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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

Based on that list, they have tended really only to do that on mobile platforms. It was one of my favorite things about the platform, but it always felt like this was partially thanks to the older hardware still getting games well into the new hardware's life in many cases. Major games, I believe Pokemon has done this a few times?

Most of their home consoles were complete departures from previous hardware.

NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube all did not work with prior games were fairly different (ok admittedly the outward difference between the NES and the SNES were minimal but still no compatability).

So honestly I think it was more notable that the Wii could play Gamecube games than the other way around as far as Nintendo's track record goes.

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First Wii was able to play Game Cube Games. WiiU was backwards compatible to Wii. All theses consoles used nearly the same chipset anyways.

I was always amazed the Wii with its full size discs could play the GameCube mini discs.

Ability to play smaller discs was normal in most CD-ROM and DVD players for many years before the Wii. A few people (probably half of whom have HN accounts) used to give out mini-CD business cards...sometimes even with truncated edges so the disc was not entirely round: https://www.duplication.com/cd-business-card-duplication.htm

Yeah but most of the optical drives that support this have trays or are top loading. It’s a little more counterintuitive to have a postbox-style drive (I don’t know what they’re actually called) that supports different sized discs.

> postbox-style drive (I don’t know what they’re actually called)

Slot-loading.

WiiU also had the back compat hardware of the Wii, just couldn't take a gamecube disc in it's drive.

Similarly, a lot of the SNES internally looks like it was at least initially designed for back compat with the NES.

GC emulation wasn't emulation; it was done with a separate chip. It was more like native support. Eventually Nintendo removed that chip and backward-compatibility support from the console.

(so, even if you could put a GC disk in, it didn't have capability to natively play the game)

It sounds like you're confusing the Wii's backwards compatibility with the PS3's. The Wii didn't have a separate "GameCube chip", its core was effectively an overclocked GC.

https://youtu.be/meZA9KHkFuY?si=5xrsSjNxKLxLnd6J

He explains it quite well. Sorry it’s German but I guess the information about the chips and reasons Nintendo choose them should be all over the net.

for what it's worth Nintendo had planned to make the SNES backward compatible and that intention influenced design choices, particularly the very similar CPU.

Yeah, the SNES uses a 65816, which is pretty much a backwards-compatible and 16-bit extension of the 6502, used in the NES. The SPC is likewise capable of nearly perfectly reproducing the NES's audio capabilities, and the PPU has the same background and sprite layering as the NES as a foundation.

I heard that it was a forced response to Sega aggressively cutting the price of the Megadrive/Genesis to the point that it made it very difficult for Nintendo to sensibly price the SNES bill of materials.

Something had to go and it was backwards compatibility.

Sega actually did what Nintendidn't. The Sega Genesis had a Z80 coprocessor, a video chip that was yet another extension of the TMS9918A design, and a PSG sound chip -- all just more advanced, or supplemented by other hardware, versions of components the Master System had. With an adapter add-on called the Power Base Converter, Master System games could be played on the Genesis.

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