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.
Nintendo is more likely than most publishers to delay releases to avoid competing with themselves. Their new virtual console strategy is a slow drip feed that won't distract from their main titles or impact sales at all, so a subscription fee.
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.
This is why we ban advertising to children and copyright should expire after 30 years, there's nothing but rent-seeking going on and taking advantage of nostalgia. This isn't encouraging creative works which is why we as a country give the monopoly to artists in the first place. People should have the right to remix the culture they grew up with.
Some people believe copyright should be perpetual. Those people are wrong, but we must still fight against that idea.
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.
Is the market for Nintendo games really so small that decades-old titles will meaningfully compete with their current ones? Surely the demand for SMB must be minuscule compared to the demand for their modern games among consumers?
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?
The virtual console is now offering GameCube titles. GameCube/PS2/XBox was the tipping point when most major 3D releases looked reasonably good and the hardware was strong enough that developers were encountering fewer limitations that hampered the games in very fundamental ways. Compare Resident Evil 1 on the Playstation to the remake one generation later on the GameCube to see a very direct example of this.
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.
Not to NES games, but it might distract from news about it (minor effect on sales) and their emulation catalogue is now up to GameCube games. So the question is whether a five or ten dollar copy of wind Waker could distract from an 80 dollar tears of the kingdom.
They also have more marginal games - captain toad or whatever - sold at the same price as their big titles. Those seem pretty vulnerable imo.
IMO the newest Mario Kart (Switch 2) is the first one that’s probably better than Double Dash. That’s three consoles in a row where I think the GameCube game’s better than the newer offerings (and that’s not even a nostalgia game for me—that’d be the original, and the N64 one, neither of which is very good).
The ordinary game is pretty damn good, but all the tracks exist in one "world" and your character + kart are racing around it on autopilot in the background of the main menu. You can press a button to dismiss the menu and take over the kart, and start a free-roam mode of the entire game-world with all kinds of challenges and such to select from.
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".
Melee is widely regarded int he community as much better than the successors, too, and it's pretty much the only game that survived its sequel in the whole series
Yeah I've played more Mario Kart than Smash Bros. and am only a very-casual player of either (... but this surely describes the overwhelming majority of people buying and playing these games?) so I wouldn't claim with some kind of authority that Melee's the best Smash Bros., but all the ones since have felt way too fiddly for me and I didn't enjoy them at all, despite really liking the first two entries in the series (and especially Melee).
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.
For a comparison, try to find a good legal version of Namco Pac-Man on mobile that isn't locked under a Namco Museum Vol. 1 IAP. The Namco Museum app itself is "free" and you get 1942, but have to buy the others.
FWIW licensing is definitely part of why some 'obvious' stuff is still missing, Nintendo doesn't own the rights to games that they didn't develop themselves (generally speaking).
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.
Which is rather surprising to me. I don't know what the contracts between Nintendo and developers say but I would have expected "rights to publish or distribute in perpetuity" would have been in there as part of the deal for making official carts.
That's probably true for later generations, but in the NES (and maybe SNES) era? Undoubtedly, they didn't have the foresight to write that into the contracts.
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.
> I would have expected "rights to publish or distribute in perpetuity"
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.
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
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)
> The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid
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
> Sounds similar to Donkey Kong 64 (1999) that had an arcade machine inside a level that let you play the original Donkey Kong (1981)
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.
Nintendo and Ikegami settled out of court. I'm assuming Nintendo got the rights to the arcade version as part of the settlement, as the arcade version of Donkey Kong got a release on Switch as part of Arcade Archives. https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/arcade-archives-d...
The distinction is, if I stop paying for the Switch Online membership at any point (or forget to renew), all those titles go away. By contrast, my Animal Crossing Gamecube disk still works. :)
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.
Fun fact: Nintendo originally had the idea to make other games available in such a way that you could download them to a GC memory card (or indeed the N64 original) and play them from there.
What I think they're pointing out is that the Wii, Wii u, and 3ds did have the virtual console and basically the full back catalogue available on it. It took the lifetime of the switch for the new service to get a comparable line up.
The biggest barrier is needing to modify the games to reduce the chance of triggering epileptic seizures. Nintendo has been good about archiving and knowledge preservation, but modifications may still be difficult or uneconomical.
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.
Id software open sourced the Doom engine, so anyone could play custom levels or enjoy community assets without directly benefiting Id. That's why Doom, and by extension Id software, disappeared so swiftly into obscurity.
> 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)
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.
Nintendo's own Switch release of Super Mario Sunshine used an outdated version of Dolphin, one of those imperfect emulators. (People were remarking on the emulator bugs as soon as it was released.) They saw a demand and didn't let QA get in their way.
That's not true, the Switch version of Sunshine runs on an in-house Gamecube/Wii emulator called Hagi. Nintendo have always rolled their own emulators, although curiously their NES emulator uses a ROM header format which originated in the unofficial emulation scene, so they must have used unofficial docs for reference.
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.
> although curiously their NES emulator uses a ROM header format which originated in the unofficial emulation scene, so they must have used unofficial docs for reference.
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.
I wouldn't even say that use of a header format itself is indicative of wrongdoing, even if Tomohiro hadn't went on to work for 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.
Yeah I think it was just the developer working with what he was familiar with. For example, the emulator used for the 3DS NES Virtual Console titles was developed by a different team at iQue. It uses its own bespoke header format called TNES rather than the standard iNES header.
Ah, sorry. I remembered people at the time of its release saying it was Dolphin because some of the bugs were identical. I guess I misremembered that speculation as fact. I didn't even know Dolphin was GPL. Thanks for correcting me.
There might also have been some confusion because the Gamecubes official codename was Dolphin, so Nintendo's emulator may well have the string "Dolphin" in it despite having nothing to do with that Dolphin.
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.
At this point I'd even say the community knows more about the differences between the various APU and PPU revisions than Nintendo themselves did.
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.
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.
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.
To some extent this is probably the case, especially with that GBA emulator. An NES emulator for the GBA isn't quite a miracle but it would definitely make the poor little 16MHz ARM in there sweat.
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.
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.
Nintendo is more likely than most publishers to delay releases to avoid competing with themselves. Their new virtual console strategy is a slow drip feed that won't distract from their main titles or impact sales at all, so a subscription fee.
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.
This is why we ban advertising to children and copyright should expire after 30 years, there's nothing but rent-seeking going on and taking advantage of nostalgia. This isn't encouraging creative works which is why we as a country give the monopoly to artists in the first place. People should have the right to remix the culture they grew up with.
Some people believe copyright should be perpetual. Those people are wrong, but we must still fight against that idea.
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.
Is the market for Nintendo games really so small that decades-old titles will meaningfully compete with their current ones? Surely the demand for SMB must be minuscule compared to the demand for their modern games among consumers?
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?
The virtual console is now offering GameCube titles. GameCube/PS2/XBox was the tipping point when most major 3D releases looked reasonably good and the hardware was strong enough that developers were encountering fewer limitations that hampered the games in very fundamental ways. Compare Resident Evil 1 on the Playstation to the remake one generation later on the GameCube to see a very direct example of this.
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.
Not to NES games, but it might distract from news about it (minor effect on sales) and their emulation catalogue is now up to GameCube games. So the question is whether a five or ten dollar copy of wind Waker could distract from an 80 dollar tears of the kingdom.
They also have more marginal games - captain toad or whatever - sold at the same price as their big titles. Those seem pretty vulnerable imo.
IMO the newest Mario Kart (Switch 2) is the first one that’s probably better than Double Dash. That’s three consoles in a row where I think the GameCube game’s better than the newer offerings (and that’s not even a nostalgia game for me—that’d be the original, and the N64 one, neither of which is very good).
I'll second this. DoubleDash was _so good_ that it really hasn't been beat since (I haven't played MK World, the latest, so can't assess that yet)
The ordinary game is pretty damn good, but all the tracks exist in one "world" and your character + kart are racing around it on autopilot in the background of the main menu. You can press a button to dismiss the menu and take over the kart, and start a free-roam mode of the entire game-world with all kinds of challenges and such to select from.
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".
Melee is widely regarded int he community as much better than the successors, too, and it's pretty much the only game that survived its sequel in the whole series
Yeah I've played more Mario Kart than Smash Bros. and am only a very-casual player of either (... but this surely describes the overwhelming majority of people buying and playing these games?) so I wouldn't claim with some kind of authority that Melee's the best Smash Bros., but all the ones since have felt way too fiddly for me and I didn't enjoy them at all, despite really liking the first two entries in the series (and especially Melee).
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.
For a comparison, try to find a good legal version of Namco Pac-Man on mobile that isn't locked under a Namco Museum Vol. 1 IAP. The Namco Museum app itself is "free" and you get 1942, but have to buy the others.
FWIW licensing is definitely part of why some 'obvious' stuff is still missing, Nintendo doesn't own the rights to games that they didn't develop themselves (generally speaking).
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.
Which is rather surprising to me. I don't know what the contracts between Nintendo and developers say but I would have expected "rights to publish or distribute in perpetuity" would have been in there as part of the deal for making official carts.
That's probably true for later generations, but in the NES (and maybe SNES) era? Undoubtedly, they didn't have the foresight to write that into the contracts.
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.
> I would have expected "rights to publish or distribute in perpetuity"
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.
[dead]
I imagine we won't see MGS: Twin Snakes for the same reason
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
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)
> The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid.
The nesticle emulator blew my mind as a kid.
thanks shitman
> The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid
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...
> Sounds similar to Donkey Kong 64 (1999) that had an arcade machine inside a level that let you play the original Donkey Kong (1981)
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...
Nintendo and Ikegami settled out of court. I'm assuming Nintendo got the rights to the arcade version as part of the settlement, as the arcade version of Donkey Kong got a release on Switch as part of Arcade Archives. https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/arcade-archives-d...
The distinction is, if I stop paying for the Switch Online membership at any point (or forget to renew), all those titles go away. By contrast, my Animal Crossing Gamecube disk still works. :)
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.
Fun fact: Nintendo originally had the idea to make other games available in such a way that you could download them to a GC memory card (or indeed the N64 original) and play them from there.
https://youtu.be/2w0U_evVEd4
https://youtu.be/A5YdD1pYzes + https://youtu.be/0cpjhIS6ClI
What I think they're pointing out is that the Wii, Wii u, and 3ds did have the virtual console and basically the full back catalogue available on it. It took the lifetime of the switch for the new service to get a comparable line up.
The emulator community may be why it is not potentially profitable for Nintendo, since most of the nostalgia market has already been served for free
The biggest barrier is needing to modify the games to reduce the chance of triggering epileptic seizures. Nintendo has been good about archiving and knowledge preservation, but modifications may still be difficult or uneconomical.
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.
This discussion from about 9 months ago explains it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42259040
Id software open sourced the Doom engine, so anyone could play custom levels or enjoy community assets without directly benefiting Id. That's why Doom, and by extension Id software, disappeared so swiftly into obscurity.
But Doom hasn't disappeared into obscurity at all.
it was sarcasm through counter example.
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)
You hope it was "sarcasm through counter example".
> near-perfect emulators
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.
Nintendo's own Switch release of Super Mario Sunshine used an outdated version of Dolphin, one of those imperfect emulators. (People were remarking on the emulator bugs as soon as it was released.) They saw a demand and didn't let QA get in their way.
That's not true, the Switch version of Sunshine runs on an in-house Gamecube/Wii emulator called Hagi. Nintendo have always rolled their own emulators, although curiously their NES emulator uses a ROM header format which originated in the unofficial emulation scene, so they must have used unofficial docs for reference.
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.
> although curiously their NES emulator uses a ROM header format which originated in the unofficial emulation scene, so they must have used unofficial docs for reference.
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.
I wouldn't even say that use of a header format itself is indicative of wrongdoing, even if Tomohiro hadn't went on to work for 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.
Yeah I think it was just the developer working with what he was familiar with. For example, the emulator used for the 3DS NES Virtual Console titles was developed by a different team at iQue. It uses its own bespoke header format called TNES rather than the standard iNES header.
Ah, sorry. I remembered people at the time of its release saying it was Dolphin because some of the bugs were identical. I guess I misremembered that speculation as fact. I didn't even know Dolphin was GPL. Thanks for correcting me.
There might also have been some confusion because the Gamecubes official codename was Dolphin, so Nintendo's emulator may well have the string "Dolphin" in it despite having nothing to do with that Dolphin.
Byuu/Near was a pioneer for emulator accuracy and was laughed at most of the time because his emulator (bsnes) consumed a lot of memory and cpu.
What a pioneer. RIP Byuu.
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.
At this point I'd even say the community knows more about the differences between the various APU and PPU revisions than Nintendo themselves did.
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.
MVG (Modern Vintage Gamer) has covered this in a number of videos, his stuff is excellent - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou66ppC8stI
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.
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.
To some extent this is probably the case, especially with that GBA emulator. An NES emulator for the GBA isn't quite a miracle but it would definitely make the poor little 16MHz ARM in there sweat.
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.
This should be an article, not a video. You have a video which is practically all text. wtf!!
Believe it or not, most movies, television, videos begin with a text script.
You might not know, but: Audiobooks are extremely popular, even though printed versions exist...
A YouTube video can be easily and effectively monetized to support the creator’s development efforts. A text blog post cannot.
way to exclude people with reading disabilities /s