Post by leunas on Dec 4, 2006 17:50:05 GMT -5
Given the rampant online piracy of Nintendo's games, should be no surprise that they have constructed significant roadblocks to prevent emulation of their last three systems: the GameCube, the Nintendo DS, and the Wii. While the GameCube used a proprietary medium, the Nintendo DS and Wii have much more effective deterrents: their unique interfaces.
The transition from the Atari 2600 joystick to the PlayStation analog pad (two sticks, D-pad, left and right shoulder triggers) not only focused the industry on a fairly standard interface but ensured that the previous generation's controls were mostly a subset of the next generation's. That progression also permitted emulation of earlier systems on newer systems with a minimum of fuss. If you want to emulate a SNES on an Xbox, the button mapping is natural. The Game Boy Advance could emulate NES games and the Nintendo DS can emulate the SNES, no mucking with buttons required. For years those same PlayStation-style pads have been available for home computers as well.
That process makes emulation both possible and attractive.
While emulation of games with nonstandard interfaces has been done before -- we have commercial emulations of the arcade games Paperboy and Star Wars: The Arcade Game and Marble Madness and 720 degrees -- the compromise made to fit a different controller is always unsatisfying.
And so, with the introduction of the Nintendo DS touchscreen and the Wii's spatial controller we see that Nintendo has made emulation piracy far less attractive, albeit still possible. Will we see people trading Wii games over the internet in 10 years as they do now with SNES ROMs? Perhaps, but it will probably mean that you will have to have a Wii controller -- or a knock off controller. Anything less will be unsatisfying. And in 10 years you can probably bet that Nintendo will offer a relatively cheap and easy alternative on their next system -- which will work with the Wii controller out-of-the-box and offer Wii games for download for a few dollars. With appropriately priced hardware and downloads, Nintendo will keep people in the Nintendo store and off the ROM sites.
The same could easily be true for the Nintendo DS. If the DS were the beginning of another cycle of incremental improvements roughly paralleling the progression from Game Boy to Game Boy Color to Game Boy Advance then we may not see another radical evolution of the Nintendo handheld line for another 15 years. Despite Nintendo's claims to the contrary, the DS appears to be its future for the handheld, not the Game Boy.
There will always be the hardcore folks who refuse to pay. They're a sad fact of life. Someone will hack drivers to make the Wii controller work on an emulator running under Windows or even on a GNU/Linux-enabled console. And certainly you can emulate a Nintendo DS with a mouse. I bet it isn't nearly as entertaining to play Elite Beat Agents by clicking a mouse, but that won't stop some people from doing it anyway.
However as appears to be happening with music, most people will choose to buy their games instead of pirate them if there are enough blocks to casual emulation piracy and a reasonably priced legitimate alternative. That's Nintendo's goal, and I think they've made the right moves to attain it.
curmudgeongamer.com/2006/12/how-nintendo-is-solving-its-piracy.html
The transition from the Atari 2600 joystick to the PlayStation analog pad (two sticks, D-pad, left and right shoulder triggers) not only focused the industry on a fairly standard interface but ensured that the previous generation's controls were mostly a subset of the next generation's. That progression also permitted emulation of earlier systems on newer systems with a minimum of fuss. If you want to emulate a SNES on an Xbox, the button mapping is natural. The Game Boy Advance could emulate NES games and the Nintendo DS can emulate the SNES, no mucking with buttons required. For years those same PlayStation-style pads have been available for home computers as well.
That process makes emulation both possible and attractive.
While emulation of games with nonstandard interfaces has been done before -- we have commercial emulations of the arcade games Paperboy and Star Wars: The Arcade Game and Marble Madness and 720 degrees -- the compromise made to fit a different controller is always unsatisfying.
And so, with the introduction of the Nintendo DS touchscreen and the Wii's spatial controller we see that Nintendo has made emulation piracy far less attractive, albeit still possible. Will we see people trading Wii games over the internet in 10 years as they do now with SNES ROMs? Perhaps, but it will probably mean that you will have to have a Wii controller -- or a knock off controller. Anything less will be unsatisfying. And in 10 years you can probably bet that Nintendo will offer a relatively cheap and easy alternative on their next system -- which will work with the Wii controller out-of-the-box and offer Wii games for download for a few dollars. With appropriately priced hardware and downloads, Nintendo will keep people in the Nintendo store and off the ROM sites.
The same could easily be true for the Nintendo DS. If the DS were the beginning of another cycle of incremental improvements roughly paralleling the progression from Game Boy to Game Boy Color to Game Boy Advance then we may not see another radical evolution of the Nintendo handheld line for another 15 years. Despite Nintendo's claims to the contrary, the DS appears to be its future for the handheld, not the Game Boy.
There will always be the hardcore folks who refuse to pay. They're a sad fact of life. Someone will hack drivers to make the Wii controller work on an emulator running under Windows or even on a GNU/Linux-enabled console. And certainly you can emulate a Nintendo DS with a mouse. I bet it isn't nearly as entertaining to play Elite Beat Agents by clicking a mouse, but that won't stop some people from doing it anyway.
However as appears to be happening with music, most people will choose to buy their games instead of pirate them if there are enough blocks to casual emulation piracy and a reasonably priced legitimate alternative. That's Nintendo's goal, and I think they've made the right moves to attain it.
curmudgeongamer.com/2006/12/how-nintendo-is-solving-its-piracy.html