1. Thats a good point but unfortunately I sold my GC/XBOX/PS2 for the next gen as they were backward compatible. I did however play some PS2/XBOX games on PS3/360 and they dont suffer this problem. Do they do that good a job of upscaling the old games? Also on the flip side does that mean No More Heroes wouldn't have jaggies on a CRT TV?
2. I understand your point here but that doesn't change the fact that N64 used anti-aliasing and the Wii (on some games at least) doesn't.
Sorry to go on about this but I do find this issue very frustrating especially seeing as its not noticable in images on the net and in mags. My jaw dropped when I saw how bad No More Heroes looked when I first booted it up.
The Wii DOES have anti-aliasing, but developers often choose to turn it off in order to free up more processing power for other things.
This is kind of true though the way anti-aliasing works on the Wii is that it has to be manually programmed just like advanced texture effects. Most devs do not have the knowledge or skill to do so even though documentation on how to do it is freely available...
The aliasing in Wii games was more an issue of dev laziness and cheapness. The Wii can produce every texture effect that the PS3 and 360 can assuming the dev knows how to program TEV properly. The fact is that most devs only know how to use game engines that simplified everything for them. The Wii had few of those and most of them were far from optimal.
The best I saw was the Lair engine followed by the Mario Galaxy Engine, then the Unleashed Engine that was used in Sonic Colors and the Quatum 3 engine. Most of these were proprietery, however, so they were of no benefit to other devs.
One of the devs of Conduit 2 who used to post on gamefaqs told me that the game didn't use AA because it would be too much of a performance hit with so many effects already running.
I'm pretty sure Red Steel 2, FAST Racing League, and Monster Hunter Tri use AA though, they're the least jaggy 3D Wii games I can think of.
There was that too. If I rememver corectly, the fill rate gets cut in half if you use AA or something like that and it needs to use a TEV unit. Though, it also depends on the quality of the textures being used in the games.
I believe that higher res textures produce less AA. It may be the other way around though. I can't remember.
Another fact is that the Wii is an HD system. It could run games at HD but it would take a huge performance hit. You would only be able to use like 1/8 of the assets you could normaly at HD resolutions if you wanted to achieve 30 FPS at 1080p. That and Nintendo had the HD capabilities firmware locked. They could remove them with an update but that obviously won't happen.
