see ya'll

ROFLcopter at last sentence. Anyway, this is true for any Homebrew programmers and programmers that do this on there free time without full knowledge of the ins and outs of the systems. For them, they need a system with much more power than the system they're trying to emulate. However, for programmers who had a hand in developing the consoles shouldn't have that much of an issue with power. Since they should know pretty much everything hardware and software wise about both systems.

Example: The PS1 emulator for the PSP. While the PS1 is fairly easy to emulate and I know the N64 was more powerful, homebrew developers had trouble making a decent PS1 emulator for the PSP. I don't think progress got very far at all. Guess what? Sony comes along and makes a very decent PS1 emulator for the PSP. No frame rate issues from what I've noticed and a percentage in the high 90's of compatibility.

It's an emulator because of hacked firmwares which take advantage of the emulator Sony implemented to be used with backups you put on your computer. So the games on PSN aren't simply recoded.

Granted, you do need more power for the system you're trying to emulate, but the amount of power needed for programmers who know the ins and outs of both systems is less than what the average joe needs. So if Sega and Nintendo really got together a lot of their programmers, with enough time they might be able to make at least a half-way decent emulator.

@Jeffrey9999

If you keep doing weird & crazy stuff like this, I might have to report you, but I don't wanna do that. Just quit it.

Thats what I said on the first page.

"Oh so then it does run by emulator. Well maybe, Nintendo is really talented and since both consoles use power pcs you might see SOME games that run good, but most won't. A lucky thing about the Dreamcast dieng early is that it wasn't pushed to it's limits and the wii may benefit from this in the form of emulation, but Nintendo and sega would have to work together to make an emulator that works on playable levels let alone smoothly. I wouldn't discount it, but unfortunately too little is known about the wii's hardware to make estimates for certain, but right now I'm not seeing too many games running well on the wii. ALso I don't really see the benefit since most of the good Dreamcast games were ported to the gamecube such as SoA."

I still think it's really hard though. Sony built both the ps1 and the psp, and no alot about the hardware. Also the ps1-psp is a larger distance than the dreamcast-wii. It's still possible, but I don't see nintendo doing it with the current situation of the storage, and how much time it would take to make a good emulator. It wasn't until recently that a good dreamcast emulator for the pc was made.

I should say the only flaw with this debate is we don't really know if the wii is "emulating" said system or if said games are being reworked to play on the wii... If they completely rework the game(not really all that hard actually especially on 16/8 and lower bit games.) then the only limitation with Dreamcast would be the fact that Sega used GD-Roms(1.2GB)

As far as emulating, Wii could but it'd be pretty sketchy with the wii running off a broadway based chip estimated at 729Mhz and Dreamcast having used a 200Mhz chip. The thing is the processor speed isn't the end all of speed. Architecture affects processors greatly. Do either the wii or Sega Dreamcast run with power saving measures? Generally power saving cuts back on processor speed so while advertised speed may be 2.0Ghz on your laptop it may be squeezing out 80% of that.

We confirmed the games are emulated on the wii because it uses roms. ALso I believe the dreamcasts chip was 100mhznvm I was looking at the graphics processor, and also a powerpc based cpu like the wii's broadway.

Dreamcast runs on RISC architecture with 200Mhz a Hitachi Sh4 if I remember right. Of course I'm talking about the main processor no the GPU.

I think the GPU ran on a PowerVR at 100 Mhz

Edit: As far as emulation yes current games are emulated. I more meant we cannot know if dreamcast and more demanding games would be emulated because it hasn't come to fruition. My mistake I should have worded more clearly.

Edit 2: From what I've read the GPU on wii uses an Arm926 core  and the CPU is of course power PC based.

Software emulation is highly related to many factors, like architecture of both machines, proper coding of the emulator software, etc.

The Dreamcast was already a very friendly machine, that's why you have this DC emulator that requires between 2x-3x the PC power compared to a Nintendo 64 one, despite that the difference between the machines is much bigger. That's why you don't see the PS3 software emulating the PS2.

In any case, if Sega provided Nintendo with a good software, I easily see the Wii pulling out DC emulation, but then again you have the space problem... and I'm not sure if those GD things could be compressed any more.

@souixan: The Arm926 on the Wii is an extra chip on the GPU that does some functions unrelated to graphics. The GPU is an ATI.

put it this way.

The graphics card alone in my pc is moe powerful then the whole of the Wii.

And my pc can just about run dreamcast emulators.

Imagine in a good 10 years when people try and emulate the ps3. thast going to be so funny lol

Wii has built-in NES, SNES, and N64 emulators.  Whenever you download a game for a new system, you also dl the emulator for that system (like the Genesis).

I wouldn't be surprised if they could get some of the smaller DC games on Wii (Power Stone PLZ!), because, due to today's compression, 1gb at the time could be compressed to about 200 mb now.  However, that's still gonna take up a nice chunk'a Wii, especially when you include the DC emulator itself.