Isnt it pretty much just the Wii and Wii U? I guess you could play GameCube disks on a Wii but calling the Wii a modernized version of the GameCube is a real stretch.
New 3DS crying in the corner because it didn't even get a side mention, which about matches the number of exclusives it had.
I'd kill to see a New 2DS XL with this mod, however...
The graphics chip was even fixed-function, like the Gamecube's, not shader-based like the Xbox 360 or PS3.
The graphics architecture was even the same between Wii and GameCube - ATI's Flipper, just with 50% higher clocks on the Wii.
I've always wondered how true this is — I feel like if it was literally true, we'd see a lot of NES ROMhacks that involve editing the ROM's layout and metadata bits just enough that it's now a SNES ROM, and then taking advantage of SNES capabilities in the mod. But I don't believe I've ever seen something like that.
I do understand that the SNES CPU is basically a "very extended" 6502; and that the SNES PPU's default-on-boot graphics mode is compatible with drawing NES-PPU-formatted CHR-ROM data; and that there's a "legacy compatibility" joypad input MMIO in the right place in address space to allow a game that was programmed for the NES to read the "NES subset" of a SNES controller's buttons.
But is the SNES's (variant) 65C816 ISA a strict superset of the NES's (variant) 6502 ISA? Or would they have had to effectively go through the assembly code of SMB3 with a fine-toothed comb, fixing up little compatibilities in the available instructions here and there, to get it to run on the SNES?
(Though actually, even if they did have to do that, I imagine it would be still be possible to automate that process — i.e. it would be theoretically possible to write a NES-to-SNES static transpiler. In fact, it's so seemingly-tenable, that I'm a bit surprised to have never heard of such a project!)
SNES 2bpp tile format is actually identical to the Game Boy's format; iirc the difference from NES is that the bitplanes are interleaved instead of separate.
> But is the SNES's (variant) 65C816 ISA a strict superset of the NES's (variant) 6502 ISA?
Mostly yes, the biggest exception being the infamous illegal opcodes which a few NES games did use. The other being that decimal mode actually works.
The main challenge in porting a game from NES to SNES would have been with the wildly different PPU and audio systems.
> it would be theoretically possible to write a NES-to-SNES static transpiler.
For simple games, static translation might be possible, but later era NES games' widespread use of cycle-timed raster effects and bank switching mappers makes it more complicated. (You could theoretically put such a mapper in an SNES cart too, but nobody did that.)
You could just ask the developers of Dolphin (Gamecube/Wii emulator). There's a reason for why the same emulator can emulate both consoles.