See, they don't need the controller ports because they can just soft-emulate it now. They couldn't soft-emulate with Wii (and didn't need to), but this one they could just emulate much as they're going to have to emulate Wii

It's the disc drive that's stopping them. That has to be it

OR Nintendo will offer GC games via their online shop, and by disabling backwards compatibility, people will have to buy them from there instead.

This strategy is understandable, GC controllers are hard to find nowadays. And GC games have small sizes. and with modern compression techniques, I wouldn't be surprised if they take less than a GB per game, and they might add some functionality to them or what not.

This is completely expected. I haven't played a Gamecube game using the Wii since 2007, so I don't care either.

A shader is basically a unified Vertex and Texture pipeline AFAIK. Can do either instead of having seperate ones like old GPU's had (like PS3, Wii, and All pre-4xxx and Geforce 8xxx cards). So I'm pretty sure they could just us some kind of software to tell some of the shaders to be dedicated vertex and pixel shaders. There is something elso going on, and I think it has to do with Digital Distribution of GC games.

Did u say that when PS3 took their last generation BC away ???

I got a fat one so no thank you very much and I got a working ps2.

DOn't mind, the only GC game I might play is Melee

Well if that's the case then you already have the necessary equipment to keep on doing that.

Consumers are making absurd demands, basically asking companies to do them the favor of ebing able to sell of their old gear for money.  Just keep the old gear you have.  

It makes sense for Nintendo to want to add Gamecube games to the Virtual Console so they can sell you games you may already own just to play on the Wii U. It makes sense, but I think it stinks that this seems to be the way backwards compatibility will be handled in the future. Sony would rather sell you PS2 games as either HD remakes or digitally rather than let you play your PS2 discs in your PS3. I wouldn't be surprised if MS does the same thing with the next Xbox. This may be the last generation where any consoles have any true backwards compatibility.

Progress sucks when it's driven by money. I'd prefer it if all consoles where backwards compatible with all previous versions no matter how many slots and disc drives they have to have to play everything. Just think how great it would be if you could have one Nintendo consoles that played 25 years worth of games without having to rebuy the games you have sitting on a shelf.

Well, tbh I'm very pleased that the WiiU will have Wii bc. I regularly played games like SSBMelee using my Wii before their Wii successor released, I'm sure I'll do the same withe Wii games on the WiiU.

I'll without a doubt keep my Wii, so I can play GC games. Since the Wii's release I've regularly used the GC bc as described above, but also to play games I missed out on originally/wasn't old enough to buy in the 6th gen such as Tales of Symphonia, REmake, Skies of Arcadia Legends, Paper Mario TTYD. Every 18 months-2 years I also quite often replay games such as Zelda WW with Zelda OoT bonus disc, Metroid Prime 1 and 2 and the like.