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Your opinion on the Virtual Console?

babylonia

New member
Hi all! Currently I'm writing a thesis on the emulation scene VS the Virtual Console. There seems to be a big miscommunication between the two, and in my opinion the distorted communication is mostly caused by Nintendo since they produced an emulator without involving the experienced programmers within the emulation scene. The lack of communication led Nintendo to introduce the Virtual Console, an emulator which according to most isn't as good as the existing emulators created by the emulator scene.

I was wondering about your opinions on this case. Do you think Nintendo did a good job on creating the Virtual Console? And if not, why? Are your objections mainly based on the ethical side (them not incorporating the emulation scene) or based on the technical side (them releasing an emulator that isn't as good as the existing ones)?
 
F

Fanatic 64

Guest
Is this for school? If so, I would recommend that you looked for another topic, since many people may believe you're talking about piracy or hacking.

Second, Nintendo is never going to work with amateur emulator programmers, and has in fact taken them down in the past, primarily for the reason above. (And they do have professionals working on the Virtual Console emulator, which works as good if not slightly better than home made emulators.)
 

Shonumi

EmuTalk Member
I think the OP is interested in the friction between "official" forms of emulation and "unofficial" emulators, which is basically anything they never wrote themselves. I don't see it as an issue of piracy or hacking (though according to Nintendo, every emulator besides theirs is illegal, uh huh...)

Nintendo's Virtual Consoles are known to be inaccurate in comparison to both the original hardware and emulators written by "amateurs". They took shortcuts and the core emulation is tweaked per-game apparently. It's somewhat hackish on their part, but their goal is to get a limited number of titles out with minimal effort and time to get results that are reasonably convincing to end-users. If it's good enough, it's good enough.

They could easily have ported an existing emulator licensed under a FOSS license, but that would probably legitmize the very "unofficial" emulators they have essentially demonized for years. They're just not going to reach out to emu developers. They'd rather do things in-house.

They will take good ideas where they see them. From what I understand, they basically copied PocketNES' tile scaling when they made the GBA NES Classics.
 

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