Here's Why SNES VC Games Can Only be Played on a New 3DS

I'm not buying it for one second.

Until they give North America the black (small) new 3DS. Then I will be buying it every bit of it

Who knows if we will get the full truth on this issue. I think most people thought the improved CPU was the cause and that seems to be the easiest reason for Nintendo to sell. I'm not buying any of the games because they are full price and there is no cross-buy option for loyal customers.

I don't think it's a cpu issue. There is a SNES emulator available to people who have exploited their 3DS, and I assume it runs on 'old' 3DS's too?

SNES emulator on my old 3DS was always patchy. Lots of slowdown and mode 7 games were barely playable. Latest libretro Snes emulator plays like a dream on New 3DS, including Starfox, Mario Kart, Pilotwings, F-Zero etc. That's the holy grail of gaming for me... a pocket SNES and a full romset!

I have trouble believing that Nintendo couldn't do it.

Nintendo is doing accurate emulation and SNES emus are not very accurate on 3ds thats why you see homebrew running at full speed..

I'm still skeptical of this. I don't know anything about how emulation works, so maybe there's a lot more going on behind the scenes, but I find it very hard to believe that the vanilla 3DS is incapable of running games released twenty years ago.

Also, with this statement, the rep never actually says the old one can't run the games, just that the new one can.

@Pixelrobin Not necessarily. I had a GBA emulator and it was pretty slow. That said, weren't there GBA games for 3DS ambassadors? Is the GBA more powerful than the SNES?

@TheDavyStar No GBA is weaker than SNES plus the GBA ambassador games are running natively not through emulation

Nonsense. They could have just got them to work like the ones released in the ambassador programme. It's to flog their new consoles, but if all they can do to justify the purchase of the new3DS in terms of software (I acknowledge there's some desirable hardware improvements, but consoles should be bought for games alone, as that's why they're used) is to sell 20-year-old titles then it's a poor show. Come on Nintendo, stretch this machine with some Gamecube ports, or even go crazy and release all-new games that only work on the new3DS.

I loved the way they changed the subject to pixels hahaha, They obviously didn't want to talk about that at all so I'm not sure maybe they can work on older 3ds models but they just work better on new 3ds so Nintendo realised they had hardly any new 3ds exclusives and saw this as a golden opportunity but maybe they genuinly don't work on the old 3ds

@Tasuki I agree with you the fact there's no cross-buy proves Nintendo is just in it for the money with SNES releases!

@DoctorOverbuild they are greedy as hell lol

The big issue is charging £7-9 for games you doubless already have owned on your snes, wii, wii U. A ridiculous pricing system when on the wii U the games are £5.29

Here's the reason: cash money.

@Pixelrobin
I assume they can't run the emulator on the old 3DS in the quality they wanted to with save state, suspend mode, miiverse, streetpass, and other functionalities running on the background. Unless Nintendo have low standards on quality of emulated games like @Tasuki, then I don't see why they won't sell it to more than 40 (or 50) million old 3DS owners.

@Tasuki or that have a basic understanding of how emulation works, and realize the old 3DS couldn't have handled it

I'm seeing people say it is possible and people say it is not possible. Eh I haven't got the foggiest so whatever. What I do have is a New 3DS however so I'm not really gonna complain. Sucks for the rest of you who don't I guess?

@Splatburst agreed. Every homebrew or emulated she's hack on the snes looks like garbage. The 3ds just wasn't that powerful

Glad they offered this emulator, now I can purchase a few 16bits roms legally aside from the SMD ones I already have (won't do it oft, thanks to the price but Zelda is a sure thing). But the most interesting thing is I can finally play a lot of roms I could not suffer on the 2DS: the Dragon Quest I-II compilation being the first one!
For the games who works decently on my 2DS, no reason to purchase/inject them for the n3DS.

@JohnnyC "the ones released in the ambassador programms" are not roms runned by an emulator packed with them, they are GBA roms directly played by the DS part of the machine.
On wich component could SNES roms be relying in the 3DS exactly? None, it has to be emulated, and sadly Nintendo doesn't want to make lot of dedicated tweaks to roms themselves or the emulator in order to improve the global experience. Personnally, I have nothing against it nor against frameskipping.

I think that they simply decided they wouldn't do it on 3DS because it would have ranged from acceptable (through use of numerous tweaks) to unplayable. There are even games who will never be emulated on n3DS. ^^

If greed was the reason for making SNES VC an N3DS exclusive. The more incentive greedy Nintendo has to make it work on the old 3DS (along with no cross-buy). The old 3DS probably outnumbers the N3DS ~10:1. Profit from software (esp. VC) is probably greater than their hardware margins.

They probably couldn't get it to go into the HOME menu without problems. The GBA games run similarly to DS and DSiWare games in that they can't suspend the game to go to the HOME menu, though I'm not sure what the technical details of that are. The SNES games likely had that same issue, and Nintendo probably didn't want their publicly available Virtual Console 3DS games to have that issue, so they made them New3DS only, which makes little sense IMO. I totally would have picked up EarthBound and/or Super Mario World on 3DS regardless of if you could go to the HOME menu or not...

Or they just wanted people to have more incentive to buy a New3DS, I don't know, there's little reason to upgrade now to begin with IMO.

@Marshi
I didn't know they bump up the price on UK. It's still 8 euros like the Wii U for us outside UK afaik .

This is what I've been saying all along.

If you look at any of the recent VC articles you can see the copious amounts of research and knowledge I've provided to show how it can't be done on an older 3DS.

Anyone who believes that this is merely a cash grab and that Nintendo are strangely holding out on older owners obviously doesn't know a think about running a business or how emulation works, and should go and buy a tin foil hat.

As if anyone would go running to the store to buy an expensive gaming device only because it can play a few, overpriced, games from decades ago.

It's not much of an "evil greedy plan to force the planet into buying a new 3DS", it is simply an evil greedy plan to get a few dollars from people who already own a new 3DS.

It's just not logical that this is a way of increasing New 3DS sales. If it were a purely business decision, the income from the vastly greater 'old' 3DS install base would surely outstrip that which they may potentially get from the New alone. It's not like SNES VC offerings are system-sellers, especially not at this late stage in the console's life.

I hope they start to realise they need to up the ante on their whole VC library, give us all the SNES RPG classics and im happy, tired of rebuying Zeldas and Mario games everytime, really hope they start adding crossplatform for that stuff aswell.

@8itmap_k1d Yeah, it sucks for old 3DS owners (I am one ~_~ ), but even Nintendo aren't as... um... "Overly optimistic" to believe that SNES-games on VC are going to shift New 3DS systems in any meaningful number, so pricing aside, the "Cash grab"-theory is out.

I couldn't help but notice that the representative didn't actually address the question. They just reiterated that the New 3DS has a better CPU and hey, there's also that neat Pixel Perfect mode!

I'm not affected by this as I have a N3DS but I have to say that was a very shifty non-answer.

I think original 3DS could have run SNES games, but not quite as well as New! 3DS. Maybe SNES emulator wasn't exactly stable on 3DS? Maybe they couldn't get it run 60fps? Maybe they weren't able to include restore points? Who knows.

Nintendo has it's quality standards. Just because they can do something doesn't necessarily mean they should.

Emulation is an expensive process, surely old 3DS wasn't capable of running this smoothly, otherwise, it doesn't make sense for Nintendo to not release for old 3DS, they will have more money with larger user base.

Sure, they wanted to push N3DS sales, but Nintendo didn't really do N3DS exclusive strategy for pushing it. Since N3DS existence, only Xenoblade Chronicle is exclusive and we know it required more power, same as Unity games that isn't supported on old 3DS.

I just wish they will be more open and release GBA VC, end the Ambassador exclusive.

I get they are half honest here. The new 3ds probably has enough power to make the process of making the games easy. where as the old 3ds would need more work. with a new system on the horizon I bet they are managing their resources acordingly

Actually, the 3DS homebrew scene kind of indirectly confirmed Nintendo's PR by the fact that the unofficial SNES emulator runs smooth on New 3DS and mediocre on the older models.

I remember using a SNES emulator on an Intel 486DX CPU because emulation was 'cool' at the time. It worked, but gave sloppy framerates. While the architecture of that CPU is different, I believe the speed is similar to older 3DS models.

And I might buy Earthbound at some point, but I'm not sure when.

@Meowpheel
Of course not. People rarely buy a console for just 1 thing. But it's 1 more small point on an expanding list of reasons. The New 3DS has just about got to the point where it makes sense to upgrade to.

To people who says the 3DS can't play SNES games
https://youtube.com/watch?v=M78dV9EHvtM

@MitchVogel There IS a lot more going on behind the scenes. It's not that original 3DS "can't run" twenty year old games, it's that emulation is a very complicated process, and the original model can't produce an end result they're happy with.

Obviously they could slap these games onto cartridges that have been optimized to run on 3DS and it wouldn't be a problem; there are certainly many games running on the system that are much more complex than any SNES game. But the issue is that when a system runs an emulator, it has to find a way to behave like the original system, and it requires a lot more processing power than just reading a rom.

@Sticker Yeah, none of the unofficial emulators available run as well on 3DS as they do on New 3DS, and none of them are as accurate or efficient as virtual console. Nintendo sets the bar higher for their emulators, and the original 3DS can't produce the kind of performance results they want. It really is that simple.

@Tsurii Yup. I'm actually kind of surprised at how many people are saying they don't buy this reason. I think people just don't understand what virtual console really is or what the name itself literally means. They just assume it's the same straightforward process as downloading a current 3DS game from the eShop.

@Slaz Excellent points.

Seems odd to say that it the improvement to the CPU when the system has been out for over a year, (more if you count in Japan) and for such a small user base in comparison to the regular 3DS I am surprised it took them this long to release it.

That being said I have officially bought Super Mario World now 4 times in this lifetime, hopefully the My Nintendo Account will fix this issue but I can't dream too big

@abe_hikura I really don't think it's "half honest," I think it's just honest. I can't see any reason for Nintendo to lie about it. They don't rely on virtual console to move hardware units like people seem to think they do. And if this were really an effort to sell more New 3DS, that's kind of a dumb reason, because there are many more original 3DS owners that they could milk every last dime out of if they just made SNES games available to them.

@Sticker

Good to see that video contains none of the 3DS' background programs or OS.

Not to mention the fact that you need to show Mario Kart, Megaman X2 and 3 before you start claiming what you are claiming.

@JustJulyo it probably took them this long just to get Super Mario Kart, Megaman X2 and X3 to run properly before they announced it. Clearly with a bunch of games already coming out and basically ready that they've been working on this for a while

In the meantime I'm playing Sega 3D Classics such as Sonic 2 with 3D features and huge customization options on my standard 3DS...

I cant' believe people are defending this cr*p. I don't get why we couldn't get a proper "SNES 3D Collection" as a physical or digital release. I mean all this virtual console stuff just make no sense as long as there is no cross-buy option, so we have to pay anyway.

This is just a desperate marketing move to sell their N3DS and get rid of their stocks before the release of the NX (which will somehow require you to upgrade in the near future anyway). Are you such blinded fan-boy that you don't see it ? It is just a way to milk us more playing on the nostalgia vibe.

I think we can all agree that the "old" 3DS can run SNES game. It's just that not ALL the games would run smoothly.

In other words "we want to finally push that underused New 3DS line. It doesn't matter people forgot about it!"

I haven't really tried 3DS homebrew emulators but the SNES emulator for the PSP works almost great. Isn't the o3DS supposed to be stronger?

I don't like many of the Nintendo emulators for a variety of reasons. I may get a game to try the emulation.

@Freeon-Leon No I don't agree. Using a virtual console as a game developer on your official hardware and be able to run 20 years old game only on your last upgrade of your hardware that is able to run games in 3D, is nothing to be proud of selling to your customer. We are talking about Nintendo on its own hardware, not about some independent developer that works in his backyard. Nothing to be proud of here. This strategy of using the virtual console just get more lame every time a new system is released, it shows how lazy they are and how little they care about their customer.

@Chunky_Droid BlraqSnes says Hi.

@MitchVogel Emulation requires much more power than the native hardware, because, in this case for example, the SNES had a different architecture than the 3DS, so it needs to replicate the same hardware, which eats up some power. And the CPU does all the work when emulating, so it doesn't matter what GPU and other specs the system has. Look at the Xbox 360 games emulated on the Xbox One; the games have some problems when running, even though it is clearly much more powerful than the 360.

Same reason GBA games are not available unless you boot the device in a dedicated GBA mode.

Maybe they will add GBA games now, too.

@Tsurii What is exactly the "quality" results? Because BlarqSnes has the same quality as the N3DS SNES titles. Both has perfect playability and graphics. Only difference that the game can be accessed on the home menu than soft moding a 3DS.

@SanderEvers BlarqSNES is playable. Just try it.

@Chunky_Droid First of all, what OS or what?

Second: I current can't, because 10.6 update blocked browserhax. But go on GBAtemp and ask them on there. Those games work perfectly.

@JohnnyC I'm sorry, but this is just a ridiculous comment. You yourself prove the point that no, Nintendo is NOT doing this to sell more New 3DS systems. I'm sure they probably view it as a benefit that comes with owning one, but if their sole motivation was money, then just imagine how much money they're missing out on by not selling these games on older 3DS, of which there are significantly more.

@Sticker Cool. Does it run mode 7 smoothly, as well?

Still my favourite news from the direct! Enjoying playing through super Mario world for the 100th time but on a 'new' platform

@Sticker "Those games work perfectly."

No, they really don't.

@Shadow15982 There is a MASSIVE difference between running games natively, which have been specifically optimized for the system, and emulating the SNES hardware to run games that have not been optimized for the system. Learn some stuff before you comment.

@hiptanaka Yes. There's literally a option to turn it on in BlarqSnes setting menu.

@CHET_SWINGLINE Care to prove?

I was one of the DS owners who paid full price and then Nintendo reduced cost. I was given 10 free games as part of the Ambassador Program.

I am sure one of these games was Super Mario World. Can any one confirm this game was part of the free games as I no longer have the console.

It's bullcrap... M2 have recreated Megadrive games in 3d at 60 fps... Whilst the SNES had hardware features that were better than the Megadrive, recreating those original games in non-3d on an 'old' 3ds would be a breeze... if you consider that the GBA handled SNES games very well (albeit reprogrammed) the 3ds could do it in its sleep. It's bull.. If you want to make money, get a company like M2 to build key games one by one and ell them like Sega did!

@Sticker I've done extensive research on BlargSNES and it doesn't run any of the games I mentioned, nice try.

I can't take the reader comments on this site. They're just so shockingly stupid sometimes. It really makes my head hurt.

@CHET_SWINGLINE Yeah so what's the point of going the emulation way, when anyway you need to re-buy the game ? Wouldn't have this been better to get proper release with 3D specific feature ? This would have been something that would have make me consider buying the new system. But to get the exact same game again with a "full price" release again after having to buy a new system ? How can someone sane even defend this ? For the sake of being able to emulate their software on their own system ? Wow what an amazing achievement!

I'd imagine the old 3DS could play SNES games but to keep all the background stuff going that 3DS does, the better CPU of the New 3DS is probably necessary to avoid any glitches and stuff.

@Sticker

I went to GBATemp, as of the 9th of March, this is the compatibility list. You're welcome.

http://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/BlargSnes_Compatibility_List

@Sticker Sure, just give me a couple weeks to go buy some capture equipment and software to measure performance benchmarks and I'll throw some videos together for you.

@Chunky_Droid There's Retroarch you know.

Ok fine if that's the case, Nintendo, then prove it by putting Secret of Mana in the 3ds eShop so we can see just how smoothly this works. Heh.

@CHET_SWINGLINE Or just record it on your camera. It's very easy.

@slatanek lol
He's not a Nintendo Hater. He gave his logical opinion about this.

@Sticker Yeah, that'll totally show an accurate measurement of a game's performance.

/not

@CHET_SWINGLINE Doesn't matter. Just make sure the top and bottom screen are visible.

@CHET_SWINGLINE "I can't take the reader comments on this site. They're just so shockingly stupid sometimes. It really makes my head hurt."

Why don't you just leave then? Smashboards would surely love your kind.

Whether or not these games could have run on the old 3DS models is something we will probably never know. But I don't see a problem that they can only run on the newer models. 3DS sales are declining and Nintendo are a business.

However, if they are going to have this approach then they should at least make the cost of the SNES VC games the same as the Wii U. There is no justification and is a bit of a slap from Nintendo.

@Shadow15982 What's the point? Because one requires simply loading a pre-existing rom as-is into an emulator, and the other requires months and months of development work and resources. It's not really a comparison. I don't agree with Nintendo's pricing model on virtual console or really anything associated with their account system, but that doesn't change the facts involved with this particular issue.

@Sticker I'll get back to you about Retroarch, but there is no logic in what Tasuki is saying. None of you are actually providing a shred of proof, it's laughable.

@Sticker No thanks. I'd rather see you leave since you're the one going around posting inaccurate information about a topic you clearly don't understand.

@Sticker Um, no. Why don't you go ahead and do that, since you're the one claiming they operate the same. Go ahead and prove it for us.

They should lower the price on these SNES games though since most people have to now buy a new system to play them.

@Sticker some (admittedly) quick research has shown that Retroarch runs games like Super Mario RPG pretty abysmally on o3DS but well on N3DS. Thanks for adding to my argument, much appreciated.

For once I think Nintendo is telling the truth. I f they could get them running on the older models to a good standard they would, simply because it would mean more sales! Nintendo being a very greedy company would not cut out millions of extra sales just to make a point. The people on here who think otherwise, also believe we did not land on the moon, and the US government took the twin towers down!

Pretty sure some skilled bedroom coder could get SNES games to run pretty much perfectly on the original 3DS.

@Chunky_Droid Looking back now, it's stupidity laughable. But still, try Retroarch out.

To be honest @Sticker, I still have a SNES hooked up with the games I wanna play, so I don't need to get an emulator for the 3DS. It does seem to run better than blargSNES from reading the feedback on various GBATemp and Reddit forums.

I do think the SNES VC on 3ds is a wasted op. Look how good the sega 3d classics turned out with a bit of work, I wish Nintendo had given the 3ds SNES games the same treatment.

@Kirk I'm pretty sure they couldn't. And since I'm pretty sure about it, it must be true.

@CHET_SWINGLINE Yep exactly, just put in a 20 years old ROM with no effort whatsoever to use feature of your new system. So we finally agree about how lame and lazy this is. This is just a d*ck move a couple of month before revealing a new hardware. But still people seems to stand and defend this, whatever technical achievement is behind, I don't care, my computer was also able to do this 15 years ago. You cannot stand comment of some people here ? I cannot stand people defending this lame marketing move.

@Shadow15982 and I can't stand people who don't do a shred of research before commenting

@Shadow15982 Ok, that post was plain nonsense and dumb.

@Shadow15982 No, we don't agree. No one is defending Nintendo's pricing structures or business practices, we're defending Nintendo's technical claims. It's not a marketing move. The technology involved in emulating games has absolutely zero relation to pricing schemes, or to marketing. These are completely separate issues, and that's not what this article is about, so I'm not going to engage you on that.

Also, if your computer could do that 15 years ago, then you don't have to worry about buying these games or a New 3DS, since you're obviously willing to download and play these games for free on your computer.

it is indeed very likely this is the case. original 3ds is rockin a dual core arm11 architecture. to put it into perspective its the same architecture used in the original iPhone and the original iPhone was dead slow. it's basically a 10 years old technology by now.

in fact when I first planned to buy a 3ds a few months ago I went with the regular 3ds xl and when I got home I couldn't bare how sluggish the overall performance was, went immediately back and exchanged it for the New model. the New is no speed demon, but the experience in general is way better.

Nintendo makes their handhelds severely underpowered, probably to sell at profit and to keep development cost down; it has additional benefit in longevity of the components as well (no heat issues etc.). I mean any midrange smartphone eats the New 3ds for breakfast. Anyway I don't think I've seen a smooth running SNES emulator on the original iPhone (or the 3gs iPhone for that matter). Keep in mind if you wanna charge people for nostalgia it has to run perfect, so you need some overhead and you don't wanna push the hardware to its limits probably.

Like i said on another article: That people are still sceptical simply blows my mind.
This topic has been discussed time and time again.
Again, for those who missed it.

You know what it takes to perfectly emulate Super Mario World ? One of the more mundane SNES in terms of technicality ?
It takes a 3ghz quad core CPU and pretty much all of its attention.

Emulation is almost purely CPU work. In terms of RAM, you basically need enough to completely load the ROM in question plus the emulator. So...roughly 10mb.

GPU is used purely for post processing, so, filter and shader work which is really a non-issue.

Everyone arguing that "this cant be the truth" are simply ignorant. Plain and simple. Lazy or not, these are the facts.

And anyone comparing VC games to SEGAs 3D classics must have missed the point that these are basically new games, almost made from scratch.

@Einherjar Thank you. Perfectly stated.

@kevfrei Took the words right out of my mouth.

Nope. Don't buy it. If emulators can run a bunch of SNES games near perfectly on an old 3DS, Nintendo could do it even better if they'd just given it a bit of effort.

As a worst case, they could compromise by making SOME SNES games n3DS exclusive (the ones that used the Super FX chip, for example), but there's absolutely NO reason why I can't play Super Mario World legally on my old 3DS when I can run it flawlessly through homebrew.

@MarioFanatic64 except emulators don't "run a bunch of SNES games near perfectly on an old 3DS"

@Chunky_Droid Uh, yeah they can.

Not impressed by this at all:
GBA games run fine
Disgusted by the jacking up of price from the WiiU versions.
Disappointed by lack of cross buy or any recognition of having bought it on the WiiU.

Prove it, show me Super Mario Kart, MegaMan X2, X3 running. You can't because they don't. Half of Nintendo's 1st party SNES games have some sort of issue on o3DS. I've done a tonne of research to ensure that this is the case.

@cmk8, no they don't. ambassador games =/= VC.

@CHET_SWINGLINE Sadly, not for teh first and most certainly not for the last time.

@cmk8 Do you know why GBA games "ran fine" ? And what about the prices ? At least over here (Europe) they cost the same as on WiiU and / or Wii VC.

@cmk8 GBA games run natively on the 3DS. Those games don't actually even stop, even closing the app. They were just released to please the people who gotten the 3DS early, which at that time there wasn't any games to play.

@Sticker Not to forget that they payed more for the system and Nintendo had to cut the price relatively early. Those games were basically a consolidation for that higher price.

@Sticker What this whole argument boils down to is: "Ive seen the title screen working, that must mean the whole game does !"

I would say more likely just to help sell more of the New 3DS consoles. People might be encouraged to upgrade.

@Einherjar Pretty much.

Meh... I definitely understand the annoyance and frustration of those who have not or aren't going to upgrade to the New 3DS. But we shouldn't be surprised either: Nintendo has always been known to release hardware revisions of current-gen handhelds. Naturally, they're going to throw more support to their shiny new model versus an older, previous one. That's why I just go ahead and upgrade so I don't miss out on features or anything else that will be exclusive to the newer hardware. And I like being current, anyway. (Plus, I had to have the C-stick on the New models and while it's not perfect - just give us a second analog, for crying out loud - this is Nintendo so it's better than nothing.)

@Chunky_Droid I never said that the old 3DS could emulate all SNES games, in fact if you read my comment you'd have seen that I said that it would be fine if the SNES games that are known to not run efficiently on an old 3DS were made exclusive to the new 3DS.

But there are a decent handful of games that can indeed be played with no noticeable issues on an old 3DS, running on an emulator made by hobbyists with no monetary gain. Surely the company who made the SNES and the 3DS, the one that understands each systems' architecture the most, would be competent enough to publish at least some SNES games that are compatible with old and new 3DS models.

@GH05T If this was the case, Hyrule Warriors would have also been exclusive, which suffers from heavy performance issues on a regular 3DS.

@MarioFanatic64 if some were exclusive to N3DS while others weren't that'd be even more alienating than what they're offering now.

And you'd likely be on here asking why you can't play Super Mario Kart while N3DS owners can

@Einherjar I think by making Hyrule Warriors available on old and New 3DS consoles they will make more money from the game, even if the performance isn't very good.

@MarioFanatic64 First and foremost, learn the difference between payd workers and hobby programmers.
Then, educate yourself on "commercial grade emulation".

And "understanding a systems architecture" has nothing to do with it. Its down to pure, raw number crunching in terms of hardware.

@Chunky_Droid Word !

@MarioFanatic64 Then people would complain about (SNES game) being only available on the N3DS. It's better to make them a N3DS exclusive and keep it only on there.

@GH05T And create a lot of customers complaining about a bad game, many lazy reviewers giving it a low score because it was tested on an old system and several angry MiiVerse postings.

Releasing a game on a system that isnt fit to run it is bound to cause a ruckus. It always was.
You are basically paying full price for software not meant for your system.

@Chunky_Droid How in any way would that be more alienating? Please explain.

By the way, no, I wouldn't be complaining about that. If I can understand why something can't be done, I wouldn't bother arguing about it because nothing can be done about it.

@Einherjar By the way how do you know about Hyrule Warriors Legends performance issues? Are you from Japan or have you played the Japanese version?

@Sticker Do people complain that Xenoblade is New 3DS exclusive? Or how their old 3DS has no C-stick for Smash Bros./Majora's Mask?

Utter nonsense!!

If they're charging £8.99 for SNES titles they're gonna want to make them run well. So yeah I'm happy to buy that they don't want to compromise quality.

@MarioFanatic64 People would simply use the same kind of arguments. "Why does this run and not this ?" or would feel secluded for only being able to play X but not Y.
Its exactly the smae schtick.

When they dont complain about Xenoblade, why do they complain about the SNES VC ?
And the original 3DS had the option to use the CPP. Thats not an argument.

@GH05T Several early testers of the japanese version. While it runs at around 25-30 frames on N3DS, its roughly 20 on a regular 3DS and takes a dive whenever there is too much action on screen. Overall, the games performance is pretty bad, Warriors games just dont belong on a handheld system, they never did.

@Henmii In what regard ?

The thing people don't understand about emulation is that it's essentially running two operating systems at the same time. Therefore, it takes a lot more processing power to run the games at full speed than it does on the original hardware.

In any case, I don't care about buying SNES games (again) on 3DS when I can just play them on my Wii U instead.

@BulbasaurusRex In regards to the VC, it is running the 3DS OS, its shell, the emulator code, the SNES BIOS and the games code.

Unsure if anyone has already pointed out above or not, but "Dragon Ball Z: Super Butoden 2" (Super Famicom free download for people who pre-ordered DBZ Super Butoden for 3DS) runs flawlessly on the regular 3DS. So this might be a game to game case, for instance, the 3DS might not be able to run games with a DSP, SFX or CX4 chip while the New 3DS discovered Japanese listing certainly make it seem it is capable of such.

@Einherjar That phenomena you mentioned, we're literally having that conversation right now. What difference is it making having SNES games run exclusively on n3DS? If that's the strongest argument against it, it's a moot point.

People don't complain about Xenoblade because they can believe that it won't run on an old 3DS.
People do complain about SNES VC because they can't believe that absolutely no SNES games can run on an old 3DS.

I'd also like to point out that Smash actually doesn't support the CPP.

Pretty embarrassing that anyone who has no understanding of the CPU loads of emulation + background function of Street Pass, Spotpass, home menu suspend etc., would say that they are incredulous about Nintendo's statement on the CPU.

And anyone bringing up M2's 'Giga Drive' should know that that's a bit of magic that not even Nintendo's SNES emulator could hope to replicate lol

@MarioFanatic64 Because people tend to be ignorant about emulation, because "Those are just 16bit games".
Thats the whole point, people are unwilling to get that emulation doesnt just mean "Oh, this system came after that one ? It must be able to run old games"

And its not about "absolutely no SNES game running on 3DS", thats whyt i meant with get yourself educated about commercial grade emulation.
These are old games and nowhere near money printers.
Thus, they make them with the least possible effort.
Only tackling one system and catering the emulation software to the system with the most hardware power so that more software is supported is the way to go.
Making specific versions for older hardware would require more manpower, more work hours and far more testing to see, if the final product does work flawlessly from start to finnish.

Commercial grade emulation is QA hell.

I can see why people are irritated by this. But what if it's true that 3DS just isn't powerful enough for proper snes emulation? I wouldn't want to play portable snes games that would have to be watered down to run. I am pretty sure the games will have trouble running on full speed on normal 3DS. As mentioned before, people would be pissed if the snes games on normal 3ds would not run properly but Nintendo still decided to sell them.

@CHET_SWINGLINE Yeah, but do you have any clue whatsoever about programming, game design, emulation, business, or basically anything other than your opinion?

I do, and my level of understanding (of not only game design and programming but business too) tells me it should be possible, but it would likely take a little more time and dedication than Nintendo is willing to commit and/or Nintendo is making a business decision that it thinks makes sense.

Whatever Nintendo is saying, I'm not buying its story at face value.

You know, I could write up a bunch of stuff.....again...to demonstrate why the o3ds could not emulate SNES games "properly" at 60fps, but I'm tired of repeating myself. I've come to the conclusion that most "internet residents" are a stubborn group of humans who won't do their research and won't even listen to those who helped make the very product that is referred to in their claims.

Simply put, the o3ds is incapable of "proper" fullspeed SNES emulation. Period. Refer to my other posts on similar articles here for a look into what allows the "blarg" emulator to do what it does.

@Einherjar So we've established that we agree that this comes from a lack of effort on Nintendo's part? I think we've made great progress here.

Look, it's not like I can't handle the fact that I can't play SNES games on my old 3DS. I shrugged it off as a 'meh' as it was announced. I just can't believe that their PR statement is %100 true.

That's complete BS.

What about the pixel perfect Mega Drive 3D Classics for the 3DS?

I think it's just a way to justify the New 3DS in light of the scarce exclusive retail titles.

Anyway the VC is not for me. 3D Classics are a complete different story, because of the enhancements, but I much rather play games in the original hardware.

I think it's fine as a n3DS exclusive. It got me to upgrade.

I just wish there wasn't 3 weeks in between releases. One a week would've been preferred to three every three weeks, personally. Hope some notable third party games (Super Castlevania IV, Mega Man X) as well as most major Nintendo games make it to the SNES VC.

as i said ! original 3ds play play zelda major mask 3d smoothly but it can't play a 16 bit game ? 20 years old one ?! ... come on !!!! we used to have a port on GBA which is 14 years old one device!!!!

nintendo can't stop being greedy ....

@Discostew But the assumption is that people care whether its done via emulation or otherwise.

I don't give a sh*t how it's done. I just think the SNES games should be on regular 3DS too. And I think it is entirely possible to do that, one way or another, and not in a way that's totally unreasonable or unrealistic either.

Remember, companies like Microsoft and Sony said they couldn't do backwards compatibility either a while ago (again, I don't care if it's "actual" BC or not. I just want to play the games from their previous consoles on the current one); and look where we are now with those machines.

People want the SNES library to be playable on 3DS, and I say that's possible one way or another, and not in a way that Nintendo simply couldn't afford to do or that wouldn't make any kind of financial sense either.

Normal 3DS may run some games properly but not all of them.
Bringing some games to normal 3ds and not others would just confuse consumers anyway. Because original 3Ds runs games like majora's mask (which were build for the system) does not mean that it is capable of perfect emulation.

@MarioFanatic64 You clearly have next to no idea what a business is, do you ? "No effort" =/= no profitable endevour.

@Moroboshi876 "Pixel perfect Mega Drive" games ? These dont exist. If you mean M2s SEGA 3D classics, those are new games with integral parts rewritten.
Some of them base on their respective arcade version. Look up a comparison between the MD and Arcade version of Galaxy Force II and you might be enlightened.

@peeks You didnt even come close to getting the point, didnt you ? Please, just look up what emulation actually means before comparing it to natively run code, thank you.

I think it makes sense, when you consider Nintendo isn't aiming to just cheaply emulate but rather to deliver a perfect replica. Emulations goal is to be playable, which is a lower benchmark. I have a couple of quality emulators on my phone from experienced devs. My phone has 2 gb of ram and a 2.7ghz quad core processor. Every game runs "pretty good" but needs some management of frame skipping and audio settings. Snes sound effects are often a little off. Games with certain chips stutter a little. Very playable, but not "perfect." The old 3ds has 128mb of ram and a dual core processor rated in MHz (I forget exactly how much). Much less powerful than a modern phone. There is an snes emulator via home brew for 3ds but it's far from perfect. Nowhere near as good as what you can get on a PSP, which itself isn't perfect.

If the recent pixel-perfect rebuild of BlargSNES (the VeryHard branch with 3D mode used for resolution doubling) can run SNES games at full speed with crisp quality on O3DS AND then exit to the HOME menu (expectably if you're on CFW so you could install it as a CIA), this means someone is lying.

@Einherjar I thought we were having a polite conversation...

@Einherjar OK, it was not entirely true, but if they are improved versions of arcade games, all the more reason.

@Moroboshi876 The Megadrive is not as complex as the SNES, and even the M2 team said there were major performance issues during development.

@MarioFanatic64 What was not polite about me pointing out that you lack the understanding of a profitable endevour ?
Hireing another dev team specifically for SNES VC games would cost extra money.
Pulling of dev teams from other titles would slow them down in exchange for software barely bringing in considerable profits.

Its not a lack of effort, its a lack of profits comming from it. Setteling with one system in mind is over all the far wiser business decision.

@Moroboshi876 They are based on their arcade versions, but they arent straight up emulations. They run natively, they have been rebuild from scratch to run on the 3DS. Thats a completely different story.

@zool I was a 3DS Ambassador, SMW was not 1 of the 10 games, only GBA SMW Advance 3 was available, GBA SMW 2 is SMW

Edit: added link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Virtual_Console_games_for_Nintendo_3DS_(PAL_region)
The 10 NES games have [a], The GBA games are all Ambassador

@electrolite77 Name me one company that would go out of their way and overspend on bringing old games to a new system ?
Of course they go for the minimal effort route, its a side project and not a profitable one at that.

And again, it has nothing to do with understanding the system, it has to do with raw hardware power that just isnt there.

@Noelemahc It's not pixel-perfect. Heck, there's not even proper palette manipulation because the GPU doesn't support paletted textures. It all has to be converted per frame into a texture cache, and the palette can change per scanline.

Okay, you wanna hear it, guys? I stand corrected. My lack of knowledge makes me a terrible person, thus I must now live with a big 'noob' sticker on my head and my opinions ridiculed. I'm out.

@MarioFanatic64 Opinion =/= Knowledge
And if you think so, well, more power to you.

(looks at Dragon Ball Z: Super Budoten 2, which I got as a preorder bonus months ago for Ultimate Budoten on my old 3DS and it works fine)

Right.

@Einherjar Well, I'd think that is even more difficult to do, and yet they did it. But it's probably because I'm not a science guy at all and I must be wrong.

@Moroboshi876 Have you read their interviews ? What they had to struggle with ? Of course its difficult.
But it is in no way comparable to straight up emulation. Two completely different subjects.

It's kind of laughable to see that people refer to homebrew emulators to "prove" that 3ds is capable to properly run snes but are too outraged to see that a person who actually works on those very same emulators states that perfect snes emulation is NOT possible on original 3ds

Then don't emulate the games on 3DS.

Get a small, dedicated team together to take the original code from each SNES game, copy and past it into a new code editor or whatever, make any necessary changes to make it run natively on 3DS, and output it again.

A bit like what AM2 does with all the 3D Classics games (as far as I'm aware), but in this case without bothering to add anything to the original games other than the basics required to be on the VC.

"Wait, so you mean that the Sonic The Hedgehog in Sonic Jam wasn’t using the original MegaDrive version’s data?

YO: No, it was based on the original data.

NH: It’s doesn’t run on an emulator; I think the original code was most likely adapted for the Saturn. It’s similar to how people got arcade games running on the X68000. It was a pretty common approach for titles in the latter half of the Saturn’s lifecycle. This is also similar to the method used to run Space Harrier on the Super 32X." - http://blogs.sega.com/2013/12/03/sega-3d-classics-%E2%80%93-3d-sonic-the-hedgehog-interview-with-developer-m2/

See, you don't always have to emulate the original code directly to play an old game on a new console. And read the bit about The 3D Remaster Project moves forward! too.

Pretty sure that at the end of the day having pretty much the entire library of SNES games on original 3DS will make more money accumulatively that it costs to get that team to just go through each game and change whatever lines of code to get it to run on the 3DS.

I could be wrong but I just don't buy what Nintendo is selling.

Force to buy .... Pay to win 😭
The modern gameing times we live in.
Wallop of the cods ..... Knackard old PCs can run snes games and PSP consoles. It's like Nintendo are still chargeing full whack for products some are made cheeply too.

horsecrap!
this is a complete lie.
nintendo, do you really wanna tell me that the standart 3DS that can run games with gamecube-like visuals in stereoscopic 3D can NOT play 20years old games????
yeah i know they say it's about the cpu not gpu, but the cpu of the 3DS is like how many times better than the cpu of the snes? 1000times or so??
in the end it is only nintendos loss. i would have definetly bought a few snes games, but i guess nintendo doesnt want my money.

Those games with "gamecube like visuals" were build for and on the 3ds architecture while the snes games obviously were not.

@6ch6ris6 Are you poeple really that ignorant when it comes to emulation ? O.o
Its blowing my mind really....
Again, especially for you:
The (PC) CPU needed to perfectly emulate Super Mario World ? 3ghz quad core and almost all of it dedicated.

Let me say it again: We live in a day and age where google is a thing. You have all the knowledge of the world in the palm of your hands. So please use it once in a while.

@Einherjar See above. . . .

@Einherjar Precisely, then. It seems that no one was willing to make the extra effort to make the SNES games run in the regular 3DS. But I understand it's a matter of giving the New 3DS something beyond Xenoblade Chronicles, and with a vague "CPU problems" many people will stop questioning things.

It seems people just think something like: that game is really old and my game system is quite new! It should work for sure! The thing is, it doesn't and it shouldn't because the 3ds was not made to properly emulate snes games.
Please read some more before jumping to conclusions. The only thing that makes this a cash grab from Nintendo's side is the fact that the snes games cost this much. I am pretty sure they at least tried to emulate snes on original 3ds.Does it sound logical to you people that Nintendo would want to lose out on millions of potential snes game downloads? I don't think they chose to lose out on that many vc game downloads just because they wanted to lift system sales by a small margin.

@Moroboshi876 You still dont get it, those are not comparable. The M2 games are made from scratch, they had completely different goals in mind.
Its like saying the difficulty of developing games on an N64 is the reason Star Fox Zero had to be delayed...

@Kirk Im with @Shugo on this one. I mean, just look at what M2 had to go through. It would take considerable manpower to do that and it would result in two things: The respective eShop would just be bloated by VC games and it would cost them extra money for the gamble of not getting anything in return.
On top of that, there are licensing fees involved, which also bloat up the costs.

Wow, there's a lot of chat generated over this.

I, for one, am very pleased they released the games on New 3DS. It's a shame they aren't on old 3DS, but I think it's fair enough for them to finally provide people with a reason to upgrade other than Xenoblade.

I do believe that SNES emulation is perfectly possible on the old 3DS, and I'm sure it won't be too long until someone proves it.

Here are the "technical reasons" keeping SNES roms from running on standard 3DSes.

Life is like a hurricane,
here, in - Kyo-to -
limos, cash bags, luxury with
Mi-ya - mo-to -
it's such a mystery...
ol' gaming history!
Nin-tales! (Woo-hoo!)
Everyday they're out there saying
bee-ess! (Boo-hoo!)
No GBA for you, it's just on
Wii-U!
H-h-homebrewer, watch behind you!
System update's out to find you!
What to do, just roll with all those
Nin-tales! (Woo-hoo!)
Upgrade your console, for just Xe-
no-blade! (Chron'-cles!)
Want good reasons? Here's Super Nin-
ten-do! (Screw you!)
No money tales, let's improve sales, with
Nin-tales! ([falsetto] Wah-hoo!)

@Einherjar,

As many said before its just a scheme to sell more New 3DS devices. With a little tweaking I am sure those games can run on normal 3DS devices. Remember the situation with NES Remix? Someone from Nintendo said it couldn't be pulled of on 3DS. But surprise, surprise: After a couple of months it did appear on the 3DS!

Nintendo is just lying!

It's not like Nintendo would or ever have lied to us before? Right?

@Sligeach
"How dare you!"

"Now let us return to our important errands."

@AlexSora89 So, they are keeping a fan favorite system from one of their most wide spread system because they are...greedy ? Yeah..sure. If you say so.

@Henmii And for the umpteenth time: Those are not emulated games.

Nintendo has 2 faces: Mario and Wario. They knew that about themselves. Wario makes all the business decisions, and Mario developed the games.

People love Nintendo games but hate their business decision. If they really want, they could've recompiled the SNES games into native 3DS code. There's no need to emulate. They owned the assets of the games, it's 2d games from over 20 years ago, how hard can it be?

Just because you CAN run a marathon with a broken leg doesnt mean you SHOULD.

The o3ds just cant run SNES games at a quality worth paying for. Its why people use homebrew to do so. It costs nothing, and when something is free you have more leeway to give on opinions on quality. Like it aint perfect but hey its free right?

But if I'm paying 7.99? SMW better work as best as it can. And Im pretty sure being choppy, framerate dipping, and no access to the OS/home menu for the sake of selling it on the o3ds would invite more scorn than praise

I don't get why people believe that the snes games are new 3ds exclusive because Nintendo wants to sell more systems. I think they would earn more if they managed to make snes work on 3ds on software sales. Besides I find it hard to believe that Nintendo actually thinks these snes games are a system seller. Why would they willingly lose out on a ton of snes game sales? I am sure Nintendo skipped snes on 3ds for a reason. They probably weren't pleased with the emulation quality on original 3DS.

@Einherjar Yeah, but M2 went way above and beyond the call of duty when putting the 3D Classics games on 3DS. Nintendo just needs to run the SNES games pretty much exactly as they were on the original console, other than a couple of minor things that are required on VC/eShop titles.

The licensing with some of the third parties would be an issue, but at the very least Nintendo could do it for basically all of its first part SNES titles.

@Gex91 People wanted SNES games for 3DS since the beginning. This is the last chance for Nintendo to entice people to buy the new 3DS before they announced NX.

@Kirk So, 1% is the 3D effect, additional content and engine rewrites (like the dual framerate in outrun) ?

@Nintendian If they wanted SNES from the beginning, no sane person would forfeit that demand in favor of gambling on system sales for a system that has no other arguments for existing.

@Einherjar Well, I removed that comment because I realised you weren't talking to me on that part, but it's obviously a much, much smaller portion of the game than all the original game code and art and sound assets.

It honestly probably took the programmer a matter of days to get these games running in basic stereoscopic 3D on the 3DS—I'm often amazed at how quickly coders can do stuff that looks pretty complex, especially when it's just adding in some visual/display effect to an existing game or whatever—although clearly there was far more to getting the basic stereoscopy working than just flipping a switch.

I changed my comment above by the way.

@Einherjar At this point, Nintendo is more interested in getting old 3DS owners to buy the new 3DS than selling more SNES games. Profits from those emulated games are pocket change. Once NX is launched, New 3DS will become Old 3DS and this is the last chance they have to sell.

@Kirk Still, its made the way you explained above. They took the original games code and made a new, native version out of it.
That would certainly be possible with SNES games too. No question. And it would make them infinitly more compatible, sure.

But it also does take more manpower and money to make. And thats not ne purpose of the VC. The VC is there to offer old Nintendo software. And the easiest and most efficiant way to do it is through emulation instead of redoing them.
If you focus an entire dev team on it, it stops being a side project and becomes a major endevour.
But other than SEGA, who can concentrate their finances on games alone, Nintendo is currently juggling projects.
Mobile, Theme Parks, upcomming console, upcomming games. There is no leeway to turn this into a full scale project that can cover its costs in a heartbeat.
And its pretty clear that these games dont cater to a large audience in the first place. The N3DS has a pretty narrow scope. So if they wanted to make big bucks, there is no way they would have willingly passed onto the opportunity to bring them to the 3DS also. At least, like i said, none that would stay in the green.

@Nintendian

Personally I don't think Nintendo considers these vc games to be system sellers (a select few may upgrade because of this) If consumers didn't want the New version before, then I dont think 20 year old games will convince them to go buy it now. I think Nintendo would have gained more from this(profit and fanbase wise) if they managed to get the games running properly on the original 3ds, so if it was at all possible to do so, I don't see a reason why they wouldn't have.

@Nintendian Again, if they wanted to sell more, they would create more exclusive software for it. VC games are hardly system sellers. Not by a long shot. Name me one person who bought a WiiU because of its VC titles.

You know what would have been THE way to force people to buy a N3DS ? Make Pokemon Sun / Moon exclusives.
Reason: The original 3DS already struggled with 3D effects on X/Y, thats why they went all out on the new system.

THAT is what a system seller would look like. Not SNES games you can get on several other systems already.

@Einherjar
There can be technical reasons, of course, but their explanation is suspiciously vague.
It's as if I had a car crash because I was distracted by someone else, say, for example some idiot off the road who blinded me with a phone's flash as he was taking a photo, and when I opened my eyes again one second later, I couldn't brake in time and ended up against the car in front of me; now imagine if I explained the accident's cause as "my attention not being at an optimal state". Sure, that works for be being distracted by someone, but also more aptly describes me being distracted on my own, as everyone listening to such an explanation would rightfully assume.
There are games that took Nintendo pains to emulate properly? Sure, and they went through a lot of trouble for them: changing a word in the European releases of Super Mario RPG, creating an ad-hoc emulator for the Generation I Pokémon games on 3DS, you name it. But aside from that? They're ROMs, plain and simple. I'm taking the bait because I already own a 3DS (for separate reasons, of course - and I would be very mad at Nintendo if me owning an inferior model of the SAME console would keep me out of the loop; as of now, I'm simply annoyed for the standard 3DS owners being in said situation) and because I love portability as I'm more of a handheld guy (and as playing games on the go is always a step forward in technology, which makes the lack of GBA games on the 3DS eShop downright dumb; there are no "technical reasons" given the GBA ambassador games have always worked fine), but I'd have preferred a more fleshed out bug log than "on New 3DS they work better and we're not telling to which extent". To put it another way: Super Metroid officially debuting as a portable title? Super awesome! Metroid Fusion going from a portable title that could also play on a home console (the Game Boy Player was essentially "play it on the big screen" done right), from a home console-only title? How can it be a system seller, where's the appeal of it? There are games that simply couldn't exist without Mode-7 (Super Mario Kart) and others that squeeze Mode-7's potential like some kind of wonderful lemon (StarFox/StarWing), but others make a very minimal use of Mode-7 (Super Mario World's final boss battle, as well as the key animation) and shouldn't be kept out of standard 3DS owners' reach because of that. That is, assuming I knew the real cause of the supposedly inferior performance. Which I don't. And which, more importantly, is the reason we come up with our own reasons - that is, our sarcasm drives us to assume greed is the most likely reason.

Besides, I made up a catchy variation of the DuckTales theme. You oughta give me that. (Hoping that would make people laugh and, most importantly, cheering up standard 3DS owners that have to pay for a superior model in order to play Super Nintendo games on the go... man, even writing this sentence feels wrong.)

@Einherjar These are not Zelda OoT or Majora's Mask, these are 2d games from 20 years ago that can be remade using Adobe Flash. Nintendo has all the games' assets, they can easily recompiled it into native 3DS code.

A system that can run Resident Evil but can't run SNES game, their PR people definitely have a hard time explaining.

@Einherjar Well, from my point of view, the manpower and stuff is irrelevant to me as a consumer. I just want SNES games on 3DS, and having them only on New 3DS seems a bit like a cheat to me personally.

I personally think it should be a major endeavour—the VC done right could be a massive cash cow and fan service imo—although I genuinely don't think it would a particularly major endeavour at all. I'd say it could be done with a very small team of guys, maybe even just one or two, working full time going through and "porting" the code for each SNES game until they're done.

I genuinely think the amount of money Nintendo would make from the accumulative sales of all those titles on both 3DS and New 3DS would more than pay for the costs of the guys doing the conversions—and the satisfaction it would bring to consumers would be kinda priceless imo.

And that genuine all-round satisfaction, beyond just hardcore fans, is something that I think current-day Nintendo lacks as compared to the Nintendo of '80s and '90s. Nintendo shouldn't be ignoring that because it might cost a few bucks, and that is exactly what I think Nintendo is doing, with more than just the VC stuff, and I think that is one of the major reasons so many people are becoming less and less enamoured with Nintendo products and care less and less with each passing generation. That's my take on it anyway.

I think Nintendo needs to start going above and beyond again, and really blow people away, give them both what they want as pretty much default and more, because that's what makes satisfied customers and also gets you additional new consumers too. But constantly half-*ssing it—like with the VC, or the new Star Fox for example—just isn't cutting it imo.

Sega 3D Classics is a Virtual Machine based of Sega Megadrive with more memory, and works in all 3DS with 3D layers and powerful arcades like Galaxy Force 2... This justification is inexcusable.

@Gex91
"Why would they willingly lose out on a ton of snes game sales?"
Well, given the first SNES titles are out for the 3DS eShop, Nintendo already did - as you put it - willingly lose out on a ton of SNES game sales.

@Nintendian If you think that porting and compiling code from over 20 years ago is "click-click-done," then you obviously lack an understanding of how coding is done.

You're absolutely right, Nintendo could reuse the source and go through the rigmarole of porting, compiling and testing their games, but it wouldn't be cost effective on their part, and they'd probably have it done by the NX's release anyway. It'd be a nightmare for Nintendo's overworked code monkeys too, development is hell man

Slapping a high-level emulator together which would interpret the SNES system calls and translate those into something the 3DS can work with is a lot more viable and cost effective.

@Nintendian Im glad you have no clue what youre talking about whatsoever. Last reply to you until you have a grasp on the topic.

@Kirk But you, as a consumer, are aguing about technicalities, right ? Shouldnt you be just swallowing their official statement and go on ? As a mere consumer, you dont have insight in what is technically required to run these things, right ?

Id also love for it to become a major thing for Nintendo consoles. These games are considered the best in their respective genres for a reason, and that for over 20 years now.

Sadly, it is a niche market. And Nintendo isnt doing so good on native releases either already. And as far as im concerned, they should stay the top priority no matter what. Thats the reason people buy these systems for, not for age old games nostalgia buffs crave. It would need a dedicated studio for it, and id hate to see people pulled from new projects for that.

@AlexSora89 Your reply takes a while I have to work my way through your text. Im multi tasking atm.

@Einherjar Whatever I am, I want Nintendo to do it right. Half-*ssing it because it believes it's more cost effective is simply more of the kind of short term thinking that's got present-day Nintendo where it's at right now imo.

And I honestly don't think it's niche enough that Nintendo wouldn't make a very decent profit if it actually bothered to do it right and get basically the entire library SNES games on both 3DS and New 3DS (if we ignore the licensing stuff for a second).

Both ways (half-*ssed or all-in), I don't think Nintendo is going to lose money, but I do think it's going to lose the hearts and minds of more and more once-loyal fans doing it the current way (and this goes to more than just the VC). I believe the value of capturing those hearts and minds in the long term is worth more than the financial investment in the short term—and it's all the "little" things that count as far as I'm concerned.

A bunch of numbers and stats on a spreadsheet won't tell the financial men that, and that's where Nintendo is failing to see the bigger picture imo.

It would not be the first time that Nintendo lies about their awkward decisions.

@AlexSora89

I didn't suggest they were missing snes sales willingly. My question is, why would they? I've seen many comments and articles from the homebrew scene suggesting these games wouldn't work properly on original 3Ds.
Why would Nintendo refuse to make these games for original 3ds if they are able to make quite a bit of money out of it? The only reason I can think of is they are not pleased with the emulation quality. Twenty year old roms won't sell €190,- systems to most of the people who already own a 2ds/3ds.

@Nekketsu3D
Sega 3D Classics, alongside Nintendo's own 3D Classics, are another thing entirely. They recreated the games from scratch, in painstaking detail. They didn't "just" add 3D effects, as you can see during gameplay if you slowly slide the 3D slider. A great deal of sweat and soul went into those games, so mad props to that!
On the other hand, aside from the exceptions I mentioned in my earlier comment on this page, the emulator that makes Super Mario World work on a New 3DS is likely the exact same one that's used for EarthBound; maybe some tweaks for getting Pilotwings' Mode-7 to work correctly, but that's most likely it. The only reason it's not sold as a "SNES Official Emulator" on the eShop, with microtransactions to buy the games in it as if they were DLC for the free app, is most likely to treat the games like individual games, and to add some tweaks to each ones if needed. Again, I can be wrong, and probably even AM wrong. But as long as the exact reasons as to why aren't stated out loud... guesses galore!

@Einherjar
I'm aware of my painful lack of brevity. No problem, take your time and reply whenever you want. If you want to tell me I'm wrong, go ahead! As long as you, in turn, make sure to take your time to elaborate an (I'm sure) unobjectionable response. Think of it like Goku's spirit bomb in Dragon Ball.

@Shikinouta
"Slapping a high-level emulator together which would interpret the SNES system calls and translate those into something the 3DS can work with is a lot more viable and cost effective."

You are saying Nintendo just want a get it done quick cash grab? Or are you saying they are lazy?

@Nintendian @Henmii You both should read up on how emulation is done. It's really a fascinating topic. And it really does require a lot more CPU power than you'd expect. Flash games and ports have literally no bearing on emulation.

Anyway, I'd suggest, as I always do, the book I AM ERROR for more insight into how emulation works.

@Shugo "But you see, conversions like that take a lot more time, effort, money, and people than Nintendo wants to put into it."

And to me, THAT's the problem.

Not that putting SNES games on 3DS can't be done, or that it ultimately wouldn't actually be more beneficial to Nintendo in the long run, but simply because in the short-term Nintendo doesn't see it as worth the money and effort.

I think THAT's the flaw in a lot of Nintendo's thinking these days.

And again, I'm not talking about suped-up conversions like the Nintendo 3D Classics and Sega 3D Classics, just porting the basic code across to run natively on 3DS. Fans don't require the games to be in 3D, or have new modes, or anything like that. They just want to play all the great SNES games on 3DS and New 3DS (with a couple of very minor things to make them suited for VC in 2016, like the option to add simple image borders if you display them in perfect pixel mode for example). I think that's well within Nintendo's resources, and I personally think it will both make a profit for them and leave consumers more satisfied in the long run. Those are two good things imo; if you do that then it's basically win win for everyone.

@Nintendian "You are saying Nintendo just want a get it done quick cash grab? Or are you saying they are lazy?"

No, I think he's saying they're a business.

@AlexSora89 As for the "superior" model, its an old hat. I dont know why people are so befuddled by it.
The N3DS is nothing else than what the GBC was to the original GameBoy, or the DSi was to the DS.
Nintendo has always done this with their handhelds.
The only handheld branch that never recieved a power upgrade was the GBA.

So, this "dilemma" of owning the "underpowered version" ? Yup, been there, done that. And speaking of the GBC, back then, it had a far, far greater amount of exclusive software. Be glad that, so far, youre missing out on one main game and VC titles only.

As for the ambassador GBA games. True, they work because of the inbuild DS hardware, that has inbuild GBA hardware in it.
Technically, those games are running natively on a 3DS, albait without any VC benefits or OS access.
These are simply ROMs wich trigger your 3DS to go into DS/GBA mode. Not really what they were aiming for with the VC.

Granted, for half the price, those would be certainly appreciated by many. And yes, that is a defacto missed opportunity.

And like many said before: Emulation is almost always down to CPU strength / architecture. So if the statement is, that the CPU is holding it back, you can say its true. Other key hardware components, RAM and GPU pretty much play nect to no role into it, other than having to meet the minimum requirements (RAM needs to be able to hold ROM+Emulator, GPU needs to be able to use certain filters)

Also, if im not mistaken, Star Fox used the SuperFX chip, a whole other beast Im pretty sure Mode7 says Daddy to it.

I have no interest in tellimg people they are flat out wrong and be done with it. Wheres the fun in that ? I just want to hold an in depth discussion, maybe learn a thing or two myself in the process. I was just playing Hyrule Warriors in the backround and was a little preoccupied

@Nintendian Neither. Cost efficiency is the keyword here.

@Tasuki Virtually every company out there is greedy—that's how they make money. Money is generally the endgame for a company.

Not buying those for sure until they're free via cross-buy, the Wii to Wii U large discount was fine but between current gen handheld and home console should be free.

I believe the original 3ds had a 268Mhz processor running on 2 cores (arm11) with one reserved for the operating system while the new 3ds has a 268Mhz processor running on 4 cores with one reserved for the os (arm11) . This equates to the original 3ds only having a 268Mhz core at its disposal to actually run the games while the new 3ds has 3 of those same cores to run games.

Edit: seems I forgot to mention that both original 3ds and new 3ds also include a 134Mhz single core (arm9) on top of the previously mentioned processor cores.

@Einherjar Not efficient enough, they should hired better programmers, SNES games had been playable on PSP for a long time. Nintendo should hired those indie emulator programmers, and maybe better security engineers, the 3DS has been hacked to pieces these days despite their constant 'stability' updates.

@Nintendian "should hired better programmers" What word of "cost efficiancy" did you not understand ?
Hireing people for not profitable software is the exact opposite of cost efficiancy.

Not buying the excuse. And not buying the games even if I have a New Nintendo 3ds because I am sick of being ripped off. In other news the wonderfully ported Sega Classic Collection by M2 will be available on April 26. Perfectly compatible with standard 3ds. In 3D.

If Nintendo had capable and efficient programmers, they could've got SNES games to run on older hardware right?

@Nintendian Also, "stability" updates are not "security" updated. Both go hand in hand, sure, but updates are usually preparing a system for a new major release that might need certain OS features not yet implemented.
Take a guess why early PSP games came shipped with firmware updates on UMD and would refuse to run if not updated ?
Thats a "stability update" in a nutshell.

As for security itself. You arent really naive enough to believe there is anything a company could ever do to prevent hacking, do you ? History showed, that the best kind of copy protection is an exotic medium.

I find it hard to believe, comparing to homebrew emulators is not an accurate comparison. Sony managed to get the PS3 to emulate the PS2 for digital releases, not something 'homebrew' would have managed.
The PSP managed to have commercial emulations of Megadrive, Neo Geo, and Capcom Arcade games released as compilations. I think they are looking for another reason to sell the 'new' 3DS hardware.

@pandarino "squaaak...not emulated...squaaak" I think ill turn into a parrot at the end of the day. These are, in no way, comparable to each other.

@Einherjar At least Vita lives in a bricked house, 3DS is built with straws. The pirates puff and puff and the piggy kept patching it's straw house.

@Ristar42 The PSP also had a 333MHz processor, compared to the 3DSs 268MHz...just as a side note.
Oh, and a completely different OS structure that didnt need a dedicated processor core running in the background

@Einherjar But it IS emulation. Just done game by game and dealing with the problems. This interview is very informative. Basically, t's emulation. Just not easy. http://www.siliconera.com/2013/12/03/emulating-megadrive-3ds-isnt-easy-enter-3d-sonic-hedgehog/

@Nintendian The Vita ? A "bricked house" ?
Funny that you mentioned it, with its PSP core being cracked for ages and "custom bubbles" making it possible to implement cartridge dumps, but go ahead, tell me your tale

oh btw, the straw house is a stable. Coincident? "Make your 3DS more stable"? Maybe it's horses, not pigs.

@Einherjar PSP came out in 2004. It's has an ancient CPU regardless of clock speed.

@pandarino "MegaDrive is difficult on 3DS VC, so enter the 3D Remaster Project!"
The "remaster" is the key part here. The M2 games are an entirely different beast. And yes, as we stated many times before: Reworking those games would certainly work wonders, but would require a dedicated team, funding and attention.
Something not that easy for a company already juggling several projects all at once.

@Nintendian I still wish you knew a thing or two about emulation, so this discussion could finally bear fruit.

@Einherjar Vita is still invincible. PSP collapsed a million years ago.

@Nintendian Invincible ? xD Yeah, sure. Here, i might have the site you where looking for: http://www.pushsquare.com/

@Einherjar really, its slower than a PSP? I did not know that. Shame they did not manage to get them working, as I may have actually bought a SNES game or two. Not buying a new console for the feature though.

@Einherjar VITA can be hacked to run old PSP "backup" games but not native "backup" VITA games. Do a research, VITA is built with bricks.

@Einherjar I see what you mean but "we don't have the time and resources to do it", is very different from "we can't do it". Not to mention M2 had difficulties because they wanted the games to run in 3D and the Genesis/Megadrive is faster than the SNES in the first place.

We cut some of the fat, accelerated things by writing some assembly code and whatnot. However for the 3DS remakes, we wanted to effectively utilize the 3DS’s CPU resources as much as possible, so we wrote assembly where we needed assembly, and swapped out code as needed from the EMULATOR, which was written in C. This took quite a bit of time, and turned into quite a magnificent bit of work. So we had to slowly cobble together performance speed by doing things like writing code that more easily hits the cache every time it’s called.

@Gex91
I know, I've been a Definitely Inappropriate Certainty Killer with my response, but you served it on a silver plate first! Of course, if there was no other way to ensure a satisfying performance on 3DSes, they had the right to make at least some profit from the SNES and therefore decide to go on and sell the SNES titles on New 3DS... then again, I can't help but think of the 3DS Dragon Ball game, which will forever be known as the one that "pulled off SNES on 3DS before Nintendo ever did", as the SNES game that came bundled with the first copies never required a New 3DS in the first place.

Of course, I just realized that Nintendo's own struggle with emulating the SNES properly might be the reason the SNES VC came so late in the first place. It would make sense, at least.

@Einherjar
You just gained a lot more respect with this reply. I just wanted to get this sentence out of the way before further discussing the various points. (And yes, there's no fun in just saying "You're wrong", because that also is little more than being the average internet troll. Which you aren't.)

As for your first point, I kind of disagree with the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy. I personally count them as two separate consoles, despite them both being 8-bit machines. The first Game Boy rearranged the Game & Watch's "printed-on-screen silhouettes" into actual squares, that is, into pixels; the screen itself was still monochromatic. The new element it brought to the table was the link cable (which was fully exploited by Pokémon) and, most importantly, the fact that there weren't multiple systems for multiple games anymore, instead going for interchangeable cartridges. On the other hand, the fact the Game Boy Color got more exclusive games shouldn't surprise anyone; it was enough of a change to give Link's Awakening an entirely new dungeon, so there's no doubt some gameplay ideas were outright impossible without colors. Could you imagine Super Mario Bros. Deluxe on a monochrome screen? I can't, mostly due to the outlines that Super Mario Land 2 characters had and Super Mario Bros characters lacked. That, alongside hardware tweaks such as the infrared communicator, make a comparison between the GB-GBC and DSi-DS dualisms rather moot. Everyone counts GB and GBC as separate consoles, and going by Nintendo's own VC icons, they do too. Then again, on a hardware standpoint, all GB and GBC roms share the same "GB" extension in their file names, with some GBC games ending with ".gbc" but that's it, there's no real difference when emulating... odd. And I obviously am glad I'm only missing out on Xenoblade Chronicles and some VC titles... except I'm not: as in, I'm not missing out (I own a New 3DS myself), not "glad" (then again, I'm glad standard 3DS owners aren't missing out on much more than this).
Your point about the GBA games, however, really caught me off guard. I didn't consider there IS some GBA compatibility in the 3DS due to the (mostly unavailable, as the DS interface never shows up outside of DS download play) DS functions in it. "Natively" is a truly fitting word here - the games are running natively, without any VC benefits outside of the possibility of closing the game (and I could have arrived to your conclusion as well, if only I considered for a moment why the Home button opens the exact same "Close the game?" window for DS and DSiWare games... I always wondered, and here's the answer!). Which makes the lack of GBA games on the 3DS eShop all the more baffling, as you admitted yourself - it's a missed opportunity: I'd pay the same price as the Wii U GBA games for some poorly done ports of the GBA games on 3DS!
I always considered emulation as a layered thing - that is, hardware has to simulate another piece of hardware in order to run "lower" software meant for the latter. It's how I usually explain how emulation works to other people. Which is why I always found weird (yet awesome, due to my aforementioned love for portability) how PSP, with its PS2-like power, could work PS1 games. However this didn't stop me from enjoying them on the go as I always wished ever since I was a kid.
Yep, the SuperFX chip, forgot about that.

You see, Einherjar, I enjoyed this discussion, which is what makes me mad at Nintendo's vague explanation: you aren't sure of how it works yourself, and yet you explained the situation more clearly than they ever did! They could have said "The SNES hardware structure allowed for graphical effects that went beyond the usual 2D fare, and so far our development team has seen issues leading to disappointing performance on standard 3DS systems; due to a different amount of processing power and overall better performance on New 3DS systems, we've decided to keep the SNES Virtual Console as a New 3DS exclusive in order to guarantee a near-identical result to the original console itself" instead of that three-line explanation, and we could have settled with it. What they did, on the other hand, was a "It works better on New 3DS" but not the "It works better on New 3DS because" that fans want.

I'm calling BS damage control, the CPU runs laps around the SNES one. Sure the 3DS runs more in the background but there are ways to still optimize this.

@Ristar42 Yes and no. The 3DS is running a dual core while the PSP used a single core CPU. And "slower" is objective as the 3DS still beats the PSP in terms of graphical prowess.

@pandarino Not really, as "we cant do it" does mean that, with their methods, it is not possible.
Their emulation methods simply wont work, and creating new software for an old system would require a new team or slow the whole process down for both systems. Thats the "cant do" part.
It just wouldnt be profitable to work twice on one release that already doesnt properly pay off.

@PtM
Come to think of it, "The older model in our current-generation family of handhelds isn't powerful enough to emulate an early 90's console" isn't exactly good PR... oh, snap... on one hand we have vagueness leading to accusations of greed, and on the other we have a kind of honesty that would damage the image of the older model... talk about damned if you do and damned if you don't!

@AlexSora89

Fair enough
I must admit Dragon Ball Super Butouden 2 makes me have some second thoughts too. I've played that game before and I personally think that would be one of the Snes games the 3DS could handle. I haven't played it on 3DS myself though so I don't know how smooth it runs. Personally I think the original 3DS is capable of running some Snes games but not all of them, also it may not run any of them the way Nintendo wants them to run. Instead of releasing some games for the orignal 3DS I think they tried to avoid consumer confusion and just decided to make ALL of the Snes games for new 3Ds only.

Does Super butouden 2 have the VC functions?

@Einherjar And you have all the financial evidence and are not giving me an answer that is just more entitled than mine? Let's say agree to disagree because I can see there's no real communication here.

@Gex91
I don't know about the VC functions, Gex. I got caught in the overall fun tennis that this discussion is turning out to be. Might look it up later.

"While many fans were no doubt thrilled to see the classic 16-bit console's games being made available legitimately on a portable for the first time"

It's not the first time...

@AlexSora89

Haha the discussion goes on and on
Just checked some footage of Super Butouden on 3DS.
One thing I noticed is that they changed the soundtrack. It may not be a direct emulation of the original.
It's possible that it's more like a port. Unfortunately, the footage didn't show if there was a VC menu included.

@AlexSora89 Yes, but nowadays, such hardware leaps arent really possible anymore. There is no such thing as "wow, its in color now !". All thats left is pure number crunching and the arbitrary extra feature here and there.
Im counting both the GB and GBC as one branch, since they shared large parts of their library with each other.
Several GBC games could very well be played on a regular GB, something usually not possible with a new branch system.

Yeah, a lot of people flat out forget the 3DS even has a build in DS which, in terms, has a build in GBA. And yes, thats why the 3DS OS is not available and instead, you simply have to shut down the game entirely to exit DS mode.

As to why they are not offered...beats me. Im pretty sure their QA standards are preventing them from selling those for the exact same price or maybe even labeling them as VC games, as there techically is no VC part to them.
They could, however, market them the same way they market Wii games on the WiiU eShop. They too simply run in Wii mode, some of them juest benefit from the fact that they do start up in WiiU mode and thus, dont disable WiiU peripherals.

Your explaination at the end would have certainly made for a great PR statement. Yes, the short answer is lacking and with the already bad PR streak Nintendo is currently having with their localisations, they should have been a little more wordy.

@pandarino What else did you want to hear ?
It would require either split work for one team or two teams for a side project. No company would be willing to do that.

@Gex91 that would mean they tinkered with the games SPC files. Sounds either like a ROM hack or like a remaster to me then.

@Einherjar I prefer the PSP just for its retro compilations anyway to be honest, the Capcom Collections are great, one even has the SNES version of Ghouls and Ghosts on a commercial release.

@Ristar42 Yup, the Capcom collections are great, although i prefer the PS2 versions, simply for easier multi player ^^

Lies. The first DS itself could run homebrew SNES emulators, so I'm sure the original 3DS could do as well.

Lot of salt in this comment section, huh? For those thinking that Nintendo is doing this for the money, really think about it; how many people own a New 3DS as opposed to an old 3DS? No one's going to buy a New 3DS just for Super Nintendo games, and Nintendo would make a lot more money trying to sell Super Nintendo games on the old 3DS than using them to push the New 3DS. In the end, it has nothing to do with sales so much as the CPU of the older model. The old 3DS can't emulate the games in the same quality that the New 3DS can, otherwise Nintendo would've sold these much earlier in the 3DS's life cycle, like when the VC releases slowed down to a crawl for GameBoy and NES games.

No crossbuy or any promotional pricing means no sale, really. No reason to buy these on the 3DS when I have them on my Wii U. Now, if the older Fire Emblem games get a translation for the west, then I'll gladly pick that up.

@yuwarite Apples and Oranges

@Einherjar Excuse off topic moment re thoses PSP versions, I own them digitally which is great as can activate on two consoles, even works with Playstation TV and Vita.

@allav866 But they also need desperate reasons to sell the New 3DS as well, and this just seems like a quick and easy way to do it.

@Ristar42 Sadly over here, just one of two games is compatible on VitaTV...that said, the compatibility whitelist over here is a joke anyways...

@yuwarite Pokemon Sun/Moon would be the quick, easy and actually working way. Not SNES games

@Deadstanley It's more the fact that we understand how hardware works. The fact that they say the performance is bad just shows laziness and that they want to do minimal.

@Einherjar You're right, the DS1 vs 3DS are Apples and Oranges compared tech wise. So it should have been way more possible to emulate SNES on an original 3DS over the much weaker DS.

I dont think people realize how taxing emulation can actually be. Most free emulators often use workarounds and shortcuts to cut down on the workload which is why the games are often highly unstable and/or buggy. For something thats free thats find but for a paid prodcts thats just unnacceptable

@yuwarite

I didnt see him mention the DS. Also, when did the ds emulate Snes games?

@Einherjar well, first you could stop snappily answering things like "not emulation" to everyone pointing out the sega classics, since as we saw, it is emulation. Just more time and resource consuming than vanilla one.

Secondly please accept it's just opinions and not try to enlighten us all with your holy gospel! It's really an aggravating attitude.
Maybe you are right, maybe someone else is, who knows?

@pandarino

Personally I see the sega games more or less like remakes. The games look even better than the originals in most cases. I doubt an emulation ever looks better than the original. Also if Nintendo would do the same thing as M2, the roll out of Snes games would be even slower than it is now. If they wanted to do what M2 did, they should have started doing that years ago imo.

@ikki5 What is lazy about focusing on other, far more important software than rereleasing 20 year old games ?

@yuwarite Which is flat out wrong. Did you ever consider the way heavier worklode of the 3DS OS for instance ? The fact that, unlike the DS, the 3DS is a multi tasking system ?
Or that you simply cant compare hobby coded emulators to commercial grade emulation ?

@pandarino If you take offense to what and how i answer, consider not reading my posts, it really helps, trust me.
Secondly, i dont deal in opinions>facts.
You might have noticed that quite a lot of people are actually interested in discussing the matter more in depth.
So, if people wont read whats already been written out several time and just "snappily" post their BS, whos preventing me from snappily answering those ?

Also "Its not vanilla emulation" is kind of a big deal here.
But please, do yourself a favor and pretend im not posting on here. It saves you a lot of grievance.

@Shadow15982 if it was a money grab they would release them on the regular 3ds. The user base is huge compared to the N3ds. Im sure the old 3ds will play snes games just not to the level Nintendo would be happy with.

See, here's the problem I have with this announcement and the New 3DS in general (as much as I'm happy to see SNES games on the New 3DS—and I am): All this stuff should have been on the original 3DS in the first place as far as I'm concerned. And the thing that rubs me the wrong way is that I honestly don't think it wasn't there from day one for any legit reasons. I think Nintendo deliberately under designed version 1.0 of the 3DS, specifically with the intention of releasing an updated version in the future that it could sell hardcore fans who'd be inclined to buy more than one system.

I can see how the 2DS came about, but I think the New 3DS is simply a sign of Nintendo not going all-in with version 1.0 of its new hardware, simply because it knows it can cash in with updated versions later down the line.

If you think I'm being paranoid then just look at the obvious downgrade from the likes of DS Lite to the first-gen 3DS (in terms of the slickness of the external hardware). It did the same with the GBA Advance SP and Game Boy Micro to the first generation DS, even more blatantly that time.

Are you telling me Nintendo forgets how to design slick looking consoles from one generation to the next, and in the case of the 3DS suddenly remembered again when the 2DS and New 3DS came around?

The original 3DS should have looked like one of the newer models out the gate, with the same features and stuff too, and it should have been playing SNES games day one imo.

I think the biggest problem is people not understanding the difference between a RE-RELEASE (re-written code of the game - like Outrun 3D and the Megaman Collection) and an EMULATION.

Simplyfying things a bit it goes like that:
Outrun 3d runs it's code natively on 3DS meaning its virtually a 3DS game, not a Sega system game. If you were to put this game in an original Sega system it wouldn't recognize the code AT ALL!
EMULATION is something completely different. You try to cheat the game into thinking it runs on the original system (SNES). It demands a lot of power to emulate an entire maschine with all it's specific intricacies and to do it perfectly is a very calculation heavy task. Virtual Console from Nintendo is exactly that! Hence it is CPU heavy. Hence the divide. Simple.

@Gex91 Via homebrew SNES emulators that could be loaded on DS flash carts. Which admitedly did have internal processors themselves for aiding in the task.

Well, it was fun, but duty is calling.
Thanks everyone for the discussions ^^

@Gex91 Yes it would have surely taken more time, basically it seems they built an emulator and then coded some part of the games. Totally can see Nintendo not wanting/having time to do it and it's what a lot of people are saying basically. They didn't want to spend time/money on it but could have done it on the standard model. I am not saying that they should have done it...

@Einherjar yes dear, and you are implying that other users are writing BS and you just know the truth, When in fact you are spreading misinformation by saying SEGA didn't emulate the games or in your holy words of wisdom ""squaaak...not emulated...squaaak"".

I really don't believe it for one second. It's just Nintendo's way to sell another wave of the New3DS to people based purely on Nostalgia. I'm sure they could have made them work, but they also need those sales so, it is what it is.
If they make a New3DS that doesn't have that garbage Nub on it, I might think about upgrading.

@Ichi The do it other than via perfect hardware SNES emulation.

In summary: Nintendo is busy with their NX, but to appease their current customers they have to make new softwares to show on their Nintendo Direct.

Besides the usual rehash of the games they already mentioned they needed something new. SNES is the new thing this time, they did a rush job and came up with an emulator that was not optimized, so it only runs on the New 3DS. They went "Oh well, better than nothing new to show!"

End of story.

I call bs. They ported snes games to Gameby Advance.

@Ps4all

A port isn't the same as emulating. Also those ports were not of the same quality as the Snes originals were.

@Project_Dolphin
Addressed that point in an earlier comment.

@Gex91
Unless there are some Sonic CD-esque shenanigans going on. Keep in mind that in my country - Europe's one and only Boot - the DBZ dub included the original Japanese soundtrack, whereas the English dub used Bruce Faulconer's score. Might have something to do with that, perhaps? Who knows.

@Einherjar
Come to think of it, how come DS games aren't sold on the 3DS eShop? I'd buy a digital version of Mario Kart DS in a heartbeat.
Also, seeing you've thanked everybody, well, you're welcome.

@pandarino
I thought that too about Einherjar at first, but he made a pretty valid point to counter every argument I wrote. Which is how he won me over on this article. And yes, as I said before, the Sega 3D Classics were remade from scratch. Just look up the M2 interview on this very site.

@Deadstanley
What's even more bothersome, though, is how some people's defense of Nintendo boils down to "Nintendo is the one holding the knide, suck it up", which sadly happens fairly often. No one here knows that much about emulation, and the fact we're kept in the dark as to the exact reason keeping SNES games from running on a standard 3DS is what made "greed" our personal joke reason (or actual reason, depending of who you ask) due to such dodgy PR speak (described with these exact words in the proper article above).

@chiefeagle02
Don't tell me you have Flipnote Studio! Did it arrive yet? I've been waiting for that far longer than I did wait for SNES games to arrive on the 3DS eShop.

@AlexSora89 thanks I'll read it, I am coming from reading this http://www.siliconera.com/2013/12/03/emulating-megadrive-3ds-isnt-easy-enter-3d-sonic-hedgehog/ on siliconera where they explain how they basically tweaked an emulator for the games, resulting in a lot more work than they thought.

@AlexSora89 DS games run in hardware mode on 3DS, not emulated. That's the reason it needs a cartridge, it can't read the SD card. The DS even has it's own hardware setting in the 3DS.

@AlexSora89

I found out it has something to do with copyright infringement. They removed the old soundtrack because the autor had plagiarised other artists songs (not just in this game too) . I am pretty sure they didn't change it during the Snes era so the soundtrack used now didn't exist on any of the versions back then.

I also believe the game was only available in French and Japanese.
Edit: It seems there's a Spanish release as well.

A link with some more info about the copyright stuff: http://www.kanzenshuu.com/features/kenji-yamamoto-retrospective/

Lots of Salty people about this! I'm really liking it.

You know what's sad about all this?

In the rush to scream and argue about SNES games, people have forgotten that numerous NES and Game Boy games are still missing from the 3DS eshop.

We still don't have Star Tropics, the first Earthbound, or countless other games.

Something for everyone to think about.

@AlexSora89 I've had the 3DS version of Flipnote Studio since it was a Club Nintendo freebie (before the program went under, of course).

So what about the statement of why GBA games are on Wii U?

they should release the Flipnote 3D Studio in march for free for those that register to the new Nintendo loyalty program as far as I know

@PtM

You guys had Club Nintendo going for months well after the NA one disappear along with restocks of items and digital titles. I'd take that over a piece of software you use 1 to 5 times in your lifespan.

@Einherjar

So you're going to defend laziness? That's pretty sad. over all, Nintendo themselves has hardly anything coming for both systems. The least they could do it put a small bit of extra work to optimize something.

@AlexSora89 and don't forget the price... the Snes VC is a really expensive vs Sega 3D titles... what a shame I would to play Super Metroid with 3D Layers and more...

Even if the 3ds is not capable on VC Nintendo could have released SNES games as compilations on cartridges as a kind of SNES classics mix series , I mean it's not like the 3DS is being flooded with choice for games each month so why not release some upgraded SNES Classics and also not alienate 90% of your userbase . Crazy how short sighted Nintendo are this gen , This confirms that they had no idea which direction to take the 3DS from the start and have been making it up as they go along as quick fixes to improve sales , Sadly this also includes the quality of games being released as most Nintendo exclusives feel nothing new and actually lacking or taking away things which made the games great in the first place .

I personally think if Nintendo could release the same SNES games for the old 3DS they probably would. Their are a lot more of the old models in consumer hands than the new 3DS which would increase sales for these VC games. I don't see it as a push to convince people to buy the New 3DS since I highly doubt that the majority of 3DS owners are concerned about playing SNES games, or if they are they probably have a Wii or WiiU at home with the same games.

It's simple.

"WITH QUALITY RESULTS"

Just getting a game functioning isn't enough.

@chiefeagle02
Travesty! I've never received it!

@Nekketsu3D
Come to think of it, why exactly Nintendo dropped the 3D Classics project altogether is anyone's guess. Super Metroid with 3D layers would be awesome, it would go hand in hand with the game's atmosphere.

@Tasuki
" People who don't see that are just Nintendo fanboys who don't want to admit Nintendo is that greedy."

That's a crock of an insult if I've ever heard. "Agree with my unending skepticism, or you're a fanboy".

I expected better from someone like you. I really did.

Your argument (and blanket insult) backfires on itself. Ok, Nintendo's super greedy. So why then in 5 years did they never put SNES VC on normal 3DS? It's a sure money maker. Free money. Far be it from a greedy company to pass up free money. They put every platform known to man on every OTHER platform with VC, so why purposely pass up 3DS?

Besides, this profits them in no way. Ok, so it makes New 3DS look a little more appealing. So what? A few thousand extra 3DS owners upgrade. Surely that benefits this "greedy company" far more than selling games that sell themselves to a fanbase 50 million strong.

Ya, great logic there.

yawn
Alright, not every game will run on SNES emulators on old 3DS AT THE MOMENT, however you'll be able to play RPGs just fine with the QUALITY RESULTS that you all and Nintendo's PR team are so obsessed with.
Hell, I honestly didn't expect FE4 to run as well as it did, but it does.
But yeah it's understandable that with Nintendo's standards they want to be 101% sure that every game works with their emulator. Though with the whole 3DS family being at its end-of-life and Nintendo's incredibly crappy VC release schedules, this might end up being more of a novelty than Wii U's VC. Especially with those really high prices.
If Nintendo cannot setup My Nintendo or NNID or whatever to allow installation on multiple 3DSes, Wii Us, and NXes (at least 2 of each) for ONE VC purchase, then I really don't see the point in this system anymore.

@pandarino I'm genuinely confused why you're linking that article. It's pretty clear that they're not talking about emulation here. They even state early on that a Genesis emulator wouldn't run on the 3DS. I think you don't really understand just what emulation is--which is fine, because most people here don't seem to.

Didn't we already know this?

Well there ya have it! I feel sorry for all of the people who don't own a New 3DS but want to own Snes games but you heard it straight from the horse's mouth so there really isn't much that can be done about it at the moment though I don't even plan on picking up any games seeing as I would rather play them on a big screen like the were played back in the day. That, and I already own the majority of what I want to purchase anyway. This makes me wonder that if Snes games can be emulated then surely GBA games aren't much harder to do as well? Those are games that were made for a handheld and I would likely snap those up in an instant!

@Mario-Man-Child

The bigger picture is that getting people to upgrade to New 3DS does little for Nintendo. It won't boost software sales since those people were already customers buying software, and the profit from the hardware is negligible when considering how few extra units sold something like this brings.

So the bigger picture is they are tanking a huge loss for nothing if what you say is true. Get a few thousand people to upgrade (if that- we're talking VC here) at the cost of 50 million potential sales per game?? And at a time when the system will soon be replaced with next gen anyways?

Makes no sense. People who have used emulators firsthand are telling you many games run like crap, if at all. Common sense is telling you they would be foolishly tanking a huge loss of revenue if they could sell to 50 million 3DS owners but purposely aren't. Facts aren't screaming to you that they have gone 5 years without putting SNES on 3DS, and that was before New 3DS was even conceptualized, and despite putting SNES on every other platform with VC. Nintendo is telling you point blank, they don't run well/reliably enough on the old model.

You are ignoring everything so obvious that says no, they just can't run well enough to the standards of VC, and willfully choose to believe against all of this that its some malicious scheme.

It's getting to the point of conspiracy theory.

Well, I'm not really keen on this, but can somebody explain why the 3ds can handle games that are way heavier than SNES games? And why can my mobile SNES emulator handle those games while running on a different processor and OS, just like the 3ds?

OMG, all these conspiracy theories.

@Dr_Corndog I understand lol. But I also understand what you mean and why some of you guys won't consider this as emulation. Though it is, partly...with a lot of extra work.

"we swapped out code as needed from the emulator, which was written in C. This took quite a bit of time, and turned into quite a magnificent bit of work."

From other interviews it's also clear they treated every single game a a stand alone entity: in Sonic 2 they used the polygons that were rendered for the bonus stage before the rendering, cause it was much easier that way to get the 3d effect and get the ads to run it, while Fantasy Zone posed little trouble and just a tweak of the emulator. So I am totally on board to say this took time and effort! But emulation is definitely involved in the process.

@kiigu Sega Mega Drive 3D Classics says Hello. The Mega Drive was considerably more powerful than the SNES.

@liveswired it took a lot of effort to get those game running and more than straight forward emulation, but I get your point.

@Rei I get that, but my point is that if Nintendo made the effort once when the sales were down, why not do it again on a broader scale? Although this question has been asked since 2011, and apparently the answer is as has already been pointed out in a recent editorial on this site; Nintendo's attitude to the vc is nonsense.

@CHET_SWINGLINE Whatever the motivation, it's a cynical one. And while they do clearly but a lot of work and love into many of their hardware and software project, this decision is more along the lines of Mario Tennis Ultra Smash and Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival in terms of quality and care for the consumer. They could have put these on all 3DS models, but chose not to.

Either they can or they cant.

SO many bums on this board defending Nintendo PR lies. Comparing it to a roughly ported, unoptimised SNES 3DS emulator is pathetic.

If Sega Mega Drive Classics can be rendered full speed in 3D. The SNES can certainly be rendered full speed on the old 3DS.

Lets see what the homebrew scene says.

@Deadstanley
Ironically enough, I have an Xperia Play phone for that exact reason. Then again, I'd rather not need one - the primary reason I bought it for was "so I could have some games with me if I don't have my trusty 3DS + PSP combo in my bag for some reason", but that quickly shifted to "in order to have a GBA, because that gap will be forever be just that - a gap - on the 3DS".
Also, one thing--"it wouldn't sate the public's need to rage over every thing that they don't agree with"--yes, you're right: gamers are unpleasable, and as the medium evolved, so did their demands. However, the opposite approach, the same "whatever, you fans will complain anyway" mentality you mentioned, doesn't help either - it's what led to the Xbox One's initial misstep of not including backwards compatibility until months later, taking the "fact" that "Xbox gamers who bought a new console just don't care about older games" for granted ("If you want backwards compatibility, you're really backwards" - and behold, never a PR statement has been worded any worse. As far as I can remember anyway...). Compare that to the thunderous applause the later implementation of BC got, and you have proof of how important listening to fans can be.
Back to the SNES VC — as we listen to the reasons given to us, as poorly elaborated as they were in this particular case, developers, publishers, producers and hardware manifacturers alike listen to their audience; it's a mutual exchange. Entitlement is an easy slippery slope to stumble across when it comes to fan behavior, but then again, fans have reasons: someone out there must have bought a 3DS with the SNES and the GBA in mind (alongside actual 3DS software of course), hoping that, following Nintendo's usual practice of getting older things (VC consoles and games alike) out of the way first, the SNES and the GBA would eventually get their turn; and as much of a minority as said userbase can be, when the SNES turns out to require a superior model than the one they bought while the GBA requires an entirely different console (let alone a home one!), you can't expect said fans to be happy, because that's one feature they won't see on the console they spent money on.
With that said, I might be one of the fans who complained about this the hardest in this very article, until my criticism mellowed down when I saw there might be actually valid reasons behind the lack of SNES games on standard 3DS (and, mind you, I actually own a New 3DS, so this is mostly a matter of principle to me). But if I didn't discuss this with other users who had the patience to do the same, I wouldn't learn more about why the SNES might actually have been tricky to emulate on standard 3DS systems and learn more about emulation in general; on the other hand, if I only read the "official statement" in the article proper, I couldn't leave any wiser, because it just says that it didn't perform with "quality results" without going into any detail as to how short of said results the SNES' performance on standard 3DS systems fell.
Let's get to your point - yes, we are ignorant on the matter. Could we blame it on our poor knowledge of how emulation works? Then again, of course we could. We're gamers, not programmers - we can't influence Nintendo's decisions in other ways than with our money, because that's how consumers contribute to gaming companies' choices. But you can't say Nintendo's explanation for the SNES being a New 3DS exclusive was thorough, either. And that's what most of us complained about - there still might be someone who, even in front of all possible evidence pointing towards Super Mario World causing a standard 3DS to spontaneously combust, will still wave his or her own fist at this article and at anyone defending Nintendo, sure, but you can't deny that @Einherjar and other NLers did a better job at fleshing out the issues that might pop up when emulating software than the Nintendo representative ever did.

@pandarino Yes, but the effort went into 3D, The old 3DS is essentially rendering the Megadrive games 2X.

This is nothing more than a marketing tool as Nintendo haven't really bothered with the upgraded Quad core CPU, higher clocks, additional GPU memory and RAM.
It's a sad state of affairs, The NEW3DS has so much more graphical whizz to offer.

I just have to laugh at the price Nintendo are expecting fools to pay. The guts of £8 to play their dulled, blur fest emulation.

@pandarino I won't dispute that. But if they had to change anything to get it to run, it's not true emulation.

Really, the processing power is only part of the issue, which is why so many people have trouble with this issue. The 3DS basically would have to create a virtual SNES within its processor, and if the architecture of the two systems is different, that process becomes a lot more difficult.

@Pluto14 Those games are built for the 3DS. For SNES emulation, the 3DS would first have to dedicate a chunk of its CPU to creating a virtual SNES, and then run the game inside that. That's harder than it might sound.

I could care less that Nintendo isn't putting these games on the OG 3DS, I just can't believe that they expect everyone to just buy all these games all over again. How difficult can it be to marry your purchases to your Nintendo Account or Nintendo Network ID? I refuse to pay for another game I've bought multiple times over until Nintendo can get this right. It's 2016 and Sony and Microsoft have been doing this since 2005/6. I love Nintendo but their absolute refusal to get the head out of the sand on this is infuriating and many fans have expressed the same opinion.

Woke up the find so many posts after the ones I made.....

@BaffleBlend That is a port. That is not being emulated. Hackers attempted to locate a ROM of the SNES game in that, but came up with nothing. If that was indeed emulated, then they would have found it, and used it as a base for ROM injection months ago when that bonus was released.

@6ch6ris6 You only talk about the CPU, yet ignore that emulation of a platform takes more than just emulating the CPU. The CPU has to handle EVERYTHING when it comes to emulation of these retro platforms. The CPU, the PPU, the APU, etc, and all these have to be in sync with one another because that's how the system was designed. I'm sure Nintendo can get emulation running well enough on something quite a bit slower than a 3Ghz CPU (which was tested for perfect cycle accuracy), but with 1/10 the speed running on a battery? No way.

@Gex91 You are correct on the o3DS, but let me correct you on the n3DS, which should give people a bit of understanding as to why o3DS cannot run the SNES games. o3DS = dual-core 268Mhz. n3DS = quad-core 804Mhz. A core in the n3DS is roughly 3x faster than a core in the o3DS. Plus, on the o3DS, 70% of the 2nd core is dedicated to the 3DS OS (vs ~23.333% on the n3DS), so o3DS for games has only ~1.3 CPU cores at its disposal (with that .3 not being quite reliable due to heavy sharing with the OS). Although the 3DS includes an ARM9, its use under 3DS mode is for security/encryption purposes, not for apps (then of course it's used for DS playback).

@Einherjar The emulator on PSP not only runs with a different CPU architecture that isn't revolved around being optimized for battery life, but the emulator itself is also using the handheld's Media Engine chip, which isn't meant to be used for anything other that media decoding. Even official developers are not permitted to use it for any other purpose. Even with homebrew utilizing that chip, most games require frame skipping anyways, which just goes to show that the system cannot run SNES games at 60fps accurately.

@yuwarite It ran "some", but there's a reason for SNES emulation on the DS being remotely possible in the first place. Built into the DS's hardware (also in the DS hardware in 3DS) are a pair of 2D engines, 1 for each screen. The 2D hardware is similar enough to the SNES's 2D hardware (it's improved versions of the GBA hardware) that at the expense of missing features, it could be used to offload the massive amount of processing that would have otherwise be place on the CPU, which is already having to do its own thing. This 2D hardware is inaccessible in 3DS mode (likely a design choice so they won't have to keep throwing in old tech into newer handhelds), hence either rendering of the graphics has to be done pixel-by-pixel by the CPU (which is not possible at 60fps on an o3DS), or use the GPU that's dedicated to running with polygons (which is already a pain in the buttocks). Again, there are missing features that are vital for a "pixel-perfect" scenario of SNES emulation, that only with software rendering via the CPU can that be achieved.

@yuwarite Yeah, I'm sure everyone would be pleased with inaccurate emulation with a price tag.....

@Ps4all Ports =/= emulation. Ports require changing the game itself to match the system it's to run on. This is not what's being done here (else games like SMW would not still have 1990-1991 on the title).

@liveswired That is incorrect. The Megadrive's CPU was the only component that was considered to be more powerful. Everything else in the SNES is not only more powerful, but more complex as well, and all of that has to be emulated too, not just the CPU. In fact, CPU emulation of these retro systems isn't even that intense.

Uh, this seems like a bit of a stretch. I don't deny that running a pure emulator of these titles on the 3DS might have been pushing it, but my mind goes back to the Super Mario World GBA cartridge I have in my drawer that's run flawlessly for years. Emulators are one thing, ports are another and at this point, ports are totally acceptable if it means playing A Link to the Past on a portable machine without dropping the extra two-hundo on a new system.

Please don't report technical information from Game Informer in the future. This information is flat out false. The New 3DS does not use an improved CPU, it simply adds an extra 2 cores of the same 268 MHz ARM11 MPCore processor as the O3DS. The other specs are similarly upgraded, except for the Pica200 GPU, which has not been upgraded or added onto in any way. The New 3DS does not use newer hardware, it just adds more of the same older hardware:

http://www.engadget.com/products/nintendo/3ds/specs/ (officially released specs of 3DS circa 2011)

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/997614-nintendo-3ds/70707570 (findings of modders/hackers, since Nintendo has not widely released the full details of the true specs)

This article does not present any true reason why SNES games cannot be emulated on the O3DS. This was thoroughly discussed in the comment section of the previous article on this matter. Unless a software/hardware engineer at Nintendo or a modder/hacker thoroughly explains the reasons, we are not going to have a definitive answer. And we know that NL won't link to/reach out to the latter, so...

@PlywoodStick That is not correct. The n3DS runs with a quad-core 804Mhz CPU, confirmed by hackers and homebrewers. Of all the places to cite, you used GameFAQs thread that doesn't even include a source? Even the Engadget page shows incorrect specs (it's 6MB of VRAM, up to 4GB cartridges, 128MB of RAM, etc).

@Discostew Let me try to look that up. It's kind of hard to find any definitive information. I may have had old/inaccurate information, if what you're saying is true. Even so, the issue was discussed pretty thoroughly in the previous article. And Nintendo pretty much never used the 8GB cards, so 4GB may as well have been the limit.

@Discostew No, the SNES was a snail on all aspects compared to the MD.

Sure SNES had a few extra 'tricks' built in, it could scale sprites larger, spit out more colour but even these couldn't be pulled off without Co processors on cart even early games like Mario Kart required basic Co processors within the cart to make Mode 7 work. Add in general SNES titles were lower resolution than MD, and typically run slower as well.

For every trick the SNES had though creative devs on MD proved it could do better. Gunstar Hero's is just one example were smart developers put the MD's extra grunt to use by using multiple sprites to simulate one large one...

Having said all that my favourite looking and playing 16bit game of all time is Super Metroid on SNES!

@Discostew Okay, I found the 3Dbrew site, it corroborates what you mentioned, but there's more to it than that. (Of course I can't link the site, since it would break site rules. The GameFAQs page is the closest I can find to this. Sorry.)

Apparently, that extra MHz clock increase can apply when the home screen is open, but for open programs, the same 268 MHz limitation is there unless a certain flag is triggered(?). So the question is, does the N3DS allow all of the 4 cores, combined to clock up to 804 MHz to be dedicated towards SNES emulation, or is the SNES emulation still bound by that 268 MHz limit?

And yeah, the rest of the specs except the GPU are just additions using the same old hardware, not new hardware.

they're really charging more than the wii U VC versions? that's outrageous.

@PlywoodStick
"Unless a software/hardware engineer at Nintendo or a modder/hacker thoroughly explains the reasons"

As mentioned by someome, @Discostew is a homebrew developer. (blargSNES)

@Nintendian Honestly, probably both, but I'm not particularly complaining since I've been meaning to play Earthbound for a while but never got around to it, so swings and roundabouts

@HaNks Same price, if I'm not mistaken

@Splatburst Yeah, I was hoping for more input by someone like him. He's become fairly prominent!

Accurate emulation is very resource hungry, and Nintendo tend to be sticklers for details like that. The GBA ambassador games were running differently, without pause options and the like.

As much as it would make sense from a marketing perspective to push the newer hardware some way, I'd have to think they would have made way more money simply having the VC on the original 3DS years ago. The fact that they didn't has always implied to me that they weren't able to emulate to their satisfaction.

Though it occurs to me that Starfox 2 would be a nice little way to make some $$$...

@Ichi Well, in addition to what Nintendo did complete for the Wii VC, home brewers of the Wii did a damn good job covering the bases that Nintendo didn't cover for SNES emulation. The Wii has a less than a 1GHz CPU, yet it emulates pretty much every SNES game just fine. Not at 100% accuracy, which no one, not even Nintendo, is trying to achieve commercially, but at least at 99% accuracy. That's all most people want.

seems legit

@liveswired Hackers and homebrewers who have actually dealt with these systems would disagree. In fact, they've made emulators of both, and MD requires less resources than SNES does.

Just graphic-wise, the MD utilizes 4-bit bitmaps for everything. It's very uniform. The SNES utilizes 2/4/8-bit bitplanes (which must be converted to bitmaps, hence additional steps required during emulation). Not to mention MD limited to 2 BGs vs SNES's 4 BGs among other things.

The whole reason MD is capable of doing what it does is because of the CPU, clocked at 7.5Mhz vs the SNES's 3.58Mhz. The SNES can do big sprites as well, because that's a PPU function, not a CPU function. Where MD excels is when a lot of stuff is happening on-screen but that's not because of graphical power. That's because the CPU power, handling the AI for each thing. These system ALWAYS operate at 60fps. They aren't rendering to a buffer like modern 3D GPUs do. They are doing scanline-rendering, in which they take the data that's set AT THAT MOMENT for each line, and process it. They are timed with the refresh rate The drop in frame-rate is because assignments of layer/sprite data like positioning and other information is set to be last in the main loop. If it can't handle game logic in a single loop frame, then it pushes on to the next frame to finish it off, hence where slowdown comes from.

@Arngrim Actually, there are people out there who are currently doing exactly that: releasing their favourite SFC or SNES ROMs (with hacks or not) inside the Nintendo SNES VC.
@Sticker That is one game and one game only. My own 2DS can run it too, and several other games more or less nicely (=more or less dropped frames to maintain the speed). But it is rather limited.

@Sticker I notice the audio glitching. That might be fine for a home brew but wouldn't pass Nintendo's quality standards.

@PlywoodStick Each cores runs at 804Mhz on the n3DS by default, but can be downclocked based on bits in the extended header of the game titles and within the app itself. Obviously an n3DS-only game/app cannot run on an o3DS, bringing up a dialog stating it can only run on an n3DS. Titles that lack the extended header are forced into 268Mhz CPU speed with no option to change them (outside of hacking means, and again, can only do that on an n3DS). Others that are n3DS-enhanced have the bit set in the extended header, but they can identify what they're running on and control the speed should they be allowed to. Games like Hyrule Warriors run better on an n3DS, but can still be played on an o3DS. Even the app SmileBASIC lets the programmer know whether the app is running on an o3DS or n3DS (via system variable HARDWARE).

for all the people saying the games are too expensive, I collected retro gaming stuff and if I were to get the original carts they would cost loads more

I won't buy them though as no cross buy discount is unforgivable

As for the games running only on new 3ds, I can understand as look how do smash bros is on boot up when used on an old 3ds. That's why I upgraded to the new ambassador edition

Wow, this must be close to an NLife record, having well over 340 comments underneath an article. Too bad most of them are truly so far off the mark in both understanding what the true issue is, and being oblivious to anything other than their own predisposed opinion about what is "surely" the case here, that it makes the amount of stupidity in this thread truly something to behold.

Unfortunately, not in a good way...

Most of these people should probably go here, since they are already there as far as their mindset is concerned:

Not understanding what true commercial emulation is, not understanding the difference between remakes and emulation, not understanding that it isn't as simple as this hardware is more powerful so "of course" it should be able to emulate that older system, and last but not least, the few... ahem.. not so smart people that actually think that the Megadrive/Genesis was more powerful than the SNES.

The ONLY thing that the Genesis had over the SNES, was the faster processor, but that advantage was largely negated by the fact that the Genesis' CPU needed far more cycles to pretty much do anything at all, so in practice the actual speed advantage was only modest at best.

Oh, and blast processing and other inventive slogans were downright lies. Blast processing was purely marketing BS that somebody came up with to make it sound cool, but it wasn't an actual existing thing...

Here are some facts, for those of you that aren't afraid of the truth:

The numbers: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~dherring/cgt141/project1/comparison.html
The head to head: http://www.dashhacks.com/ps4/ps4-news/head-to-head-genesis-vs-snes-which-is-the-better-classic-machine.html
From a developer's forum: http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9899

Luckily there are also a handful of smart people on here that at least try to give good, elaborate explanations as to why it is indeed correct that commercial emulation on the original 3DS is weaker or even impossible, but I'm afraid that in a lot of cases it is useless because people just won't listen or seem too lazy or whatever to really dive into the topic and find the correct info on what they think is the truth.

Thumbs up to @Einherjar and @Chunky_Droid for at least trying to make people understand the why and what, with comments that actually make sense.

Thanks also @Discostew: your comments were an interesting read and also nice to get the input of someone who actually knows what he's talking about considering the topic. You'd think that your input would be more than enough to send a huge stfu message in the direction of all the people that are more than likely using the very program that you yourself worked on, and even if they are not using your program, I'm pretty sure that with your experience you will probably also be quite well equipped to give a good professional opinion on what is possible or not with other emulators. People would probably do themselves a favor by actually listening to what you have to say.

And fortunately, besides those few extremely level-headed people, there were also quite a few other people who showed that they are at least in possession of more than half a brain, so thumbs up (in the form of a +1 for all of your comments from me) to @russelloh, @slatanek, @Tsurii, @Parkour_LMan, @Splatburst, @CHET_SWINGLINE, @Slaz, @BulbasaurusRex, @NinChocolate, @Shugo, @Fuz, @Gex91, @Dr_Corndog, @Deadstanley, @Ichi, @Kisame83, @crazyj2312 and @Shikinouta.

And last but not least, a very BIG thumbs up to @AlexSora89 for not only being able to make polite and interesting comments (although the part with the car accident didn't make much sense to me, to be totally honest), but also for being open to other people's suggestions and especially for not being too big of a person to admit that you may have been wrong on some points. Not only very mature and professional, but also very admirable.
(too bad I couldn't +2 you, but undoubtedly some others will give you some more points, if they care to look up where in this thread your transformation started)

And you're quite the creative type too; if I'm not mistaken, I've seen you do the "let's make a song of this" thing before. I can imagine it might take quite a bit of time to come up with text that matches the original in syllables and tune. Nicely done.

Phew... wall of text and all that, but I just had to get that of my chest. I absolutely HATE stupidity and tunnel-visioned stubbornness. Well, that's all, I'm off. Later!!!

@Mario-Man-Child

You assume selling a few thousand New 3DS handhelds is more important to them than potentially millions of sales at $8 a pop.

Selling a few thousand units of hardware is important, sure, but selling millions of games digitally is far more valuable. Selling hardware is not the goal- making money is the goal. And they'll ultimately make far more money selling dozens of $8 classics to 50 million people then they will selling 6,000 units of hardware to existing 3DS owners

@Deadstanley Consider it dropped...

@Discostew
Can NintendoLife just interview you, publish the article and be done with it lol?

Seriously need more people like you around here...

There is snes emulators for the old Nintendo DS from 2004. If that old thing is capable of emulating snes, the 3DS is more than capable. Cant belive some in the chat telling that people are dumb to think 3ds can run snes because of blablabla. The snes on DS is proof enough that it can!

@Chunky_Droid Well I remember reading an article mentioning that the virtual console wasn't going to be developing any more virtual console stuff since it takes a lot of work and money but in the long run isn't the wisest business decision.

Another reason it reminds me of Wii games being downloadable on the Wii U, that lasted all of 3 weeks.

@liveswired 3d classic is ported, they are like remaster in that sense. SNES VC is straight emulation. Surely you know the differences. Saying 3DS can run mega drive 3d classic in full speed is like saying 3DS can run N64 VC just because we have Ocarina of Time 3D.

@Erik298

Please scroll up and read @DiscoStew's posts, who clearly and technically explains exactly why DS could run SOME games. He's the guy that ACTUALLY WORKED on the biggest 3DS emulator.

And I dare say he knows a tad more than you.

@Deadstanley
It's cool; besides, I kind of forgot what I was going for when answering your comment, which resulted in the redundant repeating of the same concept over and over and over in my last reply to you.

@TheRealThanos
WHOA I did totally not expect such a response. You caught me off guard! Besides, I was kind of depressed tonight for personal reasons, so your kind words - and their timing - was spot on, a pleasant surprise I truly needed. Thanks, pal!
As for my car accident metaphor, it's about giving a vague explanation about the cause of a problem, which leads the people hearing about it to think of a completely unrelated cause. Imagine someone having a car accident because somebody else distracted him or her, and then saying "my attention span wasn't at an optimal state"; it can mean both "I was distracted" and "somebody distracted me". Same reasoning (sort of - my metaphors get really convoluted at times) for Nintendo's vague explanation, which can be interpreted as a made-up excuse to sell more New 3DSes by detractors when the true reason really was Nintendo's own struggle with properly emulating the SNES.

@Erik298

If the normal 3DS can handle the Sega 3D Mega Drive/Genesis classics with ease, it should be able to handle SNES games just fine too. So I don't buy the story.

@AlexSora89 No problem, you're welcome to it. I reportedly have a knack for that. You could say that I have the JIT factor...

I bought Donkey Kong Country 1 & 3 on Wii U so I'll buy Donkey Kong Country 2 on New 3DS

@JaxonH I second that, and thought about posting that very comment myself, but I was too annoyed by yet another "misinformed" poster...

@Discostew Thank you for your insight! It was very informative.

@Dr_Corndog Yes I agree and I understand your position and also the position of those seeing SNES titles on standard 3DS as possible (though not just through the use of an emulator). It surely would have taken more time/resources but it feels like Nintendo fans have been wanting these forever.

All the inputs you guys provided, ranging from extremely polite to snappily entitled have surely softened my skeptic position about Nintendo's commitment in the operation!

I still won't buy the games but that's just because of pricing and lack of cross-buy or at least an encouraging discount for multiple dips but this was the topic of another post here on NintendoLife.

I could have justified the extra bucks somehow if they took sega's approach and went the extra miles outside pure emulation to make this work but as it is, I sadly have to pass because I feel we really deserve a better VC pricing model.

Whatever the reason, be it CPU, greed, whatever, I don't care. I'm just glad I have Super Mario World on the go again, and will be getting EarthBound and the DKC trilogy.

@TheRealThanos
JIT, as in, "Just In Time"? Not so fast, bucko, it took you six movies before actually grabbing an Infinity Gauntlet yourself!

Oh.. ^^ yeah if DiscoStew worked with this he should of course know. My bad not to read through all comments, sorry for the language. Thanks for enlightening me!

@AlexSora89 Yep, that's what it means. Oh, and not only six movies, also almost 20 years of comics...

@JaxonH I am more of a major contributor to that emulator. The main dev, StapleButter, is the one who got it off the ground (and even based his 3DS version off of the DS one he made), but I've gone over the code and improved upon it enough it to know what the limitations are (both emulator and 3DS).

@AlexSora89 "Why arent they selling DS games on the 3DS eShop" Well, your guess is as good as mine :/
I had high hopes for it once Wii games showed up on the WiiU one. And to be frank, the WiiU DS games are awfull, at least the ones using both screens are...If your nose doesnt touch your screen, chances are, you are seeing jack...
There is one screen option, that displays both screens flipped sideways on the gamepad but enlarges them properly on the TV. And some genious came up with the idea that this mode also needs to flip the freakin D-Pad....
Suprise, games who need the DS held sideways do that automatically, no need to force that through the emulator.
That mode would have been perfect in terms of screensize, but made unplayable due to the lack of free D-Pad mapping...what a shame really.

@Discostew Yup, hackers really turned the PSP upside down. The most ironic thing was, when they discovered that the CPU was underclocked by default, overclocked it and official devs started complaining that they have never been told about this.
One FW update later, 333htz was officially supported and games who needed it started popping up

@TheRealThanos Tried my best here, but sometimes, ignorance repels any form of logic and reasoning

@Einherjar Yeah, like I said: tunnel-visioned stubbornness...
Oh, to think of all those people standing in that river in Egypt...

@TheRealThanos
And still three years to go before the epic conclusiion...

This is exactly my face as I say "come to me, precious movie". But I don't want to go too much off-topic... no, no, Mitch Vogel, no, no!! Don't!! Don--

wheeze

@TheRealThanos Currently reading your long posting, its a blessing ^^

@Einherjar
Well, it's possible that @Nintendian's guess in post #279 is the exact reason for the lack of digitally-distributed DS games for 3DS.

@Einherjar From what I understand, there is one single DS game on the eShop, and that is Advance Wars Days of Ruin, but only available in Japan, and based off hacker notes and the game's development for Japan, it is not exactly a DS game, but a DSi game. I believe Days of Ruin for DS was translated for Japan back in the day, but never released. So here it was turned into a digital title.

@AlexSora89 Haha, puny God...
@Einherjar Kein thema, or es war mir ein vergnugen, as you would say in Germany...

@zool I can confirm it was NOT part of the ambassador program. You must have dreamt it.

@Discostew If im not completely off, i think we (Germany) still got a physical version of it. It was the more dark, gritty "reboot" wasnt it ? Oh, and we have the first Soccer RPG thingy....whats it called...well, people will fill in the blanks ^^ The one with the countless sequels.
Thats the only DS game we got over here on the eShop if im not mistaken.
But like @AlexSora89 said, i have no clue why they didnt just offer their library, because i hardly doubt that any retailer is still carrying DS games (ours arent) with which Nintendo can make any profit still.
Put them out for a tenner, 15 tops and you have another easy money maker that actually doent take any effort other than making them self-bootable.

@TheRealThanos Mijn genoegen (Hope google didnt fail me My dutch is seriosuly rusty) Im really enjoying your contributions.
And please excuse me, no offense meant, but your age is showing We young ones can learn a thing or two from your patience and level-headednes ^^

@Einherjar That's close enough, but it's a very formal translation.
FYI: I'm no Dutchee myself, I'm a Californian but I've been living and working here (Amsterdam) for over 35 years now, so I had to learn some Dutch too...

And no offense taken. Any comment combining age with wisdom and patience is fine by me...

Inazuma Eleven was the title i was looking for !
Does anyone own the eShop version of it ? Was it remade into a native game or does it boot into DS mode still ?

@AlexSora89 Because if the latter is actually the case, there probably is a way to stream these ROMs into the system memory before going into DS mode. Pretty much what flashcards do really. If it was turned into a native 3DS game, well, @Nintendian might be right with DS modes inability to access SD card content.

@TheRealThanos Phew Wouldnt want to step on the wrong toes here I read your bio but wasnt sure which part of the "half blood" was the "original part"
But as klishe as it might sound, i spend quite a lot of time in the netherlands in my youth due to the camping trailer we had there...
"Klein Canada"...if they still exist ? I wonder...

Anyways, like i said, i tend to loose my temper on a regular basis. And while i dont get overly offensive, i can get pretty arrogant, especially if i have to turn on parrot mode. Im glad we have people like you who level the playing field and act as some kind of calm and collected mediator ^^

@Einherjar No idea where that should be, Klein Canada. Never heard of it. Never seen that much arrogance from you. Either that, or I'm more used to Germans than the average Yank, having also worked with a couple of them...

@Einherjar Looked it up, out of curiosity: the camping still exists, in Limburg, the South of Holland.

@TheRealThanos Found it: http://de.kleincanada.nl/ Its in "nord-limburg"

I wont lie, i can be a major duck (quack) sometimes. There is no denying it really. But i try my best to avoid slurs and insults, i save those for Smash matches agains my SO and her brother...especially her brother...

But like you wrote in your longer post, i simply cannot stand ignorance. Its perfectly fine to have no clue about the technical details and what really goes into all this stuff.
Perfectly reasonable, we cant all be dorks.
But starting an hour long discussion about the same thing that has been explained over and over again and that could be cleared up by doing a simple "google-fu self educating hour" session drives me up the walls.

Especially when it comes to emulation, as it should be clearly known by now that its a really iffy topic in terms of compatibility. For starters, why the heck can my tablet upscale 3D rendered PS1 games to HD resolutions without loosing a single frame, but drops to 5 when a single stransparency parallax layer pops up in a sprite based game The punchline ? With excessive post processing, smoothing and filtering, this can be avoided !

@Einherjar When I'm feeling particularly snarky, I just send them a "let me Google that for you" link. Works like a charm, at the very least to shut them up...
Go to www.lmgtfy.com, enter your search query and copy/paste the link they make from it in your comment and you'll have an automatic search page for people too lazy to type it in themselves...

@TheRealThanos Hah ! That is awesome Why have i never heard of this before ? Thank you ^^

@Einherjar And don't forget to use the catch phrase before you post the link, like so:
Here, let me Google that for you:
http://bfy.tw/4h20
(shorten the link to make it a bit more exciting, otherwise they can already see the topic... )

@Ichi The first one ? Well, sounds like turned it into a native 3DS game then, instead of simply releasing the ROM.
DS mode is pretty much what it says on the tin. The system switches over to its DS hardware, thus disabling home menu suspension (multi tasking).
I will look into the Layton thing tomorrow, its already 1AM over here. If it turns out to be another rework, i think we have our answer why DS games arent on offer.
If its a bootable DS ROM, im questioning their business decisions regarding it.

Anyways, time for me to hit the hay.
Thanks again to everyone, @TheRealThanos gets an extra mention at this point for pretty much making my evening / morning ^^
Nighty night everyone.

@Discostew Now that's some important information. If each core of the N3DS version of ARM11 can clock up to 804 MHz, then that certainly is a massive improvement over dual core with 268 MHz capped for each. It's still ARM11 with 4x MPcores and 4xVFPv2 coprocessors instead of 2x for each of those, but some kind of improvement must have been made to it somewhere. Thanks for the info!

Like @JaxonH said, NL should have just interviewed people like you instead of reposting a commercial magazine's incomplete assessment.

It still leaves me questioning, though, is that bit header you mentioned also applied to SNES VC titles on N3DS? And do the extra CPU cores actually come into play while they're running? Reading your earlier posts helped me understand the situation much better, but those two questions still hang in my mind.

@TheRealThanos And thank you for believing I have more than half a brain! That's probably more than what most of my students think of me!

@pandarino Hey, I think 3D SNES games would be cool, too, especially if they're charging $7.99 a pop. Not that Super Metroid isn't worth that much, but they've already done this. Twice now.

@Dr_Corndog Oh, my 3D Super Metroid - I would buy that in a heartbeat! It's one of the best game ever made imho but, just like you, I just can't process a third digital purchase

@Kirk Um, yes. I have been programming professionally as a back-end web dev for over five years, before that I was an IT manager, and I majored in computer science in college. On top of that, I have upwards of twenty years of experience with emulation, PC gaming, hardware construction, and a lot of other geeky stuff that I do just as a hobby. So I have a pretty good handle on the subject.

Do you actually know anything about programming? I know you've worked in gaming, but didn't you work as an artist/designer? I know you're always suspicious of Nintendo and you seem to harbor a fascination with conspiracy theories, but in this case I really doubt your experience supports your doubts, and in the least I doubt that it makes your opinion anymore valid than mine.

@Marshi maybe you have all of those on those systems, but I don't.

from there current lineup all I got is earthbound and im tempted to double dip!

@JohnnyC Again, no. They could not have put these on the older 3DS. Why do you keep saying that? If that were true then they would have done that, because it would have meant a customer base of millions of extra people for these games. Meaning more money. Follow your theory through to its logical conclusion and you will find that Nintendo has nothing to gain by arbitrarily widdling down the customer base for these games.

@CHET_SWINGLINE I never bought the "It's to sell more New 3DS systems, those greedy businessmen!" theory myself, but I still wonder if it was just too much work to complete an acceptable (again, not 100% accurate, just 99% or even 90%) emulator for the O3DS, so they decided that with NX just around the corner, it would be a lot easier to just make it work for N3DS, then call it a day. Certainly, the comments on this thread helped me understand more, but I still have a few dangling questions about the situation.

@PlywoodStick I am totally willing to accept that there could be a way to run an inferior version of SNES VC on the original 3DS, but if Nintendo weren't willing to go that route, I'd say it's a safe bet that they weren't able to emulate with anywhere near 99% accuracy. Especially when you consider how much more money they could have made if they had gone that route, since most original 3DS owners would gladly buy these games if they were only barely diminished in quality. But however close to the mark they may have been, I think it's totally reasonable for Nintendo to decide to only release these games on systems that can deliver high-quality results.

If 3DS owners can't have SNES games, then neither should New 3DS owners.

@Arckadius Yay entitlement! If I can't have something I want, NO ONE should have it lolz!

Ha, I certainly did not expect there to be such a heated debate over this! After looking over emulation processes more, I have to say that I side with those who say that the old 3DS is simply not powerful enough. (It really is eye opening how aged the hardware is!)

All the same, I don't intend on picking up any of these due to the fact that there's no cross-buy, but that's another discussion.

@Einherjar P.S. You might wanna edit some of your previous posts where you have typed @AlexSory89 instead of AlexSora89, because now he has missed all these kind messages of yours...