That would look ridiculous on an HD TV. Let's say you have a 50 inch television (Wii U pad is bottom screen) and you're playing a DS game. That would be 5.82 PPI for a top screen game. The text would be unreadable at such a horrendously low IQ. 

For a comparison. 

I could literally go to my television screen and trace out and color in the pixels, in such a scenario (33 pixels per square-inch.) I roughly drew a pic of what the size of the pixels would be like. 

Sure, my point was that the DS has some pretty nice 2D games as well. If I wanted to make a comparison to the GBA I would've posted Shantae screens from the GBA. 

Well, they already have GBA games on the Wii U, and those run at an even lower resolution than the DS, just 240x160.

http://nintendoeverything.com/more-gba-wii-u-virtual-console-details-brightness-smoothing-resolution-manuals/

 GBA games were artificially brightened back in the day
– VC games have been altered to compensate for the over brightening
– With the GamePad, it will seem noticeably darker
– On TV, most probably won’t notice
– Can smooth the screen with GBA VC games
– GBA resolution was originally 240×160, meaning it is blown up considerably when brought to the TV and the individual pixel placement is incredibly noticeable
– The picture will be smoothed when activating the feature
– All diagonal lines will look less blocky and curves will look curved
– Activate in real time by pressing down on the right stick
– Games don’t take up the whole screen
– Instead, it’s a block of 1620×1080
– Virtual Console settings menu will let you choose Original Resolution, which runs on the TV screen
– Upscales it to the largest whole factor it can on the screen
– 1440×960 making it 6×6 pixels for every 1 original pixel
– This doesn’t affect the resolution on the GamePad
– Not possible to run a toggle in real time for this
– Touch the small “?” icon on the GamePad screen to bring up the game’s manual
– Can scroll through the pages using the touch screen on the GamePad
– Zoom in as well
– Can view the manual while still playing the game on the TV screen

I actually have a few GBA games on Wii U, like F Zero Maxiumum Velocity and GP Legend, and I can play them without edge smoothing just fine. Yeah, you can see individual pixels, but I'm a child of the SNES generation, so this is nothing new to me. ;)

Also consider that a lot of what you see in GBA games is not pixelated (it is pre-rendered.) A 3D game would look horrible at these pixel densities if there is no good upscaling technique, or higher-res rendering happening. 

There arent that many (polygonal) 3D games on GBA, are there?

Yes, that's my point. We were talking about a DS emulator that would run at its native resolution and how horrible it would look on, say a 32-50 inch television. 

I'm sure I could cope, I play Starfox for the SNES on my 32 inch, haha.

Even so, it's not even close.



Look at the background on the image to the right, and compare it to the one in Metroid. It's clear that the games are from different generations. Not only due to the details, but also because of how when she jumps from the background to the foreground, it changes the background. The background in Metroid ZM was not dynamic, but static. And I included a cave image for the sake of comparison. Check out the details on the floor of the water cave. And look at the details on the floor in Metroid. They're no more detailed than that no matter where I looked in the trailer.