Will Nintendo's next handheld and console use Power PC like the Wii U?

[VanceIX]

spemanig said:

burninmylight said:

Because to make a console backwards compatible, you have to either base your new console around the same architecture as the old one, which is usually very dated by the time you're looking to release the new one (Wii and GameCube), or you throw in hardware that literally makes it two different consoles one box (PS3 and PS2), which makes it quite pricey. Or I guess you could try to go the emulation route (360 and Xbox OG), but that's the weakest option.

Why is emulation the weakest option?

Emulating relatively modern hardware on a completely different architecture is nearly impossible. Gone are the days of simple hardware design like the PS2/PS1/NES/GB/DS. Consoles like the PS3/360 run games using a myriad of complex coding, and emulating that effectively would take years of painstaking optimization, and even then you would run into a ton of problems due to the differences in hardware.