tuoyo said:
I don't see Nintendo going down that path even though it seems like a good idea. First, they are unlikely to sink much R&D cost into something that is unlikely to be released (I assume you mean they develop two completely different consoles with only one being released depending on the circumstances at the time). Secondly, Nintendo seems quite adverse to any technology that isn't theirs (e.g. not even puting 5.1 audio in Wii even though it probably won't cost more than a dollar more) and thirdly Nintendo does not have the support of other money making divisions so it has to have a business structure where it releases its consoles at a profit and at an affordable price.
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If you look at all consoles Nintendo has produced over the years, they have never really been against using technology they didn't own or using powerful hardware, Nintendo tends to be against selling hardware at a (large) loss or driving up the price of a console to the consumer. The two consoles (released since the NES) that stand out in people's mind as being low performance are the Nintendo DS and the Wii ...
The Nintendo DS really isn't that underpowered of a system when you take into consideration that the Nintendo DS launched at $100 less than the PSP, the PSP was rumored to be sold at a very large loss for Sony, and the Nintendo DS has a much longer battery life than the PSP. Certainly the PSP is far more powerful, but I don't think you could have produced a system which was dramatically more powerful than the DS while selling at $150 (regardless of losses) while keeping battery life in a similar range to the Nintendo DS.
Now, we will (probably) never know what hardware configurations were tried with the Wii and why they really settled on the Wii's specifications but I think there were (probably) multiple considerations. I suspect that there was a focus on keeping development costs low enough that Nintendo could survive on a very small userbase and to attract third party development, and I also suspect that Nintendo wanted to keep manufacturing costs very low incase the system ended up being a flop on the level of the virtual boy. I could be wrong but I imagine that if Nintendo (really) started to increase the processing power much beyond the level of the Wii they would start to fall into a (much more) awkward position where the system still couldn't handle most HD games and development costs were no where near as low as Wii development costs. The reason the Wii doesn't support 5.1 digital audio (it does support 5.1 through pro-logic 2) is because Nintendo settled on hardware which was an advanced version of the Gamecube hardware, and that meant that the Wii uses a similar audio processor as the Musx processor that was designed by Factor 5 for the Gamecube.
