If they want 100% B/C with everything as they are pushing, a lot of the hardare will need to be there.  And that could incude everything that limits Wii to 480p.

Perhaps a later version of the console will move to software only as PS3 did at one point (and then took it away completely).

Sure, there would be a slight extra cost to ensure backward compatibility with all Wii games.  But all Nintendo would have to do at that point is add a built-in video setting (just like X360 has) to make sure that all content is upscaled and output at 1080p.  I agree with your sentiment, and think that it would be way more worth it for the Wii U to be capable of this.  Nintendo would see a surge of AAA 1st party Wii sales because of this.

Oops, sorry for the double post.

The X360's emulator is still software based, not hardware.   The X360 does not contain an Xbox inside it.

I misread your post, I was thinking upscaling/output instead of backward compatibility.

You just said WiiU wont upscale but you are not sure if it would upscale :)


UPSCALING is  taking pixels you have and stretching them matching the pixels of a screen with higher resolution.

WiiU might be able to upscale because its almost no work at all for any device. If it will not upscale then your TV will to the job.  (like it upscales SD TV so you dont have borders on your HDTV etc.)



What WiiU will not do is RENDER games in higher resolution  (generating more information more pixels etc...) than Wii's native resolution because the WiiU has Wii hardware inside (like the Wii had Gamecube hardware).   This Wii hardware is clocked as the Wii console itself so  it is NOT faster. Therefore it cannot simply output a higher resolution because it would require more power.   Nintendo could have used higher clocked Wii components here but to save money they didn't do it. Thats really sad IMHO.

Nintendo officially announced about a year and a half ago that the Wii U will do no upscaling of any kind.

I can see why that came off a little wierd .

What I meant was basically what you said though, with a poorer choice of words...

what do you mean with a lot of hardware? the cpu is still a ppc, just generations ahead. the gpu of gc/wii was built by ati/amd, so will the gpu of wiiU. so i don't really see nintendo will build in wii-hardware - this will also increase costs what we could see with the japanese ps3 at launch.

and also keep in mind that it is almost a tradition at nintendo to keep close to last generation in terms of hardware for bc.

The Gamecube and Wii used a customized processor that included 34 new instructions, and GPU architecture has changed dramatically over the past 12 years and a modern GPU doesn't really resemble the GPU from the Wii at all (regardless of who built it).

To get (nearly) perfect software emulation you generally need a system that is several orders of magnitude more powerful. This is often referred to as true software emulation, where you create a program that steps through the instructions one by one and simulates exactly how the original system would operate; and (as you can imagine) this is very costly from a performance perspective. The Wii U might be able to handle this, but to do this and render at a higher resolution is probably beyond its capabilities.

A faster form of emulation is instruction translation, where you interpret the instructions of the program and translate them to the hardware you're running. The problem is that not all systems have instructions which operate in exactly the same way; and a slight variation in how an instruction operates on one machine may impact a wide variety of games.

The reason the Wii U might not upscale the Wii games is that scaling images may be handled by the Wii U's GPU and (if backwards compatibility is handled in hardware) the output from the Wii's GPU may not be accessable in the Wii U's GPU.