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darkknightkryta on 10 June 2011
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NJ5 said:
darkknightkryta said:
NJ5 said:
thetonestarr said:
In order to make it backwards compatible with GCN as well as Wii, they would have to incorporate GCN hardware into it as well as Wii. Multiple consoles' hardware is tedious and cramped.


They're probably not incorporating Wii hardware on the Wii U, because Wii hardware can operate in GC mode which is supposed to be how the Wii does backwards compatiblity. If they did incorporate Wii hardware, GC compatibility should be very easy.

I'm guessing they'll do some sort of emulation for the GPU and possibly the CPU (not sure if the Wii's CPU is binary compatible with POWER7 CPUs).

Unless ATI did something seriously crazy with the GPU and completely changed the assembly, there's no reason why Gamecube games don't work on Wii U.  None at all.  Unless Nintendo didn't go with IBM with their CPU and then Wii games won't work properly on the Wii U.   Ultimately this makes no sense at all.

The GC/Wii GPU doesn't even use shaders, so yeah, they did something "completely crazy" in the 10 years since the GC. If the Wii U is using a standard modern AMD GPU as they wrote in the press release I don't think that's directly compatible.

The shader technology doesn't change the assembly, it would add to it but no remove anything to make the current code base useless, if that were the case Quake 3 and Unreal wouldn't be able to run on current machines.