Very cool. Sony needs to get their act together. Nintendo and MS are doing B/C right. All systems going forward should offer full emulation of every console from the past.

With Nintendo going to ARM & Nvidia for the next 20 years, the investment in an emulator for that instruction set and chipmaker will pay massive dividends. An X86 & AMD Emulator for PS1,2,3, P, & Vita should be high priority.

Hopefully by the time I pick up my 1st Switch this holiday or early next year, we will have a decent library of Virtual console titles to choose from.

You should try playing then on their original hardware. Much more satisfying.

My thoughts exactly.

Why are they going ARM and NV for the next 20yrs, exactly?

I find it hilarious that you speak of a "high-priority x86 and AMD (same thing) emulator" for all the Sony systems though - have you ever tried to write an emulator, especially for something as exotic as the PS2/3? Frankly, even an emu for Genesis is difficult to write. There is a good reason why those are not implemented in PS4, ranging from difficulty of implementation (PS3 would be difficult to implement on a potato CPU such as the one in the PS4) to irrelevance (most PS1 games).

It means theres a stand alone nes emulator (software) on them, that ll allow you to play any NES game, if you had full access to it and some roms to feed it.

Software Emulation is so easy you have to wonder what possess companies to take so long. If a couple of random people on the internet can shove emulators on every device under the sun the official companies should have no problem emulating their own devices.

PS1 on PS4, still not a thing, and Nintendo has a history of taking absolutely ages to add support for VC systems.

As much as I am a nintendo fan and have my negative bias toward PS, I gotta defend them here. Ps2 and ps3's architecture was a nightmare to program for, so it can't be easy tomake emulators. I mean hell, ps2 emulators barey run on my 2015 macbook pro 13" when gamecube/wii dolphin runs fine at 720p upscaled and even 1080p for some games when the gamecube is quite a bit stronger.

Ninty was able to BC for the past decade cause they used similar chipsets. GC to wii to wii U. GBA to DS to 3ds. And xbox just runs a version of windows.

Of Course that Switch will have VC and NES games alongside.

This makes sense, it was confirmed before launch that Switch would host NES games, at least.

It'd be easy for Nintendo to add emulation software for other systems, too. This might be one reason Nintendo limited the NES Mini's native output to 720p, because that's the output of the Switch screen and the emulation software being used on the Classic Mini hardware will be used on Switch.

It'll be interesting to see what Nintendo do. It's long passed time Nintendo tied retro purchases to a single account, at least, and allowed you to transfer them across hardware. I don't get a huge amount of use out of my Xbox One, but Microsoft's approach to backwards compatibility is admirable. Any software that is backwards compatible - whether purchased physically or digitally on previous Xbox systems - can be used on my Xbox One. Obviously Nintendo can't go down the physical route, but allowing you to bring forward previously purchased Virtual Console games from Wii/Wii U/3DS onto Switch would be a great move.

I know they're in an entirely different league. Still, it would have to be designed and production set up for it, which would take money. It's probably not a lot of money, but should be enough for Nintendo to prefer to not pay it. Also, it would add more overall complexity to Switch. Considering the (assumed) ease of software emulation, hardware emulation ought to be vastly inferior in Nintendo's eyes. I should probably look into how difficult exactly it is to emulate the NES, writing an emulator for it might be an interesting exercise project...