The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid. It's amusing to consider I was sitting there playing NES games inside a GameCube game rather than playing the GameCube game itself.
Maybe it's licensing or something, but the fact that Nintendo doesn't simply have its entire catalogue available via virtual console is a real shame. The passionate console hacking/reverse engineering community has managed to make near-perfect emulators for everything up to the Wii, and pretty good support for the Switch. Accessing this takes only a few minutes to accomplish on the high seas, but somehow Nintendo takes years to add a few games to their own service.
And then if you had the right cable you could connect a Game Boy Advance, and it would download the game to it, allowing you to play it on the go (well until you turned it off at least, since the game was stores in RAM)
Nintendo is the Apple of gaming. They want top-down control. This is evident over the years from how they've treated everyone from Tengen (who admittedly did cross the line in gaining access to 10NES), to UltraHLE, to yuzu. They want control, and they have a huge war chest to spend on that.
I'm waiting for someone to make some tools/hardware for copying Nintendo games that also keep themselves completely clean legally. AFAIK, both the yuzu and the MIG Switch people were kinda shady and didn't stay fully legally above board. Many of the publicized court cases where Nintendo went after mod purveyors, it turned out they were also dealing in pirated software. Where is our savior, who rejects any pirated software or illegal ROMs but still makes the emulator or "modchip" work
Cool video! I do wonder though, how much cases there were those arbitrary compatibility quirks being sacrificed for performance. I could imagine a shoddy job trying to support everything axing performance.
One thing to note is that Nintendo doesn't really have any intrinsic advantage over the unofficial emulation community just because they produced the NES. Whatever documents they have archived internally (something along the lines of this: https://archive.org/details/famicomdocs ) would just document how the system is supposed to work and how well-behaved software should work, not any of the quirks and edge cases being tested for in the video. I think it makes sense that Nintendo didn't bother making an accurate NES emulator until they moved to the "emulator and a bunch of games" model with the NES Classic and Switch Online. The "emulator bundled with each game" model used by the Virtual Console allowed them to avoid doing all that difficult hardware analysis work. If a poorly behaved game exposed some inaccuracy in the Virtual Console emulator, they were able to add a hack to that game's build of the emulator to make the game run correctly instead of having to figure out what strange hardware behavior the game was depending on.
Good video, however on the other hand, super accuracy isn't needed for the vast majority of NES ROMs, and for the ones that do require it, they could have done some special-casing or game-specific stuff to make it work. The author should check any VC packages for NES games that are notoriously hard to emulate. Running SMB1 accurately isn't exactly the gold standard for true emulation accuracy.
9 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 25.8 ms ] threadMaybe it's licensing or something, but the fact that Nintendo doesn't simply have its entire catalogue available via virtual console is a real shame. The passionate console hacking/reverse engineering community has managed to make near-perfect emulators for everything up to the Wii, and pretty good support for the Switch. Accessing this takes only a few minutes to accomplish on the high seas, but somehow Nintendo takes years to add a few games to their own service.
I'm waiting for someone to make some tools/hardware for copying Nintendo games that also keep themselves completely clean legally. AFAIK, both the yuzu and the MIG Switch people were kinda shady and didn't stay fully legally above board. Many of the publicized court cases where Nintendo went after mod purveyors, it turned out they were also dealing in pirated software. Where is our savior, who rejects any pirated software or illegal ROMs but still makes the emulator or "modchip" work