Emulating New Super Mario Bros. Wii At 1080p 76
KingofGnG writes "An impressive confirmation of the Dolphin Wii emulator's capabilities comes from a YouTube video, which shows off recently-added video clips of New Super Mario Bros. Wii in full HD. It demonstrates the growing compatibility of Dolphin with the latest games published for the Nintendo console."
Good start (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a great start. The advantage of the Wii to the emulator community is that it is greatly underpowered compared to 360 and PS3. I don't mean underpowered in that it can't play games, but that the requirements to emulate it are much lower. Since people have already hacked the Wiimote to work as a mouse [wordpress.com] then there is no reason why the emulator community would not be able to incorporate this to use the real controllers.
The benefit to Nintendo is that they would still be able to sell their hardware add-ons to the emulator world. The downside is that this will act as a modded Wii and so people will probably just download the Wii games, which will still mean that Nintendo will try to shut them down eventually.
Perhaps by the time this emulator works with enough games to make it viable, they will have already come up with the Wii2 and then they won't care so much about people emulating the old system.
I think that Nintedo should have preempted this. The best solution for them would have been to release their own PC version of the Wii which can run the legit games and use the official peripherals. The pressure for other people to write an emulator would have reduced.
I stopped buying games for my PC when copy protection got intrusive and sometimes destructive. These days, I don't trust any games that insists on running as administrator and I always research the copy protection system. If Nintendo created a software Wii that sandboxed itself from the rest of the computer, I would happily play the games knowing that my system would be (mostly) safe.
Demonstrates jack! (Score:0, Insightful)
I have an issue with the last sentence. A mostly 2d game, that requires very few resources demonstrates the emulators prowess?
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nintendo wouldn't put in extra large textures because they don't have the RAM to load them into. Even if they did put them in, they wouldn't load them because loading the extra large textures would make load times worse to absolutely no advantage on the Wii.
You're seeing a few items that look good because at times they are viewed zoomed in. And the rest of the stuff is just stretched and it still looks pretty good because cartoony graphics are very amenable to stretching. And then some other stuff (like the coins) still don't look that good.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear Nintendo did plan ahead and draw their textures in higher res for future HD use. But I would be surprised to hear the put them on the disc, let alone loaded them in.
Re:Good start (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait what? Let us start at "Nintendo should have preempted this." Nevermind. "PC version of the Wii" - I gather what you mean is "Software for computers capable of running Wii games." While not at all a bad idea, and one I've wanted for a long time to be official from Nintendo for things such as NES, SNES and 64 games, its not going to happen...probably. Considering that one of the Wii's competitors is owned by the company most known for having a stranglehold on the OS market, I don't know that Nintendo would like this. Suddenly, they lose profit on hardware in exchange for adding to their competitor's gaming market share? Nah, though MS would probably welcome the idea with open arms. You can sell a Wii for a lot more than you can software that emulates (and not always predictably accurate) said software, whats the point? You don't want to invest in a console rollout so that you can bleed out of every chopped off limb by running your software on PCs.
"The pressure for other people to write an emulator would have reduced." - Kind of backwards - its much easier to pirate something that already runs on your target system. Granted, piracy isn't emulation per se, you stand to lose way more by allowing your games to be run natively on systems you don't own, service, upgrade and control. Demand for emulation would obviously drop, but demand for piracy of games and software to run them would skyrocket.
I'll be honest, I haven't gamed on a computer in a while - at least not on a PC and mostly OSS games. But, last time I can think of, not many games out there require Administrator rights to run. Maybe you have Windows Vista? And you're thinking of the installation process? And even then I don't know if I believe you. Games, more than most any other software on your computer, should have no issues running in userspace, and companies like MS probably see it in their interests to give average users access to DirectX-related hardware.
Why should I use this and not by a Wii instead? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Nintendo console is quite cheap anyway.
Re:Good start (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good start (Score:4, Insightful)
If you divide the price for the number of games (not only Wii games) that it can run, the x86 is *much* cheaper.