Technically, all HDTVs upscale, at least the ones based on LCD and plasma screens. They have to; they can't really change their resolution like CRTs can, so they have to fake it through upscaling. You can see this on your own computer if you have an LCD screen; just try to change its resolution to anything other than the native one (typically the highest resolution offered).

The problem is that most HDTVs seem to get their built-in upscaling hardware from Cap'n Cheapo's Discount House O' Silicon. This keeps costs down, and is frankly more than a little convenient for them for other reasons, but it means that if you want SD to look decent on an HDTV you need better upscaling hardware.

I'll upgrade the resolution when Nintendo does.

me too

I can try... longish post follows.

That's the magic of vector-based graphics being in concept resolution-indipendent, whereas raster graphics are not.

In a totally abstract way: your game uses some graphic libraries to access the features of its hardware. Thus the commands are things like "draw a triangle of vertices (1 ,1, 2.3) (1.6, 2, 4.5 ) and (1.5, 2.5, 2.5)".

Note that the resolution is not mentioned, and that those coordinates for each vertex are not "screen coordinates" but coordinates in an abstract 3d space containing all the graphic objects.

It is then up to the graphic library of the console to translate this command given by the game into actual pixels, using the GPU. In particular this is where the resolution comes into play because the GPU must render that abstract triangle into one made of the right number of pixels, and that depends on the set resolution, resulting in more or less evident "jaggies" on the triangle sides.

Up to this point, an emulator works great: it simply catches all the library calls issued by the game and uses the PC GPU to render them at a higher resolution than what the console library did with its hardware.

What does not work as well are some other components of graphics: for example some image postprocessing done using pixel shaders expects a given resolution (say, to make all the image weave as if the camera is underwater), so an emulator must find a way to deal with that part of the graphical rendering.

BTW, this resolution-indipendence has nothing to do with upscaling.

Upscaling means rendering at a lower resolution each frame, then scaling it up to the higher resolution. Since the upscaled image has more pixels, some of them aren't "original", ie they were not created by the game engine. These extra pixels are filled with colors based on the colors of the "original" pixels nearby, and there are mathematical algorithms that do a pretty good job of this, so that the final effect is "smoother".

But this is a purely 2d manipulation, frame by frame. It knows nothing of the original details of the 3d models, so it can bring to artifacts that whould not be there if the image was rendered in higher resolution right from the beginning.

In other words: if you magnify the Mona Lisa up to the size of a skyscraper, you're not getting details that Leonardo didn't put there. You're just smoothing the same amount of information onto a bigger surface.

The real surprise for me is that there's already a Wii emulator. I thought there weren't even Gamecube emulators yet. Maybe the popularity of the Wii made more programmers interested in making one?

This man is correct.

TBH though i feel that the sheer amount of AA has made more of a difference to how it looks than the upscaling did.

Try playing Crysis wth no AA, it looks fairl jaggy and no where near how good it does when run with the AA settings at maximum.

Well it was meant to be a Gamecube emulator but then added features like Wiimote and finally even supporting Wii games.

does it support the sensor bar, if not, i don't think there's a way to play Wii on pc

i guess there's no way you can play online and download things

the hard part should have been the graphics and speed, and since there is already a ps2 emulator and games with ps3 graphics for pc, it's nothing special

The sensor bar is just a IR emitter, its light is captured by the camera in the Wiimote. The emulator doesn't need to support it, it just needs to support the Wiimote.

if it's as accurate as the sensor bar, then it's really a great work from those who made it

but still, if it does not support Zelda, Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart and so on at normal speed, it cannot be called a Wii emulator

actually, it's good that new gen consoles cannot be 100% emulated on Pc, like PSX for example

i think i'm offtopic, but maybe this emulator can be used to as a demo for some games to see if they are good to buy (even if running slow) , however, my pc sucks : P