How inaccurate are Nintendo's official emulators? [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
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.
If they every have a badly selling console like the Wii u again expect them to ramp up emulators to look generous and add a lot of value quickly.
Is Breath of the Wild really going to lose sales to Legend of Zelda? Are there really consumers who will only buy one or the other?
They also have more marginal games - captain toad or whatever - sold at the same price as their big titles. Those seem pretty vulnerable imo.
I'm not quite sure it displaces Double Dash as far as straight-up obsoleting it, but it's the first I've seen that brings enough good new stuff to the table that I'd at least sometimes choose it over DD, all else being equal. Every other one I was like "this is OK but I'd sorta rather just be playing Double Dash".
Another case where my "nostalgia" one is the N64 game, not Melee, so I don't think it's a nostalgia thing making me prefer the Gamecube version.
Additionally video games can be a major time investment. Disney doesn't worry about the older Star Wars movies cannibalizing interest in the new ones because you can match the original trilogy in a single evening, were beating a single game could potentially take months. The quality of the entire Zelda series on average is extremely high and the majority of the games are still worth playing, a young gamer could easily start going through the library and find themselves having enough fun to just keep focusing on that instead of purchase the latest and greatest at top dollar.
I blame the widespread adoption of digital communications. What's the saying? A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can pull its pants up?
We should have kept the internet for nerds only. The day we introduced e-commerce to the internet, we killed it.
Eternal September indeed.
The nesticle emulator blew my mind as a kid.
the parent comment mentioned:
> Yup, they're sitting on millions of hours of work because of some nefarious business logic. Probably they determined that making old games available would negatively impact the sales of their new products, at least enough to be a problem. Whatever the reason, a shame.
so he replied with "yeah, id software did that and people forgot about doom" exactly because that gave new life to the old game and the franchise probably has better health today due to the community involvement. (not a great analogy, but has a point)
Sounds similar to Donkey Kong 64 (1999) that had an arcade machine inside a level that let you play the original Donkey Kong (1981): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwPRHdhhVK8
> Nintendo doesn't simply have its entire catalogue available via virtual console
Not entirely the same, but Nintendo does offer a lot of their classic games through the Nintendo Switch Online membership: https://www.nintendo.com/us/online/nintendo-switch-online/cl...
Interesting tidbit about that is that it was carefully recreated from scratch by Rare, rather than being emulated, because Nintendo doesn't have/own the rights to the original source code. They originally had Ikegami Tsushinki do the programming for the arcade version, who later claimed ownership of the source code and eventually won the lawsuit.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-secret-history-of...
People have even come up with generic gift codes that can unlock some of the NES games Nintendo never "officially" released for AC, like Legend of Zelda, Punch-Out, and a few others.
My entire basement house in the original Animal Crossing is filled with nothing but gyroids and NES games.
Ex. We'll probably never see the first six FF games on Switch Online, Square Enix is just unlikely to agree to that for a variety of reasons.
The NES didn't have software lockout in Japan. Most third-party Famicom[0] games were manufactured and sold by their publishers, with little or no control from Nintendo. Nintendo's way to wrestle back control over their platform was the Famicom Disk System, a disk drive add-on that was intended to work around the NES's 32k ROM limit (and associated costs of ROM) with cheaper disks that could hold up to 64k of loadable data per side.
The key was that the FDS had two lockout features that Famicom cartridges didn't:
- FDS disks had an imprint of the Nintendo logo at the bottom that meshed with plates in the disk drive. If your disk did not say Nintendo on it, it would not mount in the drive and the game would not play.
- FDS disks were rewritable, and Nintendo planned to sell games at special vending machines that would write you a fresh disk. If you weren't selling your game through Nintendo, your game wouldn't be on these vending machines.
So if you wanted your game on FDS, you needed to sign a distribution agreement with Nintendo. I'm told the terms were rather draconian. Most developers just... put larger ROMs and better enhancement chips on their third-party Famicom cartridges. This continued until someone figured out how to copy FDS games using just the RAM adapter carts and Nintendo gave up on the FDS concept entirely.
To be clear, Nintendo did have software lockout in the US, and you did have to license your game to Nintendo and have them sell copies of it using their hardware. This caused a lot of problems for NES releases of Famicom games that had custom chips in them (e.g. Contra). But even then, these were not perpetual licenses.
A perpetuality requirement would have killed any and all licensed games stone dead. If you're making a movie tie-in cash grab game on NES, you don't want to have to license that movie in perpetuity just because Nintendo demands a perpetual sublicense for a game with an expected shelf-life of about a year. Hell, not even Nintendo licensed Mike Tyson for Punch-Out perpetually.
[0] "Famicom" is just "Nintendo" in Japanese!
I think that would have been unlikely to occur to Nintendo's lawyers, since in the NES era, publishers required the developer's co-operation to provide masters targeting any additional platforms. This was before intergenerational emulation and internet distribution became widespread, and Nintendo would have had a sunset date for NES title sales.
In the early days of television, many broadcasters were prohibited by contract to retain any copies of the performance, because no value was seen in reusing them, and there's no other reason to give them any rights. Also see shows like WKRP in Cincinnati where music was only licensed for the slim purpose of the original broadcast (and perhaps direct repeats in syndication), but for release on home video, the music used did not support that use, so it had to be replaced.
And there's the reason Nintendo isn't doing it. The top priority for them by a massive margin is consistency. The QA they perform for their own products would require an absolutely enormous amount of staff, all for a minuscule payout because there just is not the kind of demand for those games that would justify such a return.
Even if Nintendo wanted to use existing emulators, they wouldn't touch a GPL project like Dolphin anyway. They do use open source libraries in their games but never, ever GPL ones for fairly obvious reasons.
Tomohiro Kawase, the guy who did the Animal Crossing NES emulator, was a part of the emulation community in the 90s and contributed to iNES. It makes sense that he kept using that header format when he started working at Nintendo.
However, if Nintendo had released any NES ROMs with a "DiskDude!" header? Then maybe. AFAIK this never happened though, and the big leak proved that they had a full final (and sometimes post-final or unreleased final) archive with split PRG/CHR, so they didn't need to use DiskDude! ROMs.
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
Did you see the "Donkey Kong 25th Anniversary" NES hack that Nintendo did, that shipped on red Wiis in certain regions? It's one of the sloppiest hacks I've ever seen. Based on that alone, I'd say the community knows more about the NES than current Nintendo does.
It was probably only semi-deliberate, though. Even more than for hobbyist emulators, the point of these was to play games - and in these cases, some specific games too. And for most games, most of these inaccuracies are going to be pretty imperceptible in practice.
So if I were the poor Japanese salaryman entrusted with making this emulator, I'd start by implementing the NES hardware in the simplest, most obvious fashion, and only go further where necessary to get these particular games running. It just so happens that, in emulation, more often than not "simplest and most obvious" also usually translates into fastest.