Nintendo Warns It Won't Make More Retro NES and SNES Consoles (engadget.com) 90
Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime warned that the NES Classic and SNES Classic will sell in the Americas through the holidays, but will be "gone" once they sell out. Engadget reports: If you want to walk down memory lane after that, you'll have to take advantage of the games that come with Switch Online. You might also want to tamp down your hopes for a Nintendo 64 Classic. Fils-Aime added that the existing systems are the "extent of our classic program." That wouldn't be completely surprising given that the N64 was considerably more complex than its predecessor. The executive likewise ruled out additional games for the mini NES and SNES models.
Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away (Score:1)
But, the cloud!
No, no, no (Score:2)
They're not going to make more classics (for a few more years), to drive people to the Switch and Switch Cloud Games.
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Or to download them from any number of torrent sites -- but yeah, that's a technical hurdle a large number of their customers won't bother clearing (unfortunately)
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It's really because people were hoarding them and loading them with pirated games to sell on eBay.
They need to engineer something new, or work out an agreement with the FPGA console developers (Super NT, AVS) to make licensed multi-carts in turn for making it marginally harder for pirates to load games on the devices.
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That, of course, is absurd. It's not absurd because it's not true. It's absurd because even without the NES/SNES Mini people were loading up Raspberry Pis with pirated games to sell on eBay--and that offers a better profit margin for the commercial pirates either way. The problem with Nintendo and a lot of other old game owners is they fear that people will pirate their games. The truth is people who can and will are already pirating their games. Trying to actually sell their games in one form or anoth
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It's clearly working great for the Switch. The Wii-U marketing efforts were mismanaged.
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Trying to actually sell their games in one form or another for a remotely reasonable price (given the cost of distribution) is a way for people who want to be legal to actually give such companies money.
That isn't really feasible.
Nintendo can sell a platform with their own games and maybe get some licensing deal for some other less popular games.
To make a platform where people can play all the games from their childhood they would need to wade through an unsurpassable bog of copyright law.
Companies have disbanded, the right to the games have been sold, or just entered some sort of limbo.
Maybe the owner of the source code are different from the owners of the binaries that are different from ROM stencil that
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Shigeru Miyamoto [wikipedia.org] created Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and evenradically different games from established series [metacritic.com]. Mario64 got a 94 while Mario Odyssey got a 97. Zelda N64 got a 99 [metacritic.com] while got a 97 [metacritic.com].
Fools! It might be terrible to the ego to admit that Nintendo's old games are better than the new ones.
You're thinking of Sega [metacritic.com].
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It might be terrible to the ego to admit that Nintendo's old games are better than the new ones.
What are you talking about? They are still making the old games, just not the consoles. You can buy a huge portion of their back collection ported to the Switch. Profit was looked in the eye, the Switch is far more profitable than the NES Classic.
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No they are not. Take off the nostalgia goggles.
They certainly were masterpieces but a lot of progress has been made. Newer games have better graphics, better sound, better story, more varied gameplay, more content and a better designed difficulty curve. Technology, budget and decades of game design studies allowed it.
About the difficulty curve, yes, I mean it. Back in the days, difficulty was a way to prolong the gameplay through die-and-retry, it is also a remnant of quarter sucking arcades. People who la
retro consoles (seem to be) terrible! (Score:1)
With Project 64, snes9x and the other emulators, do we really care?
I picked up (a while back) the Atari 2600 retro console and it was terrible.
I took it back. Space Invaders was different - thought it was me until I
compared it with the emulator version - yes, it was very different and broke!
I suspect there's a lot of subtly that's not included in a retro console that
existed in its original console version. And amazingly, those are maintained
in the emulators quite well (yeah, I know it's the original rom -
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Emulators are great but now that Nintendo has shut down EmuParadise's ROM hosting (along with other hosts) it's become much harder to reliably get clean ROMs to play, so I'd say yes we do care.
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Software emulators aren't accurate. Period.
The NES is about 99% accurate, the SNES 94% accurate, and the N64 is A LOW 80% or so. N64 emulation in software is an absolute crapshoot for accuracy.
FPGA hardware emulators actually replicate everything, including bugs and hardware level latency and don't use framebuffers. Your PC emulator has to use a framebuffer, adding 16 to 32ms of latency to the output on the HDMI. On top of that, the HDMI screen may use motion smoothing or rescaling in it's own frame buffer
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> You'll only get 0ms latency with a picture tube and nobody does that anymore...
I do.
> I think your latency quotes are excessive
I can't say what the real value is either, but it's definitely a problem whatever it is.
> I'm pretty sure that I don't experience anything as bad as that.
To the extent people play emulators well, it's because they've learned to cope with the lag. If you're a skilled player and you go straight from playing Super Mario World on a CRT television with a real SNES to playing
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And if I remember right, all of these retro consoles that have Adventure completely fucked up the Secret Programmer's Room.
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The article also notes that those ports "differed in varying degrees from the original games, and therefore the Flashback was unpopular with some purists."
Apparently
It's just a way to ramp up demand. (Score:4, Insightful)
Announce that the mini-consoles will only be sold through Christmas, inflate demand. Wait 5 months then re-release them in "limited quantities" rinse and repeat next xmas.
But that's OK... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: But that's OK... (Score:1)
Indeed. I have gameboys that are ancient and were owned by destructive little kids for probably their virst decade. They've held up and protected the electronics inside. It's nice, in this era of modern mobile hardware, to have replaced the display windows with hardened glass.
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Pretty much all the classic games are available on the Switch anyway.
If only there was some way (Score:3)
to download the ROMS and emulate the NES/Super systems in software. /s
It's not like Nintenblo is making any new games for them. Or translating any Japanese Language games into English.
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Re: If only there was some way (Score:1)
Are these things being sold in the south Asian countries where almost all of the ocean-going plastic waste is being dumped in the rivers?
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Are these things being sold in the south Asian countries where almost all of the ocean-going plastic waste is being dumped in the rivers?
I don't know, but producing such throwaway electronics doesn't help anyway. Also remember that a lot of our e-waste ends up being "recycled" in third world countries.
Now, what I'd like to see is a way to use generic Linux on these consoles. Since you cannot install new games via official channels anyway, Nintendo/Sony have nothing to lose, only goodwill to gain. After all, they are using a ton of opensource software, including the emulator in the PS Classic. You can probably get equivalent, open hardware
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"to download the ROMS and emulate the NES/Super systems in software."
I know... Let's do THAT thing!
Cool, so back to emulators. (Score:3)
Cool, so back to emulators.
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Or Nintendo-sues-you-into-the-poor-house emulators? (See "LoveRetro".)
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To what end? You're upset that one way you're giving profit to Nintendo is different to another way you're giving profit to Nintendo and all games are still available so it's driving you towards piracy?
I call bullshit and will assert that you had been using no-profit-for-Nintendo emulators from day one and had no interest in the SNES Classic.
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I'm sorry, I thought this would have been completely assumed but clearly it was not.
Cool, so back to (illegal) emulators.
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Jesus, you're a semantics asshole aren't you? You actually have no vested interest in this other than the proper wording, right?
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So by your own account your insistence on the absolute literalness of what I had said couldn't possibly be true. It's almost as if Illegal ROMs might have been the key point and you chose to be a semantics asshole because the issue was named improperly.
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Cool, so back to emulators.
Or just buy a Switch which is ultimately what Nintendo are trying to get people to do here.
I don't think it's much of an issue (Score:2)
The real reason no N64 version: (Score:1)
They are using emulators (I'm betting it's BSD licensed emus) for their retro systems, so they are fucked when it comes to the N64 because the shitty ARM SBCs they are distributing cannot render raster enough or achieve the pixel perfect graphics they want.
As soon as a BSD licensed N64 emu comes out with perfect graphics that runs on one of these ARM systems then they'll start selling them.
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Nope.
Nintendo has always had these emulators. How do you think the developers made the games in the first place? Especially since the N64 used an off-the-shelf SGI machine.
No the problem is that N64 emulators always used dynamic recompilation, and as such they're super-buggy messes. Nintendo clearly has kept the source code for games since the N64 otherwise they'd never have made DS/3DS ports of those games. For Nintendo, it would be easier for them to recompile all the N64 games for a base-line emulator th
Re: The real reason no N64 version: (Score:1)
I have every GBC and GBA rom on my phone. They are small enough to just have every one in a folder on the removable SD card.
That's a shame, but not surprising. (Score:2)
I've found the value of the NES Classic and SNES Classic is for people who aren't particularly technically inclined (and won't be setting up RetroPie) and don't want to spend hundreds of dollars getting a Switch or Wii U but still have nostalgia for NES and SNES games. It's a dead simple system. If you can operate a Bluray player, you can operate a NES Classic.
The "not surprising" bit comes from the acknowledgement that there probably aren't that many such people out there.
(And all the other retro consoles
idiots (Score:2)
Why on earth would they willingly leave so much money on the table? Those idiots running the kiosks in the malls with the bootleg emulators with every damn game ever made installed on them are doing *just fine* at $40-$60 apiece. And THEY have to pay around $1200/month in rent.
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Here in Spain they only roughly similar thing I've seen is those small arcade machines that are popping up in many restaurants and pubs. They're running some version of MAME with hundreds of obviously unlicensed ROMS. I guess the owners of such games just don't care
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They aren't. They said the same thing a while after the NES Classic came out, then a few months later flooded the market with new ones. It's bologna.
Retropie with raspberry pi better imo (Score:2)
Cheaper and better and easily user configurable and moddable
Just an opinion though
Re:Retropie with raspberry pi better imo +RecalBox (Score:2)
I'm a Fool because I just bought two. (Score:2)
And then I see this NES Classic discontinued because ‘we don’t have unlimited resources,’ Nintendo says [polygon.com] (Apr 28 2017)
Immediately followed by this Nintendo’s NES Classic will return to U.S. retail stores on June 29 [techcrunch.com] (May 14 2017)
They went a full two months and then capitulated. I guess Q2 next year we will see the systems start to sell again... Meanwhile I paid full price for one and a 5% markup for the other. Worth it? Probably.
-dk
Re: I'm a Fool because I just bought two. (Score:1)
Was it an "investment" or did you buy them to have fun playing the games?
No more... (Score:2)
...we're done. But you still can't download and emulate.
This is called: fuck the fans.
This seems stupid for Nintendo (Score:2)
Not only are they not continuing with the remakes (I for one would be very interested in a Nintendo 64 classic so I can play Super Mario 64 the way it was meant to be played rather than trying to throw Bowser off the ledge using arrow keys pretending to be an analog stick) but they aren't bringing any proper Virtual Console to the switch either. Given how popular the Virtual Console options have been on the Wii and Wii U and DS line, it seems stupid not to have all the same stuff available for the Switch as