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Nintendo Warns It Won't Make More Retro NES and SNES Consoles (engadget.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the end-of-the-road dept.

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.

90 comments

  1. Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by BrendaEM · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Fools! It might be terrible to the ego to admit that Nintendo's old games are better than the new ones.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
    1. Re: Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      But, the cloud!

    2. Re: Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Really want one of these with all my heart

    3. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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.

    4. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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 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.

      Really, Nintendo is in so much a position of "Take my money!" that it's patently absurd. Any ideas that this is some sort of master plan to get people to buy a Switch? Uh, yea... That worked so well for the Wii U and the [New] 3DS...

    5. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Narcocide · · Score: 1

      It's clearly working great for the Switch. The Wii-U marketing efforts were mismanaged.

    6. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mario Galaxy is a million times better than Odyssey, and Galaxy 2 tops it

    7. Re: Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lmfao. Yeah, sure, if you like your video games to be linear and hold your hand every step of the way, and you like jiggling your Wiiwii motes

    8. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Switch sales have been strong since day one (over a year and a half ago). Virtual Console in its limited form of a finite 20 games is tied to continuous payment for Nintendo Switch Online service and is only a few months old. There isn't even a correlation to point at, yet alone a basis to argue some sort of causation.

    9. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fools!

      You mean the people that keep buying the same games from them, year after year?
      They won't sell you a toy emulator console because they will sell you emulated games on your more expensive console instead.
      Again.

    10. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Prien715 · · Score: 1

      Shigeru Miyamoto created Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and evenradically different games from established series. Mario64 got a 94 while Mario Odyssey got a 97. Zelda N64 got a 99 while got a 97.

      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.

      --
      -- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
    11. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      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.

    12. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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 are different from the owners of the cartridge PCB layout that are different from those who have the rights to the brand.
      Most likely the ownership is no longer clear and several companies thinks that they own the right to the game.

      I think it would have been a good idea to make it so that copyright only is valid as long as you make the work available.
      If you no longer make any profit from it you will have to decide to either provide it anyway or let it pass into public domain.
      That would probably mitigate the clusterfuck that surrounds rights to old computer games and old computers somewhat.

      There have been some effort to preserve old software but at the moment it often requires that archivers break the law and keep the access to their archives limited to other archivers which makes it problematic to do research into gaming and software development history.

    13. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by GuB-42 · · Score: 1

      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 laud difficult games probably forgot about all the frustration it incurred when they were younger. And anyways, the indie scene especially is full of hard games that are better than the classics thanks to said advancement.

      Old games are a part of history, and people still want to play them for a variety of reasons, mostly nostalgia, and Nintendo wants to capitalize on that. Still it is not a huge market.

    14. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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.

      That's really a strawman. Yes, *all* games from the platform can't be sold because of copyright limbo. That doesn't explain why the games that are already being sold or are wholly owned by various copyright holders and aren't in possible copyright limbo aren't being sold. Every one of those could be sold and money being made vs the piracy that may already be happening.

      The library of games I suggest, even if it were only something like 10% of games, would be substantially more than the 0-1% that's current available from most publishers, excluding Nintendo who may be closer to 10% on some platforms. And yes, those percentages are made up, but it's clear Nintendo keeps pushing to resell its games on different platforms it owns and has lured some publishers aboard. It's unclear what Nintendo has actually paid out to said publishers, though, but I imagine Nintendo's cut is part of why VC games were as much as they were.

      Regardless, any money is better than nothing. Look no further than Capcom reaching 1 million sales on MMLC, it being the fifth Mega Man title to reach that number (the others being MM2, MMX, MMBN4, and MM3). The market is clearly there.

    15. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No you can't. The Switch, unlike the Wii and the WiiU, doesn't have a virtual console. Its 'equivalent' is "Nintendo Switch Online", a $20/yr service which gives you access to a paltry amount ( 40) of NES games on-demand.

    16. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Cool! So they will stop ripping people off with their crappy game console that has 30 games (and mostly the crappiest ones!) and no way to add the games people really want! Oh, and don't forget the cables are all so short that you have to be within 3-4 feet of the TV!
      And I know that Nintendo is trying to shut down the sites where game ROMs can be downloaded, but thats an impossible task! For every site that they manage to shut down, 5 more will spring up! I have heard that there are people out there with torrent files of thousands of game ROMs!

      What Nintendo should do is buy up the licenses to all of the third party NES, SNES, and N64 games that they can, then sell all of the ROMs on a DVD disk for about $30.00 Lots of folks would snap them up!

    17. Re:Look Profit in the Eye and Walk Away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      mario 64 and ocarina of time were revolutionary 3d games for the time and the scores reflect that context. odyssey and breath of the wild are competing in a much more mature and competitive marketplace.

      what i'm saying is using the old games reviews as a metric understates just how great nintendo's newer games are.

  2. retro consoles (seem to be) terrible! by Anonymous Coward · · 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 - but the software
    emulation of the underlying hardware is pretty amazing).

    CAP === 'walked'

    1. Re: retro consoles (seem to be) terrible! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It seems like lots of people have originals around their houses. I heard that a surprising number of college aged people have an old system they got from their parents or somewhere

    2. Re:retro consoles (seem to be) terrible! by Isarian · · Score: 1

      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.

    3. Re:retro consoles (seem to be) terrible! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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 to add an additional 100ms of latency.

      That is why these shitty $40 retro consoles are horrible, they're a simple software emulator on a low-end ARM core. The accuracy will be worse than PC emulators, because PC emulators actually can be updated. Really Nintendo should have came out with the Virtual Console to begin with for the Switch, because at least they can update the emulators on it. Yet they probably realized that the current JB'd switch devices will just enable piracy on a much larger scale, and only until they exhaust the NES and SNES classic toys will they decide it's worth the risk.

    4. Re:retro consoles (seem to be) terrible! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, but I think (from my experience) of my favorite games (Super Mario World included)
      I can't tell the difference. Someone may "see" a difference if they're going for those crazy
      timing things that depend on milli-second pixel stuff, but I think for the average retro-player,
      those emulators get the job done quite well. And w/open source, though it's not perfect,
      things are fixed and updated over time. Also, there are still many places to get the roms
      out-in-the-wild, I suspect. I don't mess w/NES emulator unless I'm really, really, really bored.
      But sometimes I get that SNES itch and the snes9x scratches it quite well.

      I think your latency quotes are excessive - 1/10 of a second is definitely noticeable and
      I'm pretty sure that I don't experience anything as bad as that. I think if you were to measure
      it (I didn't), the latency would be well under 1/30th of a second - but everything that isn't a
      tube monitor has some sort of latency. You'll only get 0ms latency with a picture tube and
      nobody does that anymore...

      CAP === 'cohere'

    5. Re: retro consoles (seem to be) terrible! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's noticible. Ive

    6. Re:retro consoles (seem to be) terrible! by Scarletdown · · Score: 1

      And if I remember right, all of these retro consoles that have Adventure completely fucked up the Secret Programmer's Room.

      --
      This space unintentionally left blank.
    7. Re:retro consoles (seem to be) terrible! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's still trivial to find a full set of Nintendo ROMs, the average Joe might not be aware of it but with a quick google they'll be pointed in the right direction.Hell Nintendo probably got them from the same place considering what happened with Nesticle headers being found inside what were supposedly Nintendo's own dumps.

    8. Re:retro consoles (seem to be) terrible! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      FPGA hardware emulators actually replicate everything, including bugs and hardware level latency

      No.

      FPGA hardware emulators are still just an attempt at recreating the real thing. That doesn't mean that accuracy is guaranteed.
      Especially when it comes to more "analog" quirks like for example what happens with the floating bus signals NES has when you read a controller. (Emulator writers are aware of this and FPGA emulators typically has a workaround that drives the bus to a state that is more or less equivalent with the result you get on a real NES.)

      The only thing that makes FPGA emulators more accurate is that they are typically written by hardware geeks that approach the problem in a similar fashion that the original hardware developers.
      Since the original hardware developers typically chose the solution that was simplest from a hardware perspective you are more likely to get it right, but saving transistors on a chip doesn't necessarily equal saving LUTs in an FPGA.

      What makes FPGAs attractive for emulators is that you don't get performance issues.
      A cycle accurate emulator will need to emulate the state of the hardware for every clock cycle, or even more since it isn't uncommon that hardware takes both clock flanks into consideration.

    9. Re:retro consoles (seem to be) terrible! by Kavonte · · Score: 1

      > 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 it on an emulator on a computer, you find yourself running head-on into enemies and dying when you intended to jump over them, because when you see that it is time to jump, it's too late. You have to learn to do everything 100 ms sooner than you normally would.

      If you've not played on a real SNES in a long time, then you'll just think that you didn't jump soon enough and next time you'll jump sooner and after a while you'll have developed all of your skill with that 100 ms lag, and if you switch to a real SNES on a CRT television you'll find that you do everything too soon.

      It is a real problem, and it's exactly why I didn't buy these retro consoles. If they were real re-creations of the hardware I would have been interested, but I'm not paying a lot of money just to get an emulator. There are better choices in the form of other companies building clone NES and SNES systems that aren't emulators and so they don't have a lag problem. ...and you can get a CRT television for free at most yard sales.

    10. Re:retro consoles (seem to be) terrible! by Dogtanian · · Score: 1

      If it was quite a while ago, I'm assuming that the "retro console" you had was the first generation Atari Flashback. Its Wikipedia article notes that this was based on an "NES-on-a-chip" design that didn't even bother to emulate the original architecture through software, but merely ran what were effectively NES ports of the original games.

      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 the Flashback 2 was a single-chip hardware recreation of the VCS (obviously the best solution short of an exact reproduction of the original hardware) and most/all of the later versions use software emulations of the original system.

      --
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  3. Wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So the Switch isn't retro? I couldn't tell with shoddy graphics and the re re re rereleases of all the retro games.

  4. It's just a way to ramp up demand. by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    1. Re:It's just a way to ramp up demand. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There's nothing wrong with making seasonal limited production of products.

    2. Re:It's just a way to ramp up demand. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I never said there was anything wrong with it. Just that they literally already did this before. It's not exactly news.

    3. Re:It's just a way to ramp up demand. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is perfectly fine, but be aware that it wouldn't work in a capitalism since someone else would sell the product in the rest of the year.
      This is only possible because the legal system have granted Nintendo a monopoly on these products and enforces said monopoly.

  5. But that's OK... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2, Insightful

    We've had emulators since forever after all.

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
    1. Re:But that's OK... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      but that cheap Chinese plastic encompassing the hardware.. what ever will I do without it?

    2. Re:But that's OK... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't think you understand the quality of Nintendo's plastic hardware. Their controller hardware does a good job of withstanding the rigours of daily life.

    3. Re:But that's OK... by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Pretty much all the classic games are available on the Switch anyway.

    4. Re: But that's OK... by Cmdln+Daco · · 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.

  6. If only there was some way by bobstreo · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:If only there was some way by TeknoHog · · Score: 1

      The S?NES Classic and the Playstation Classic are indeed just Linux machines running emulators. I guess this is the next stage of the "app" culture: instead of selling software, sell a new "app-liance" for every separate feature. The oceans will thank you.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    2. Re: If only there was some way by Cmdln+Daco · · 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?

    3. Re: If only there was some way by TeknoHog · · 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?

      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 for less, but not necessarily if you count the case and the controllers.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    4. Re:If only there was some way by noodler · · Score: 1

      "to download the ROMS and emulate the NES/Super systems in software."

      I know... Let's do THAT thing!

  7. Cool, so back to emulators. by skam240 · · Score: 2

    Cool, so back to emulators.

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    1. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by mark-t · · Score: 1

      afaik, their so-called retro console *IS* an emulator.

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    2. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by pak9rabid · · Score: 1

      Back to no-profit-for-Nintendo emulators then.

    3. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by tepples · · Score: 1

      Or Nintendo-sues-you-into-the-poor-house emulators? (See "LoveRetro".)

    4. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by pak9rabid · · Score: 1

      Well yeah, don't sell shit that doesn't belong to you. It's common sense.

    5. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, they are nothing but dressed up Android set to boxes. Effectively you can do you own with a Raspberry Pi or other cheap android based boxes and emulators/roms for the platforms.

    6. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by skam240 · · Score: 1

      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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    7. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by mark-t · · Score: 1

      What emulators do you know of that are illegal?

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    8. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What emulators do you know of that are illegal?

      Any of them including firmware or bios code under another person/companies copyright.
      Also any of them being distributed against the license of the creator.

      RetroN5 is an emulator released by Hyperkin, which repackaged GPL 3 licensed code from RetroArch without attribution or source code. That was an illegal emulator.

      Recalbox was another that used multiple GPL emulators and frequently released versions with binaries only, only to release source code after months of people asking them.

      I can't remember the name of the emulator, but one of the very early and first playstation 1 emulators included a full copy of the PS1 bios built into its code.
      That sort of thing is why emulators tend to load such bios code from a file now, so that the emulator itself isn't in violation of copyright, it's up to the end user to go download the bios and potentially violate copyright :P

    9. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Cool, so back to emulators.

      Or just buy a Switch which is ultimately what Nintendo are trying to get people to do here.

    10. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      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.

    11. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by mark-t · · Score: 1

      You misunderstand the point of my question... my point was that since virtually all of the emulators that exist today are not actually illegal in the first place (even if companies like Nintendo hate them), and I was wondering what illegal emulator a person would actually want to use.

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    12. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by skam240 · · Score: 1

      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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    13. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by mark-t · · Score: 1

      My point is that we aren't really going back to emulators when the NES and SNES retro console aren't available anymore because those consoles were actually emulators too, and so that's all that we've ever been using the entire time anyways.

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    14. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by skam240 · · Score: 1

      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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    15. Re:Cool, so back to emulators. by mark-t · · Score: 1

      I wasn't trying to be an asshole... and the questionably legal ROM's weren't mentioned, only the emulators. I'm not a mind reader, how was I to know that wasn't what you meant?

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
  8. No, no, no by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 1

    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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    1. Re:No, no, no by rogoshen1 · · Score: 0

      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)

  9. Re:FUCK nintendo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I don't care about Nintendo but I can easily ignore advertisements. Nobody forces you to do more than glance and ignore any kind of message they have.

  10. N64 Classic... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    N64 Classic would have been cool and, despite the 3D graphic requirements wouldn't have been much to 'emulate' on today's hardware considering I was emulating the N64 on my Pentium 133 back in 1999. Heck, I believe the NES and SNES classics are already able to run N64 emulation.

  11. I don't think it's much of an issue by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    the folks who bought them for Nostalgia will tire of them and they'll be clogging ebay before long.

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  12. The real reason no N64 version: by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 0

    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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    1. Re:The real reason no N64 version: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Also N64 didn't do so well compared to PS1. It did OK, hardly was a failure, but maybe not enough of a success to make a classic console for.

    2. Re:The real reason no N64 version: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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 that simply emulates the N64's sound system, and just uses a much more powerful GPU to run them at the original resolution, but scaled up to 2K/4K/8K without the latency that emulating the hardware would have done.

      It's still impossible to emulate a SNES without speed hacks. You need a 4Ghz PC system just to emulate the base system, never mind the expansion chips. Even then you're still dealing with scaling, buffering and other not-close-enough-to-metal API's of the host OS that you'd never have to deal with with the SoC or FPGA re-implementation.

    3. Re:The real reason no N64 version: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They're doing Gameboy next

    4. Re: The real reason no N64 version: by Cmdln+Daco · · 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.

  13. That's a shame, but not surprising. by thevirtualcat · · Score: 1

    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 that have come out since then seem to be pathetic, half-assed, copycat cash grabs.)

  14. idiots by irving47 · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    I had a sucky sig.
    1. Re:idiots by iampiti · · Score: 1

      Do they openly sell hardware with pirated games in malls where you live? Wow. You live in the US?
      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

    2. Re:idiots by Mike+Frett · · Score: 1

      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.

    3. Re:idiots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      better go to korea.

  15. Re:FUCK nintendo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're an idiot, nobody asked "hey, can some idiot apologize for slashdot shamelessly advertising an IP troll? Great thanks" - nobody said that. Fuck off to a 1980's video game you're not legally allowed to play anymore.

  16. Retropie with raspberry pi better imo by Cito · · Score: 1

    Cheaper and better and easily user configurable and moddable
    Just an opinion though

  17. This tactic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    is known as the "hard sell".

    She's a real beaut this one, and purrs like a kitten too, but if you want it, you better buy now because I had a feller in here this morning who had his eye on it.

  18. I'm a Fool because I just bought two. by dknj · · Score: 1

    And then I see this NES Classic discontinued because ‘we don’t have unlimited resources,’ Nintendo says (Apr 28 2017)

    Immediately followed by this Nintendo’s NES Classic will return to U.S. retail stores on June 29 (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

    1. Re: I'm a Fool because I just bought two. by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 1

      Was it an "investment" or did you buy them to have fun playing the games?

  19. Bitching works! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Thank you for finally respecting the wishes of my browser and not overriding my selected fonts.

  20. Emulation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    All of these retro products run on emulation. Current emulators on low powered SOCs really can't satisfactory emulate anything much more powerful than an SNES. Even some games on that platform suffer on a Pi3 running retropie

  21. No more... by Chewbacon · · Score: 1

    ...we're done. But you still can't download and emulate.

    This is called: fuck the fans.

    --
    Chewbacon
    The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
  22. Disney vault by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is what's happening here, I know it.

  23. Re:Retropie with raspberry pi better imo +RecalBox by tarokejihi · · Score: 1

    Indeed ! And even more polished is RecalBox : https://www.recalbox.com/

  24. And nothing of value was lost. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We still have higan, and ROM packs are easy enough to find. We don't need their less-accurate for-profit emulators that only play a select fraction of titles from each system's library.

  25. This seems stupid for Nintendo by jonwil · · Score: 1

    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 well.