HoloDust said:
As for Gamepad - I agree, I think Wiimote has vastly more mass appeal than Gamepad....that's why I think they should've opted to pursue Wii route, and make Gamepad (or more presicely, version of it) just a convenience option, a Pro contoller with screen if you wish, without being main feature or requiring extra devs focus - it would still be differentiating feature, but not focus. |
I believe that your approach for backward compatibility is not feasible if you want BC to have 90% of the games working with no major bugs at launch.
Let’s assume that Nintendo wanted to develop an emulator that does basically the same things that vWii does on the Wii U and ignore extra features like gamepad support and native upscaling since them would require a lot extra of coding and testing.
Low level emulation requires a lot of CPU/GPU power (a low level SNES emulator requires a Core 2 Duo CPU) so in theory it is impossible to implement it on the setup you suggested.
So Nintendo would have to develop a high level emulator. However it would require extensive testing and custom RAM patches for basically every single relevant Wii title released since it is not as reliable as low level emulation. Nintendo would probably have to release an emulator compatible with a few key titles at launch and then improve it in the flowing years which would make the project way too expensive and consume resources that could be allocated in the development of original Wii U titles.
Finally, while Dolphin is amazing and I have a lot respect to its developers, it has a lot of problems. It cannot proper use modern multi thread processors and it barely uses the GPU while sending intensive chunks of code for the CPU, it also has many of bugs and randomly crashes. All those things make it nowhere near to a commercial product and we have to remember that Nintendo products are usually more polished than ordinary commercial products.
Perhaps a better solution would be two SKU's, one with the Wii hardware inside and another without it. It would allow the backward compatible version of the console to run almost 100% of the Wii games. But it would be just like it is on the Wii U now so Nintendo would need to abdicate not trivial enhancements (like native upscaling) that could lead to unexpected behavior and consequently drain more resources to develop/test.
