I don't understand this. Why would they worry about recompilers when they have the specs of their previous system, especially when it comes to software emulation?
How does "having specs" negate recompilation? You can't just run things natively by having a compatible CPU (and Cortex-A9, if they're using that, isn't 100% compatible with the ARM9 used btw), you need more hardware support. ARM doesn't really have support for true virtualization either, and it's not a good fit for more embedded/real time platforms like DS anyway.
Also, you seem to be comparing feature sets over the accuracy of emulation, and I don't think their's anything to worry about with regards to the latter considering how spot-on Virtual Console's is. (I don't think the Zelda bonus disk counts, considering those were being streamed-off a disk, and the data transfer rate is nothing compared to having it all run off the Wii's NAND.)
Virtual Console is a poor comparison. With VC Nintendo has the luxury of hacking the emulation for each release in order to get things right. And this is something they do invoke regularly, there are all kinds of hacks in their emulators. They also have the luxury of not releasing anything that they can't emulate well. With 3DS they'd need to get a general purpose emulator right and it'd need to have as high compatibility as possible (btw, compatibility != accuracy)
VC is moot anyway because the performance deltas between anything it emulates and the Wii itself are larger than the deltas between DS emulation and whatever 3DS hardware will be. Grossly so except in the case of N64, which like most other N64 emulators out isn't really emulating all the N64 hardware.
And I just don't buy the whole "have lots of money, can't hire passion" statements; most of the N64 emulators out there can't even get to display the filter/buffer effects right while the ones that run on the VC's can.
Yeah, whatever, see my above comments on VC. Hardly a level playing field when they can fine tune the emulator per-game and
modify the ROMs themselves. SNES games on VC don't even emulate the audio chip, they're modified to store raw samples.
That aside, saying that the industry is better at console emulation than enthusiasts based on a few cherry picked examples shows a pretty deep ignorance of what has actually been done on both sides.
But again, this isn't about the N64. I see no point why DS backwards emulation would be so terribly difficult. And besides, what keeps them from just minituraizing the current DS chipset and putting it in along the new model?
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I didn't say "it's so terribly difficult", I looked at the three different methods of achieving backwards compatibility and identified pros/cons and reasoning towards the likelihood of Nintendo pursuing it.
There's software emulation, which would be very difficult to
get perfect (or good enough). If you don't understand this then you don't know enough about what it means to emulate a DS in software. Compare the backwards compatibility in XBox 360 and PS3 Slim with Wii. There's an obvious compromise at hand with those platforms.
There's redundant hardware, which is an option Nintendo has specifically avoided (at compromise to their overall design, IMO). This is probably because it's a waste of resources. For whatever reasons, Nintendo doesn't like including significant amounts of hardware that exist just for backwards compatibility, instead opting to build their new hardware around augmenting the old.
Which is the third option. It would be a design compromise - the main point of the original post I made in this thread - but aside from using less resources and being consistent with what Nintendo has been doing it'd have a few other advantages. One would be that it'd be much easier to migrate tools and libraries. Another would be that it'd be much easier for developers to transition (see the really short transition guide for Wii as a reference), which would give them a quicker leg up on getting the first really big titles out the door, especially when developers will have to adapt to doing things that fit well with 3D displays.
Look at the timeline between announce and release for the following:
GBA - "Project Atlantis" was first revealed 5 years before release, with more concrete details about 2 years prior
DS - November 11, 2003 to November 21, 2004 - 1 year
PSP - May 2003 to December 12, 2004 - 1.75 years
While 3DS is looking to come out around 8 months after announce.
Yes, DS hardware is small by Tegra 2 standards. And Tegra 2 is probably expensive by Nintendo standards. At this point we don't actually know what's going to be used, deal with nVidia or not.
Nintendo may go with high end 3D (by handheld standards), but it's really not the sure thing that some are making it out to be. They've already proven that that isn't really central to their overall game plan, especially in the handheld arena where they're trying to save power. DS has been very successful with pretty meager graphics, with a lot of its bigger titles even being predominantly 2D. 3DS is introducing yet another Nintendo Gimmick, but has no official hype of setting a new standard for graphical capabilities. And yet people are really certain that Nintendo will roll out a handheld that even surpasses their current console. I just wouldn't be so certain.
