4th November 2016, 12:21 PM
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/11/ne...dentified/
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.
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.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)