Wii - NESdev BBS

Wii
by laughy on 2006-06-08 (#13985)

I just thought about this - forgive me if its been brought up before. I mean, Nintendo is going to make a virtual console which is going to play NES, SNES, GB, N64, SEGA, and arcade games. Doesn't that like...suck? I mean think of all those emulators they have to make. Having made an NES and GB emulator that's far from perfect, I know how difficult it can be. Is it that much easier to make emulators for dedicated consoles? Is having access to direct tech specs gonna make it a piece of cake? Maybe they only care about getting specific games working, but I know some NES games are a PAIN to get right without some crazy detail.

by tepples on 2006-06-08 (#13987)

laughy wrote:
Nintendo is going to make a virtual console which is going to play NES, SNES, GB, N64, SEGA, and arcade games.

NES: Technology is probably based on acNES, the emulator built into Animal Crossing.

Game Boy: I don't remember this being announced, as the Game Boy is still sold as the GBA SP 2. Even if so, Pokemon Stadium for N64 featured a Game Boy emulator tweaked for Pokemon games. Making it more generic would probably not be too hard.

Nintendo 64: I seem to remember that Ocarina of Time for GameCube ran the N64 game in emulation. Besides, Nintendo has the source code for its own N64 games and can recompile them to use a high-level emulation of the APIs.

Genesis: I seem to remember Sega licensing a Genesis emulator such as Kega for some Sonic compilation on the PC.

laughy wrote:
Maybe they only care about getting specific games working

The emulator only has to be Nesticle Final quality: just enough to play the supported games.

laughy wrote:
but I know some NES games are a PAIN to get right without some crazy detail.

Are these painful NES games published by Nintendo? I'd imagine that it's the third party publishers' job if they want to get their old titles onto Wii. Remember also that there are no Rare games on the Virtual Console, so getting Battletoads working on Xbox Live Arcade is Microsoft's problem.

by blargg on 2006-06-08 (#13992)

* Nintendo has full authoritative NES documentation and likely many of the original programmers who knew the machine intimately.
* As tepples said, they only have to support the games they release. Further, they can modify the game to be easier to emulate, rather than having to make the emulator bend over backwards to accommodate a picky game.
* Their emulator only has to work on a single platform with plenty of performance, and its processor architecture (PowerPC) makes asm coding virtually unnecessary.
* They have professional programmers who are much better than most of us at designing and planning an emulator.

by teaguecl on 2006-06-09 (#14025)

blargg wrote:
* Nintendo has full authoritative NES documentation and likely many of the original programmers who knew the machine intimately.

Also, they are making their own custom chips. Given that they have the original designs, it's not that hard to drop a 6502 and a NES PPU macro into the design, and it would take a very small number of gates. That would give them a hardware implementation of the console in question. I doubt they would bother with this on the NES, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there was some extra harware acceleration to handle things like the vector processor in the N64.

by mozz on 2006-06-10 (#14052)

teaguecl wrote:
Also, they are making their own custom chips. Given that they have the original designs, it's not that hard to drop a 6502 and a NES PPU macro into the design, and it would take a very small number of gates. That would give them a hardware implementation of the console in question. I doubt they would bother with this on the NES, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there was some extra harware acceleration to handle things like the vector processor in the N64.

They aren't likely to bother putting in custom hardware for emulating old games though. That will be a relatively minor bit of what Wii is about, and they ought to have more than enough power to emulate the old chips in software at full speed. Technologies have changed a lot over the last 15 years, and they may also find it safer to do the emulation entirely in software because then if they find a bug in it they only have to fix the software.

by blargg on 2006-06-10 (#14053)

mozz wrote:
Technologies have changed a lot over the last 15 years, and they may also find it safer to do the emulation entirely in software because then if they find a bug in it they only have to fix the software.

Even if emulation were in hardware, they could work around bugs in the retro games themselves. Remember: Nintendo can "pull a Nesticle" and patch the games rather than fix/improve the emulator, if that's a cheaper approach. They aren't aiming to emulate the NES; they want to emulate specific games. This is much less stringent than modern NES emulators which attempt to emulate NES hardware and (among other things) play the original unmodified game machine code and data.