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+--- Thread: NES Mini appears to be more powerful than the 3DS. (/showthread.php?tid=7000)
NES Mini appears to be more powerful than the 3DS. - Dark Jaguar - 4th November 2016
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/11/nes-mini-teardowns-have-begun-chips-identified/
At first glance, this is very confusing, but economies of scale explain everything. Put another way, factories are very expensive. If they can just repurpose an existing low end mass produced chip without worrying about needing to fully optimize it for games, that saves them a LOT of money compared to the overhead of working out deals to set aside factory space to make specialized chips. At this point, it would cost a lot more money to set up a factory to make the original NES hardware than to use hardware a few factors of 10 more powerful. That also means any dreams of some perfect "repro" setup of higher quality than 3rd parties tend to make are just that.
So, this system is definitely an emulator at heart, but at least a rather full featured emulator. Their biggest shortcoming is the lack of any online ability to buy more NES games from their digital store front. Second biggest is the Wii plug cords (no USB?) and the surprisingly short cables.
NES Mini appears to be more powerful than the 3DS. - A Black Falcon - 5th November 2016
Yeah, that is kind of odd, but they probably just chose the cheapest option that got them enough power, and it happened to be more powerful than some now-aging consoles. Heh.
As for the NES Mini, the concept is good, but I don't think I'll get one; I have most of those games on cart, and while not having to deal with dying old batteries is nice for the ones with saving, I have some in newer releases of some as well (GBA Zelda 1, etc.) to help with that. For people who don't own most of the games already though it looks like a nice thing to have. It's good to see Nintendo finally get into the classic standalone system market, which has of course been quite popular for many years now.
The one issue I see with this system, beyond the un-upgradable game list which is a standard issue with these things, is as you say the very short controller cable. What are you supposed to do, sit two feet in front of your TV? That's absurd! And it's not like it comes with really long HDMI cables either, so I have no idea what Nintendo was thinking. Apparently the cable is even shorter than that on a Wii Classic Controller Pro. You could get a Wii adapter port extension cable, since such things exist, but there's a problem there...
Additionally, in order to quit back to the menu to change games or save a savestate, you need to hit the reset button, which, remember, is on the console. So you really need to be sitting right in front of the console to use is fully, but few people do that! So yeah, big issues there. Hopefully people like it anyway so Nintendo keeps making things like this.
NES Mini appears to be more powerful than the 3DS. - Dark Jaguar - 5th November 2016
If I were designing the thing, I'd use original NES style plugs or USB (preferably original NES plugs to allow use of the full suite of accessories for the NES on this thing). I'd also add a cartridge slot for NES games, to allow me to plug in my old library on the new system. NES emulation has reached a point of perfect hardware simulation, so they shouldn't have to worry about compatibility issues (if they actually had the will to use fan's work online rather than reinventing the wheel). I would love to take my old library and flat out rip it onto such a system, save data and all. They could encode the files so they could "track" anyone who tried to upload their rips online to share. These are all idealized situations.
As it stands, like you I don't really want it for myself. It doesn't really offer me anything I don't already own, but hey, it might make a good gift for kids.