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Nintendo - WiiU or WiiHD? - View Post

DarkTemplar on 11 February 2013
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HoloDust said:
DarkTemplar said:

 

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.

 

http://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Wii

Well, considering how many titles have perfect or playable rating on Dolphin (5 or 4 stars), my impression is that on suggested hardware, which is so much above Wii's, Nintendo would not have any problems making really perfect emulation if they wanted to. As for upscaling....I'm pretty sure that's all that WiiU is doing there - upscales, just like PS360 or any modern DVD player upscales to 1080p - it does not upres, like Dolphin is doing, and upscaling is not really dependant on CPU/GPU combo...

That list you showed me juts reinforced my point that Dolphin is not even close the level of compatibility required for a commercial product. For example, Xenoblade (listed as 4 starts) has random crashes, sound issues and visual bugs. If we look at the Devolution’s (a GC emulator for the Wii released last year and coded by a single hacker) compatibility list (http://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/Devolution_Compatibility_List) it is possible to see how reliable and trivial the emulation becomes when the console hardware is almost 100% compatible with its predecessor.

I think I do not understood your point on upscaling but there is a very trick difference between what Wii U does and Dolphin does. What type of enhancements (while emulating a Wii game) you wanted for your setup? My point is that even a simple high level emulator with no enhancements on the Wii titles would require years of testing and development to accomplish the required level of compatibility for a commercial product.

Anyway, Wii U upscales the image once it is complete on the framebuffer which does not make relevant enhancements on the image. What Dolphin does is native upscaling which means a change on the process of rendering the image on the framebuffer. While it can make Wii titles look much better, this type enhancement leads to unpredictable behavior since most of the Wii titles where never tested by their developers on a resolution higher than 480p so every compatible title would need to be exhaustively tested before the emulator release.