Topic: Nintendo Has Overcome Technological Hurdles to Making Virtual Consoles

@Atariboy
You're link doesn't have any specific information about Nintendo's VC service. Also, most of Nintendo's consoles have had backwards compatibility anyway. Hell, GCN even ran games through the GameBoy Player, and Wii U's components still derive from that. It's not that farfetched that they're just running old data on a new console.

So you're telling me that all of Nintendo's old hardware was running emulators to have BC?

Even if Wii U has to emulate 4 GBAs, the Wii U is far more capable than that. The difference is literally between their consoles and their handhelds. In you link, it described a PC emulating a console game. That's a different situation.

@SCAR392 The GCN was not backwards compatible with GBA the game boy player was just a GBA without a screen that's what ran the games not the GCN.

I know, but Wii, DS, 3DS, and Wii U have BC built in already, and those were directly related from console to handheld.

Even if Wii U has to emulate GBA, the Wii U is far more powerful than 4 GBAs. Freaking GCN was probably 4 times more powerful than GBA, but they didn't have an OS to control things back in 6th gen. Not to mention that GBA carts weren't digital.

EDIT: The GameBoy player was required, strictly because of cartridges.

Since things are digital, you don't have to physically put 4 cartridges into the console, and the console itself is 4 generations stronger than SNES, which is basically what GBA derives from.

This is still retrospectively looking at how GameBoy player worked.

@Atariboy
Ya, so getting GBA to run on Wii U, would be about as complicated as porting it to a GCN disc. Just imagine running a GBA game on a GCN disc. They still have that information.

EDIT: If anything, you should be wondering how they ported SNES games to GBA.

@Atariboy
What about the GCN games that supported GBA as a controller? There had to have been GBA code in order for the GBA to recognize an image from the GCN.

I'm sorry, I'm going to have to side with @Scar here. There's no way that the Wii U isn't capable of handing four instances of a GBA emulation at the same time. Emulation is demanding but it's not that demanding. The GBA is basically a SNES with a few extra tricks. I cough have "heard of" people running GBA games on crappy decade old single core Celerons at 2x the normal speed with minimal effort. Just putting this in perspective, that was a machine that ran this game at low detail

The Wii U can run Assassin's Creed at reasonable details at 720p, 30fps. I'm sure it can run four instances of a GBA emulator. If things scale it should be able to run a bucketload of instances.

I love how emulating four GBAs simultaneously is seen as childish play when its not especially when the emulation is of high quality.

An obscure SNES game called Air Strike Patrol/Desert Fighter is said to need 3Ghz to emulate the hardware accurately enough to show the player's plane's shadow (supposedly the game is far less playable without that single graphic)
And it was also estimated it'd take something like 50Ghz to properly emulate the SA-1 chip (as the SA-1 itself contains a faster duplicate of the SNES' main CPU). I know it was because some of obscure feature in the chip, thought I don't remember exactly. Possibly there was some minor graphics glitch in Super Mario RPG? Playable yes, but not accurate.

3DS is already running GBA, as well as a majority of the VC games that Wii U has.

Plus, no one's even considering the GPGPU. Even if it hypothetically takes 1 CPU core to run 2 GBA games, that leaves 2 other cores and an entire GPGPU just sitting there.

@Atariboy
The main difference is home consoles compared to handhelds, which they've already gained ground on.

This is just a wild guess, but putting SNES on 3DS is probably just as time consuming/difficult as putting GBA on Wii U.

There's also a huge difference between putting GBA on Wii U and putting GBA on Wii U with multiplayer support, especially four players. I mean, I can dream, but I honestly wouldn't expect Wii U GBA VC games to support any more than two players in multiplayer. I suppose it is possible to use 3DS' as additional players, but I feel that if Nintendo went that route, then they might just focus on making the Wii U only single player for GBA games and then using up to 3 more 3DS' for multiplayer.

Nintendo certainly hasn't put the most effort into their virtual console games in the past. I can only hope that they'll do more with VC games on the Wii U (GBA multiplayer, n64 rumble / memory paks), but that's just wishful thinking.

I may or may not have just run a game named something like "Finish Tap" on a Windows GBA emulator at 4X GBA resolution with ti-linear filtering on Linux through WINE on a five year old laptop.... at 600% normal speed..... with ~25% CPU utilisation. I'm more than willing to try and do the same test on a 1.6Ghz ATOM later if you still think it's that demanding.

Oh, and there's also the fact that they can get GBA games running on the 3DS. Also the fact that they had N64 games running on the Wii. Neither of which had much problem being accurate, reliable and responsive. I doubt it was pushing those machines to their limit. The Wii U is orders of magnitude more capable than the 3DS and Wii U

The clock rate isn't as important as it might have once been but for the sake of argument lets assume that it is everything and also assume that the 3DS is being hammered when it does GBA emulation. This is total bull but I'll just entertain this idea for a bit. A quick google gives the 3DS a dual 266Mhz CPU and the Wii U a triple core 1.24Ghz CPU. Again, total nonsense to be comparing them like that but just to entertain the thought.

So lets say a GBA emulator is a two threaded process that uses a full 266Mhz. That would mean that 4 instances would take up 8 lots of 266Mhz. If you imagined the Wii U's cores as three buckets (please don't, this is nonsense) then four maxed out 3DSes worth of effort would leave about one and a quarter cores spare.

But can I repeat yet again that it doesn't at all work like that. Ten years ago you could get CPUs that were doing a fairly reasonable 3Ghz and sometimes just above. In terms of actual horsepower you can get more out of the dual-core 1.4Ghz CPUs they throw into tablets these days even in single threaded applications. Then there are the consumer grade CPU kings these days clocked at around 3.5Ghz. Clock rate hasn't been a good measure of actual performance for a long, long time.

................... all that said I don't think we'll see multiplayer GBA games on the Wii U. Not because I don't think it's technically possible because I do think it certainty is. More because I don't see the great appeal. It's a fair amount of effort for a limited gain. If they do it then I won't complain but if they don't I won't be surprised. As a Mario Kart fan I'm not sure why I'd want to play four player Super Circuit when there's Mario Kart 8, Super Mario Kart, Mario Kart Wii, Mario Kart 64 and maybe even Mario Kart Double Dash multiplayer available.

WINE isn't an emulator. Hence why it stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator and it's also why a lot of demanding Windows software runs full speed using WINE therefore the fact that you are using WINE will not have an impact on any resources.

The 3DS doesn't use emulation to run GBA games as the 3DS runs GBA games natively due to them both using an ARM CPU

@craigmoss19
I wasn't saying that WINE was an emulator, I'm fully aware that it's not. The only reason I put that in there was because that's the first one that came up. I don't make a habit of using emulators other than to prove points or to play around with input devices. All I was trying to show is that this idea that the GBA emulation is so hard that the Wii U couldn't possibly run multiple instances is just crazy.

The example of the Wii being able to do N64 games no problem and my memories of running it on a beaten up Celeron were not enough. Also the fact that they're wanting to put DS games on the Wii U VC is I would assume irrelevant. So I ran GBA games on an old machine that I currently have at 6x with zero issues other than the fact that at 6x the game is moving really fast.

As for the 3DS and GBA games, fair call and you're probably right. It's also clocked, if the numbers I'm looking at are right, at 20x the speed of the GBA so I'd argue that it probably could emulate it if it isn't.

That's what I was saying.
3DS is BC with DS, DS was BC with GBA, then GBA was BC compatible with GB/GBC.

Wii U is BC with Wii, Wii was BC with GCN, and GCN has essentially already incorporated anything GameBoy related into the GB Player.

Now... the GCN only ran GB games, because it basically had an entire GBA built into what was the GameBoy Player, but looking at how some GCN games had GBA code burned directly onto the disc(FF: Crystal Chronicals, WW, Pac/man vs, etc. very few) and how select GBA games were specifically able to utilize the rumble feature of the GCN(Super Mario Bros. 3, M&L: Super Star Saga), Nintendo has arguably already treaded this ground before.

It doesn't really matter, in the end, because we'll see how Nintendo handles GBA and DS VC on Wii U. I'd argue that Nintendo might even allow people to use 2 GamePads for DS VC, pretty much becoming 2 DS consoles.

Their systems are flexible as they can be, with software from the past or present.

I'm not saying that emulation is completely non existent, but as I said, Nintendo has arguably had and retained this progress made from their past consoles, considering how most of their consoles were BC to begin with(excluding NES, but even SNES and N64 had forms of GB support).

I did not say or suggest anything further than what I said directly in my post

I wasn't really responding to your post. I was just trying to further my point from earlier. @craigmoss19 hit it right on the money with GBA not being emulated on 3DS, and it wouldn't surprise me if Nintendo had some sort of 3DS/Wii U software kit for shared titles.