Emulating New Super Mario Bros. Wii At 1080p

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."

A Trend, Perhaps?

[dancingmad]

A lot of these 2D games for these Wii seem to look great at 1080 (well, by a lot I mean this and Muramasa; The Demon Blade). I wonder if this is proof that there may be in fact a Wii HD in the works. I thought they were just the normal fanboy rumors but perhaps Nintendo is already planning on it? Between the motion controls on the other two machines (especially the PS3's) it seems like the 3 major consoles are reaching for parity with each other.

Re:Good start

[Kagura]

Interesting idea, especially since specialized hardware hasn't really been needed for console gaming/emulation since the early 2000s. I would pay half the price of the console for an official Nintendo/Xbox/PS emulator, and I would also pay money for controllers.

Too bad. :(

Dolphin has come a long way.

[qazadex]

About a year or two ago, before Dolphin was open sourced, it was a buggy, slow emulator that couldn't run games very well. After it was open sourced, improvements were made extremely rapidly, and even though the rate of increase has designed slightly recently, it's still progressing at a very fast rate. I've been following the project since it was open sourced, and I have to say props to the Dolphin team

Re:Good start

[tepples]

Suddenly, they lose profit on hardware in exchange for adding to their competitor's gaming market share?

You are assuming that people haven't already got a computer and paid money to Microsoft.

It's a valid assumption considering Microsoft's lead over Apple in the market for desktop computer operating systems.

You are also assuming that Nintendo couldn't make their emulator work on the Mac as well. This would not really add anything to Microsoft's market share.

Both Microsoft and Apple are "their competitor" in video gaming: Xbox 360 in video game consoles and iPod Touch in handhelds, especially with Apple's recent ad campaigns promoting it as a DS replacement.

They can still charge for the software

Not once pirates thoroughly crack the emulator to play ripped copies. If you've been following gbatemp or maxconsole, you know how easy it became for a PC to run pirated DS games. It's still a bit more work to run pirated games on a Wii than on a PC.

People write an emulator so they can run a Wii game on their PC.

Does the emulator run well on the $300 entry-level PC from Dell? If not, the PC needs an upgrade. Think of how much it would cost to upgrade the PC with a faster CPU and a non-Intel video card and then add on a Wii Remote ($40) and a Nunchuk ($20). Now compare that to the retail price of a Wii ($200). Besides, you still need the Wii in order to dump your game discs, which use a slightly rearranged format for physical sectors that PC DVD-ROM drives' firmware can't recognize.