This is a technological question and I would be excited if this was possible, specially cause I'd love to play Xenoblade on a higher definition.

I understand the video output of Cafe would be HD as it is transfered through a HDMI cable, but I guess games, specially old ones, weren't coded to output a higher quantity of pixels. Would it be possible to upgrade their graphics so they are 720p real and not 480p upscaled to 720p through massive patches? Am I even making myself clear or using the right words?

I hope:

1 - you get to understand my question,

2 - you know the answer already

3 - it is affirmative.

I'm not an expert, but I don't think so.

It's not like movies that can be upscaled on DVD to a higher resolution, because many of those movies were filmed in a higher resolution than what they ended up on DVD. Such as when people talk about how old black and white films were hi-def at filming, we just never had the technology to play them back as such.

With game graphics, they are built and designed from the ground up with a resolution "cap" already in place. So I don't think that can be raised and improved with out some work being done from the core of the game engine, out. I'm not sure a patch could do that much, hence why most updates to old games are retail releases.

Interesting question. I hope someone with more technical knowledge can explain better than me.

Sure it would be possible. See the Dolphin emulator. You just process the 3D assets at a higher granularity, maybe throw in some anti-aliasing... Tah-dah!

But your mileage may vary (3D art assets might come out looking much better, but 2D art assets might just end up looking fuzzy, because they have to be scaled rather than rendered), and it might introduce some compatibility problems. The last one is the killer. You may have noticed that Nintendo backwards compatibility tends to shift the Wii right into Gamecube mode, with no access to the home menu and other Wii features. I haven't really explored 3DS BC much, but it seems to also shift the device into DS firmware mode. It can jump back to 3DS mode without a restart, though.

The point is that Nintendo may opt to ensure that 100% of Wii games work just as well as they did on the original console, rather than add a shiny new paint job which could gum up the works for some games.

Judging by the rumors, reliable as they are, while it should much more powerful, Cafè still may have in common at least something with the old Wii and GC architecture since it still uses IBM PowerPC CPU and Radeon GPU. So the console may be retro-compatible without emulation. In that case the console is for sure capable of output those games in 720p and even in 1080p (if Nintendo wants to do that) even without game-specific patches. The only thing that won't change are 2D sprites and animations, at worse you can still see those equally as good as you can on 480p, while the rest of the scenario looks better. I think also, in that eventual case, it's even potentially possible to play GC and Wii games in 3D but, in that case, I think a game-specific patch to adjust the 3D effect is required.

Hooray to you for the promising news.

And thanks to the rest of the guys who helped me out by answering!

Depends entirely on how the backward compatibility is implemented.

If Cafe has Wii hardware built in, similar to how the Wii handles GC backcomp, then it is pretty much a solid no. It would be the same as running the software on the wii itself.

However, if Cafe emulates the wii hardware, then it would be simple to upscale, and here is why:

Each frame that is displayed is constructed using the geometry of the scene. The geometry doesn't care what the resolution is. The rendering process converts the geometrical/texture/shader/etc data into a 2D array of pixels. So if the Cafe is handeling the render process through Cafe hardware, then it can just render the data at a higher resolution (even throwing in other effects like Antialiasing)

Textures would probably be pretty muddy though because they were not made with higher resolutions in mind.

Very pedagogic and considerated of you!!