Links

• SHUEISHA Inc. | Jumpland (The One Club)
• Jump Festa 2009 | Aaron Tan (Flickr)