Wii Virtual Console

[Matteo]

It is far from silly to think that a business would try to spend money to make even more money. Thats what most businesses attempt everyday. Why do you presume that alot of money is needed to convert a game to online play.? I don't know how much it would cost Tecmo to convert Tecmo Super Bowl to the VC and make it online capable. How much will it cost to only convert it to the VC? How much of difference money wise would that be? 10's of thousands? That kind of money would seem to be very worthy to me when I might sell 500,000 copies of a game at 5 dollars each. People will go nuts, apeshit, over an online TSB on a console, over any of there old NES, SNES, Genesis, N64 classics online capable. When a game is just a ROM ported onto an emulator, its just a collector's piece, a lark. When a game is given online multiplayer and possibly new features it becomes a topic of conversation and a great selling piece.

How many people would not have downloaded Gauntlet or Smash TV (just two examples) for the XBLA if they didn't have online Multiplayer. Most people. I only downloaded/bought those games because they were online. That was my chief reason. We are living in a different age when it comes to multiplayer gaming. Local multiplayer just doesn't cut it anymore. Videogame companies recognize this, they are aware of market trends, they are businesses. Hopefully some of them will push Nintendo to fully realize the VC.

[Kairyu]

It is far from silly to think that a business would try to spend money to make even more money. Thats what most businesses attempt everyday. Why do you presume that alot of money is needed to convert a game to online play.? I don't know how much it would cost Tecmo to convert Tecmo Super Bowl to the VC and make it online capable. How much will it cost to only convert it to the VC? How much of difference money wise would that be? 10's of thousands? That kind of money would seem to be very worthy to me when I might sell 500,000 copies of a game at 5 dollars each. People will go nuts, apeshit, over an online TSB on a console, over any of there old NES, SNES, Genesis, N64 classics online capable. When a game is just a ROM ported onto an emulator, its just a collector's piece, a lark. When a game is given online multiplayer and possibly new features it becomes a topic of conversation and a great selling piece.

How many people would not have downloaded Gauntlet or Smash TV (just two examples) for the XBLA if they didn't have online Multiplayer. Most people. I only downloaded/bought those games because they were online. That was my chief reason. We are living in a different age when it comes to multiplayer gaming. Local multiplayer just doesn't cut it anymore. Videogame companies recognize this, they are aware of market trends, they are businesses. Hopefully some of them will push Nintendo to fully realize the VC.

I keep getting this overwhelming impression that you don't know all that much about adding online play to a game. I know a very small amount, but it's enough to know that it's really just not worth it for a LOT of games.
There are certainly exceptions (i.e. Gauntlet, Smash TV), but those are exceptions, not the rule. Who would care if you added online multiplayer to SMB, SMB3, SMW? Some of the greatest games ever made? Probably half a dozen people at most. The games weren't designed for multiplayer.

The thing is, like vegeta1215 said, when companies are remaking games for XBL, they're basically porting it to a different system. They're reworking the code to make it work with another console anyway. I'd assume XBL and the X360 both have plenty of design specs and tools easily available. When a company releases a game on the WVC, they may not need to do anything more than dump a cart and make a few tweaks to it. For them to change these NES/SNES/GEN/etc. games, they'll need to have people working for them who still understand how those systems worked. Systems have gotten easier to program for over time- they're using high-level languages instead of assembly now.

It's not like I wouldn't like to see a lot more Online games. But that doesn't mean I don't understand the difficulty involved.

[MottZilla]

Ya emulation + netplay is not a new thing. The Virtual Console for classic games require little to no effort really. As long as the emulator supports netplay then any game could. I certainly would love to see them release Super Bomberman's 3, 4, and 5 in North America finally and have 5 player netplay.

[{DSG}DarkRaven]

There's a lot to read here, so forgive me if I'm repeating something that's already been said.

At any rate, Japanese Wii probably needs to be more competitive at launch, so lower prices and more VC games are in order. Economics are very different between countries, and since Japan has different media laws than we do, it's not surprising at all to me that their prices are slightly different (though I can't say for certain if that has anything to do with it).

Second, I forgot what I was going to say.

Third, maybe Nintendo is retooling old games before releasing them, similar to the way that Microsoft is releasing patches for the 360 to allow backwards compatability compliance. Since it was pointed out earlier that emulators like ZSNES allow internet play, it's entirely possible that old games might be modded to allow distant users to play as if they were connected to the same machine (as in the olden days).

Fourth, I remembered what I was going to say for number two: why SMW on the VC is $8, and for the GBA, it's $20. Can you say portability? You can't take your Wii to school with you to play in class, or on a city bus, or on a plane, or into the bathroom. That extra cash, apart from paying for physical material costs, buys you convenience. And people will pay for that.

[Orion]

There's a couple of interesting theories as to why there aren't many N64 games on the Virtual Console. The first is that they could compete with the releasing Wii games. The second is that Nintendo is afraid of people using up the internal memory right away. And the Third is that Nintendo is taking more time because it's more difficult to get the N64 games to emulate correctly. THey all make a little sense I guess.

[MottZilla]

Orion, the only reason that makes sense is that the N64 is difficult to emulate accurately, and infact impossible to emulate with 100% accuracy on the Wii's hardware. N64 emulation on the Wii will likely use Dynarec and HLE which is the way popular PC based N64 emulators work. It's fast but not as accurate. But with fine tuning on a per game basis (which is certainly possible for them to do) they can certainly achieve the results required for a commercial product. Atleast it should be much better than the god awful N64 emulator for GameCube used on the Zelda OoT Bonus disc. Part of the issue with that was the lack of sufficant RAM to even hold the ROM image. Not to mention you need more memory when working with DynaRec.

Really I don't see how N64 games would compete with Wii games at all. And the internal memory being used up also I don't buy that because they will gladly sell you a nintendo branded SD card to make a profit.

Anyway, I just hope they do a good job in making certain each game runs properly with the best degree of accuracy possible.

[Grasshopper]

And the internal memory being used up also I don't buy that because they will gladly sell you a nintendo branded SD card to make a profit.

Yeah, those are just way too much money.

[Warlock]

N64 game is what, 4megs? Nintendo's own memory card is 512mb (ignoring Wii flash memory which I think you can save to - can't remember - and also a couple megs of flash on each wiimote). And since the Wii supports SD cards I've already picked up a 2gb sandisk card ahead of time

Anyways, they obviously got something working for Majora's Mask on the Zelda CE disk (not even talking about OoT since that was sort of done specifically to work with GC way ahead of time for Wind Waker's bonus). I gotta think they've got some sort of emulation software already designed in-house that works well. Whether Majora's was tuned as well, I don't know. But it did run pretty well, and that was a 4mb expansion game (which usually run fairly crappy on PC emulators). So I think Nintendo will be fine.

But I do imagine they've got to at least test the games and make a few tweaks here and there before they release them. So yeah, I can understand the slowness on getting N64 stuff out there.

What I don't understand though, is the lack of SNES stuff (for US - Japan got a ton). No reason for that at all.

[Matteo]

I keep getting this overwhelming impression that you don't know all that much about adding online play to a game. I know a very small amount, but it's enough to know that it's really just not worth it for a LOT of games.
There are certainly exceptions (i.e. Gauntlet, Smash TV), but those are exceptions, not the rule. Who would care if you added online multiplayer to SMB, SMB3, SMW? Some of the greatest games ever made? Probably half a dozen people at most. The games weren't designed for multiplayer.

The thing is, like vegeta1215 said, when companies are remaking games for XBL, they're basically porting it to a different system. They're reworking the code to make it work with another console anyway. I'd assume XBL and the X360 both have plenty of design specs and tools easily available. When a company releases a game on the WVC, they may not need to do anything more than dump a cart and make a few tweaks to it. For them to change these NES/SNES/GEN/etc. games, they'll need to have people working for them who still understand how those systems worked. Systems have gotten easier to program for over time- they're using high-level languages instead of assembly now.

It's not like I wouldn't like to see a lot more Online games. But that doesn't mean I don't understand the difficulty involved.

So because its hard to do, my needs as a consumer are therefore not valid?

It seems like you are trying to nitpick my posts and stance on this because I am not as knowledgable as you about coding etc. Now that we all understand that you understand the difficulty involved I think we can all sleep better at night.

I want online gaming from VC games that should provide it. That's all. Is is not an unrealistic expectation. Again, the consumers are willing and are going to pay for these games. We deserve online play. Don't defend companies who for a little work (a little compared to the million plus spent on the latest next-gen game) can transform an old title into one that will make them alot of money.

[MottZilla]

N64 game is what, 4megs? Nintendo's own memory card is 512mb (ignoring Wii flash memory which I think you can save to - can't remember - and also a couple megs of flash on each wiimote). And since the Wii supports SD cards I've already picked up a 2gb sandisk card ahead of time

Anyways, they obviously got something working for Majora's Mask on the Zelda CE disk (not even talking about OoT since that was sort of done specifically to work with GC way ahead of time for Wind Waker's bonus). I gotta think they've got some sort of emulation software already designed in-house that works well. Whether Majora's was tuned as well, I don't know. But it did run pretty well, and that was a 4mb expansion game (which usually run fairly crappy on PC emulators). So I think Nintendo will be fine.

But I do imagine they've got to at least test the games and make a few tweaks here and there before they release them. So yeah, I can understand the slowness on getting N64 stuff out there.

What I don't understand though, is the lack of SNES stuff (for US - Japan got a ton). No reason for that at all.

The smallest N64 games (a minority too) are 4MB(bytes). The largest are 64MB. There are only 5 of those though. But the general sizes are 8MB, 16MB, and 32MB. Most of the later games are 32MB.

Next, "getting it working" isn't hard. Corn (the original N64 emulator to attempt DynaRec if I recall) had Zelda and other games "working". But you can't just have them working, they need to be performing correctly with no apparent glitches. Again the best way to do this is a single emulator with settings for each game to run optimally, or actually different emulator builds specific to the game which would work too. Also, FYI, the N64 emulator used on OoT and MM was not very good. While it would run a few other games (not properly) it was FAR from competing with the likes of emulators like NEMU, 1964, or PJ64.

Oh ya and the expansion pack is 4MB of extra RAM... Ya... not hard to emulate at all man. PC emulators have emulated that for ages.