You may not know the Nintendo European Research & Development (NERD) by name, but you'll certainly be familiar with its work. Having created emulators for the NES and SNES Classic Editions, and downloadable Wii/DS games on the Wii, NERD recently helped out with Super Mario 3D All-Stars, too.
Including emulated versions of Super Mario 64, Sunshine, and Galaxy, many of you will know that 3D All-Stars is being delisted next week, but – though it admittedly flew under the radar at first – before that occurs, NERD has given us more details about how they got it running on Switch.
Specifically, this latest update focuses on Sunshine, outlining the technical challenges of emulating GameCube games on Switch. It's a short read, and you can find the original post here, but here's what was said in full:
NERD’s own Nintendo GameCube emulation technology was used in Super Mario 3D All-Stars to bring Super Mario Sunshine to Nintendo Switch.
One of the biggest challenges was emulating the Nintendo GameCube’s old but powerful MPU (microprocessor) on the Switch’s customised processor: a number of optimisation tricks were needed to get the game to run at full speed.In addition, NERD worked with the Super Mario 3D All-Stars team on several features to give Super Mario Sunshine a modern twist. These include 16:9 HD rendering, updated controller bindings for an optimal Joy-Con experience, and others… The in-game videos were also upgraded to HD using NERD’s own deep learning engine.
Leveraging the similarities between Nintendo GameCube and Wii hardware architectures, NERD also supported Super Mario Galaxy porting efforts by providing graphics and audio emulation technologies.
It also offers a potential insight to why we've not seen more GameCube games on Switch (so far). Homebrew emulators have long achieved this, but getting them running on the Switch's custom processor at higher quality seems to rely on "optimisation tricks".
Considering Sunshine has proven how well the Switch can handle this, we remain hopeful further GameCube games will eventually show up.
[source nintendoeverything.com, via SuperMario3DAllStars.html]
Comments 58
I am still baffled why they didn't just put the effort into properly remaking the game if this apparently took so much effort. I am aware of Covid, but I don't buy that this compilation was a last minute idea, I would of thought this would of been in development pre-Covid.
"many of you will know that 3D All-Stars is being delisted next week"
Yep I think the 400 articles over the last 6-7 months have given us a heads up, cheers...
What a nerd ...
Why is Pharrell William's old band explaining this to us?
@blockfight
Ha! Beat me to it!
@MS7000 you have no idea how much more effort a "remake" would take, lol...
who claims that this was a last minute idea or that it wasnt in development prior to the covid outbreak?
I'm really hoping they add more systems to Nintendo Switch Online like the GameCube... It's been over 4 years now
@MS7000 it was. builds of the game date back to 2019!! pre-covid, yep
@WiltonRoots,
And another load of those articles yet to come, you know just to remind us that the game will be taken off sale at the end of the month, just in case we missed any of the previous articles.
Seems like a waste to do this and then yeet the game off (digital) store shelves.
"many of you will know that 3D All-Stars is being delisted next week"
Wait.......WHAT?!?!?!?
It would be interesting to see them detail what they did with real technical depth, but they'll obviously never do that.
Things like opening the map menu being very slow due to the transition effect it uses, fixing the display of debug cube markers on that one secret level, and one mission where you scrub Sirena Beach clean sometimes "winning" instantly are known issues that have affected Dolphin Emulator for a long time as well, and NERD needed to fix through a software update.
Enhancements like proper 16:9 widescreen support and controller remapping were also previously achieved.
Also, the videos being "upgraded with NERD’s own deep learning engine" sounds suspect. They likely did not develop their own engine, but found an existing engine such as ESRGAN and used it to process the pre-rendered video files. It's a shame they apparently didn't have access to the original video files from the production process, or evidently even the source code for a direct port.
So, mistakes like Princess Peach's earrings being textured with her eyes in one shot still remain in the 3D All-Stars version.
@Bustacap "you have no idea how much more effort a "remake" would take, lol...".
No, but nowhere did I claim I was a game developer either, so astute observation.
I never said in my comment that a remake would necessarily be easy either, but my point is, they updated one or two textures here and there in the collection, and patched in GameCube controller support for the Switch quite a while after it came out, made it widescreen and 1080p, and altered the tutorial by editing out tiny bits of speech which was GameCube controller specific. They put some effort in at places and ignored others, so why not go all the way and do it properly?
“Having created emulators for the [...] downloadable Wii/DS games on the Wii”
Do you mean on the Wii U?
@TheFullAndy I don't know how you wouldn't know, but the both physical copies and digital copies of 3D all stars are going to be removed. If you haven't gotten it yet you don't have that much time yet. Mario 35 also shuts down its servers, the localized version of the first Fire Emblem game is removed, as well as a bunch of other things. It's been a huge controversy since September so I don't know how you wouldn't know about it, but if you didn't that's what's happening.
@blockfight lol! and now I have to go listen to their song "She Wants To Move" xD
I would guess that eventually the all stars collection games will go on sale individually. Or maybe the triumphant return of Nintendo Selects in a year or so, after the Zelda anniversary. There are so many great Gamecube games they could bring over. Luigi’s Mansion, F-Zero, Mario Strikers, chibi robo, paper mario. double dash, a good mario party game... these games are 20 years old now just bring them over! And yes I know this won’t happen haha!
Maybe they should adapt his tech and bring gamecube games to switch.
@MS7000 They probably want to use this same emulator on multiple games so it was easier to just create this that they can use multiple times than to do a full on remake.
I heard they got greenlight 3 months before release of the compilation. So all is done and build in 3 months by a select couple of devs.
@TheBlackholeProducer
Yeah I was taking the mick.
@Dethmunk F Zero GX has widescreen support. Not quite 16:9 but it nearly fits. I find it bewildering that they need tricks, when the Nvidia Shield in China got Wii games working no problem, and Shield even runs GC games via emulation pretty well. It's the same chip.
@TheFullAndy
People don't seem to get sarcastic jokes in the nintendo life comment section.
I appreciated it, though.
@TheFullAndy My bad, it was pretty early in the morning when I wrote that, was kinda tired.
@Kiwi_Unlimited
Cheers!
It can be hard to identify sarcasm when written but that is why I doubled down on the "!?!?" to help indicate!
@TheBlackholeProducer
No worries!
If you don't know the acronym, this headline sounds very aggressive.
Eternal Darkness next, please and thank you!
@pa261639 That would make the most sense, but heck knows if that is what Nintendo are planning on doing. I have no clue what they are thinking anymore.
So now they got that tech.....it time they started to offer N64, NGC in the online package!
Yeah, they do a lot of ***** that doesn’t seem to make sense at all.
Plot twist: NERD is actually like NERV and they will soon test the SIM: Switch Instrumentality Project where everyone will become one with their Nintendo Switches.
That's why 3D Mario All Stars is a limited release.
Sounds like the kind of tech and experience that could be handy for future Gamecube remasters. So that probably won’t happen, or at least not in any kind of structured or understandable way.
@MS7000 You try remaking 3 Mario games from the ground up with Mario Odyssey style graphics but here's the catch you only have 6 months to do it and mind you these games aren't like the Crash and Spyro PS1 trilogies which were largely identical to each other outside of each new installment having QOL improvements and mechanical tweaks but rather 3 completely different games each released on a completely different system that have completely different engines, physics and mechanics.
@MS7000 I'm guessing they were building an emulator not just for Mario Sunshine, but for future GameCube releases as well. If they get one game running, they can probably handle the rest as well without any major hickups. They can then be sold separately on the eShop, so the technology stretches further than just being limited to one single game.
@Wolfgabe Ahh, I see you are of the opinion that if you are not a game developer, you are not entitled to criticise a game because it's not like they could do a better job. Welp, lesson learned, never question developers ever. I wish those people who write reviews for games knew that. Same for those people who review movies books and other forms of media etc./s
That aside however, as I said in my first comment, I seriously doubt that development wouldn't of started for this way before Covid. Maybe from a developer perspective, sure, Crash and Spyro might have been easier to remaster, but if we are using these two for comparison, from my perspective as a consumer, it's not hard to see why Crash and Spyro would seem to be the better deal when they are fully remastered over wide screen and 1080p for 3D All-Stars. It also doesn't help that neither Spyro or Crash weren't full priced remasters (£35 at launch) unlike 3D All Stars (£50 at launch).
@RupeeClock FWIW they probably did have the source, the game's been dumped and the executable has all the characteristics of having been recompiled with newer tools.
I'm hoping for Gamecube games get on the Switch in some form. My top vote is Wave Race Blue Storm! I loved that game.
@MS7000 I'm pretty sure the optimization still took a lot less effort than it would've taken to fully remaster the graphics from scratch.
Besides, as a compilation title, if they were going to fully remake "Sunshine," to remain consistent they would've needed to do the same for the other 2 games as well, and even if they did that they probably could no longer justify selling all 3 games together as a compilation.
@FargusPelagius "Pretty well" isn't good enough for official re-releases. Just because an emulator can run games for a certain system doesn't mean it can run them perfectly.
I know I'm being naive and it'll never happen, but part of me hopes Nintendo will surprise us all on April 1st with a free update to the collection that adds Mario Galaxy 2 to the pack.
@BulbasaurusRex the Chinese released games were official, running at 1080p.Tweak the settings in the emulator and the games work perfectly. They work pretty well by default. The ground work for the Shield games surely would have helped, they ported Metroid Prime which was also on Gamecube and the Wii processor is an improved GC processor etc.
@ermzzz Heh, be wary of any news coming on April 1st.
@FargusPelagius Maybe GameCube games are possible, but Wii games are still out of the question. Even ignoring the problem of the Switch not having an IR sensor, the Wii is just too powerful in comparison to the Switch to be able to be properly emulate it. As you said, the Wii is basically a more powerful GameCube, which is the problem itself irregardless of architecture. Emulation works by running a 2nd operating system simultaneously on top of the first one, and the more powerful the 2nd OS is, the harder it is to emulate at full speed. The Nvidia Shield can do it simply because it is more powerful than the Switch
@BulbasaurusRex The Shield uses the same chip. The emulator they used even had added code to override critical errors that occured on original Gamecube hardware.
Unless the next Switch model will be fully compatible with the emulator, in which case Nintendo proper bungled the Switch Specification 4 years ago.
The Switch has motionplus and an IR sensor in the right joy con for wii waggle games. How did Shield run those games on a normal controller?
Added code. Nintendo has already done most of the work.
many of you will know that 3D All-Stars is being delisted next week
What!? I had no idea. Why didn't Nintendo Life tell us this atleast 100 more times?
I wish we had more articles like this, explaining who it's often next to impossible to "port" old games because of architecture changes.
One of the best ways I'm heard this explained is NASCAR. If 99.9% of driving is NASCAR, eventually you are just going to get rid of the distinction between turning left and right. "Turn" just means "to turn left". CPUs and GPUs do this all the time. They drop rarely used instruction sets for more efferent ones, which often completely drops support for something old games did. Ray Tracing, for example, will EVENTUALLY lead to GPUs that just completely drop the instruction set needed to do bloom lighting.
Emulating a shell that can run old instruction sets is unbelievably process heavy. I was around (yes I'm old) when someone figured out how to make MODE 7 work with new 3D cards and it was the best thing ever. Until then, we couldn't get games that ran on a system with the processing power of most calculators at the time to run on the most advanced PCs in the world.
The internet had long decided that these ports were dead easy for Nintendo to do and were just simple emulation work
@HeadPirate hear hear.
@MS7000 I'm baffled why they are talking themselves up over this. The standard Nvidia Shield can run the game at 1080p60fps widescreen through an opensource emulator.
@jsty3105 Likely because they were already running perfectly via Dolphin in 1080p60 on a stock Nvidia Shield a few years ago.
When it comes to 3D everything is a challenge for Nintendo.
@FargusPelagius The Switch does not have an IR sensor and it has a cheap knockoff version of motion plus - open up the joycons for yourself, look at the parts - I was absolutely disgusted at the inner quality of these £60 controllers, pure cheap trash.
@Wolfgabe 6 months? Gee Nintendo really shot themselves in the foot. They knew for the last 5 years it was Mario's anniversary.
@Dethmunk F Zero has a 16:9 widescreen option.
Enter Exhibit A
@liveswired the IR sensor is just like the wiimote one. It detects heat just like a wiimote. Just pop two heat sources infront of it a set distance apart and it can act like a wiimote pointer. People used to use two small torches to get wiimotes to work on PC, it's a bog standard IR camera, nothing fancy.
As for it being a cheap wii motion plus, all the gyro and sensor controls i have used on Switch have been fine compared to Red Steel 2, Skyward sword and Tiger woods.
Edit: besides the point i made was they added a line of code so the Shield picked up it's controller as a Classic controller or GC controller.
Soooo NERD... since you’re so seasoned with Switch emulation now...
How about we get some Game Boy, N64, Game Cube Nintendo Switch Online apps along with a wide array of accompanying notable games then ASAP please? And I’ll also take the Mother Series expeditiously too. Thank you kindly.
@HeadPirate That actually explains a ton really
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