WiiGeePeeYou (Hollywood) what IS it ?

SC: DA video, looks like a PS2 port. Not as good as the ss, it seems.

 

DS is making them money. It's not a sagging enterprise that they're sacrificing R&D money from elsewhere to keep afloat. It's the cash cow that's funding everything else going on in the company.

 

There's no need for them to sacrifice anything due to DS, since they're making piles of money on the machine. Also they have several billion dollars in cash they could use if they felt they needed to compete directly with Sony/MS. Money really isn't an issue here, other then the fact that Nintendo like to make lots of it

 

I was referring to DS software, actually.

 

Their handhelds always had a much more minimalist design than even their consoles, the ultimate in cost savings and low power. If they could get away with a system on a chip, they would. Wii almost seems to follow that philosophy more than their console philosophy, of providing a powerful core system no matter what else had to be cut (memory, sound, storage) to make it. Actually, I'd say Wii's design is more in line with the failed design attempts they've kept trying for years, such as the 64dd, and maybe the virtual boy. Ignoring the core technology to focus on gimmicky addons, that ultimately failed due to cost. Well, they've managed to do their gimmicks while keeping costs under control.

 

They're making money on DS as a whole, hardware and software. Also DS software development costs wouldn't even come close to making a very small dent in they're cash reserves (over $7 billion dollars last time I checked). So there's definitely no way that DS could have limit the kind of hardware that Nintendo could put into Wii.

 

Should have never ported it. Xbox version looks way better. It looks like the lighting is not fully implemented. The AI seemed pretty stupid in the video as well. They must have played this thing on very easy. Also, the controls just seem tacked on.

 

You are right nintendo is always cost concious, but you are not right they always have crippeld hardware. The Snes actually is alot faster than what sega had to offer at the time, the n64 is alot more capable than the psx though the design has some (big) flaws and the GC is alot faster than the ps2 and even comes really close to xbox.

Nintendo always used slow hardware for their handhelds because they understand what a handheld should be capable of. A handheld so be small, last long with battery's and it needs to be quick to play on. Ever since the GB their have been alot better handhelds in a technicall aspect but they all failed because they didnt offer what handheldgamers want. That even can be said for PSP, its fast, but doesnt offer what most handheld gamers want. Though the PSP does alot better than any other handheld manifacturers other than nintendo.

 

I always considered the SNES a disappointment given it's time frame though.

Sure, it was better than Genesis, but not by a lot, and it took a while too prove (hell, it's probably still dangerous to make such a statement on B3D! I half expect some Genesis ****** to bite my head off). Considering how much later it came I didn't find essentially parity hardware impressive.

And again, sure to open a whole hornets nest, but I'd consider the GC essential parity hardware to PS2 as well. And N64 I considered superior to PS1 only on paper.

But I'd agree, prior to Wii, Nintendo did always have competitive hi-tech hardware of course, if not necessarily the best.

 

I dont necessarily agree. Sure, they've supposedly got 4-6 billion in cash, but a enterprise like PS3 or 360 will probably be in the hole a couple billion or more before it makes profit back. Can Nintendo truly afford 50%+ of their reserves on something that has the possibility of not panning out and if it fails, may never get back the money lost? Lets just say I am not convinced. I think cutting edge hardware did get too dicey for Nintendo. It gets riskier and more expensive to stay on that cutting edge every generation. Nintendo saw where it was headed. How many hundreds of millions did Sony spend on Cell R&D? On Blu-Ray?

 

not only that, but i think nintendo recognised that if there was a time to change course, now is that time. the installed base of HD displays isn't large enough to impact them yet, and if they can produce an image that looks good enough (however you want to define "good enough") on SDTV/EDTV now is the last chance they are going to get. next generation will have to be HD all the way.

 

You don't have to lose billions just to produce and sell competetive hardware though. After all there's no need to be as powerful as PS3 to be competetive.

My point about being able to compete directly was that they could do so if they thought it was neccesary, I certainly don't feel they should do so. However I do think they should have produced hardware with reasonably competetive graphics. Something that would not have been risky at all.

BTW last time I checked (first quarter financial report AFAIR) there cash level was $7 billion and there liquid assets where around $9 billion.

 

Why not? What else are they going to do with that money? If they wanted they, they could spend $2 billion creating cutting edge hardware at no risk to the company, because though they could lose $2 billion, they're still profitable. Nintendo have chosen to spend less, rather than be forced into it by lack of available funds.

 

Mortal combat? donkey kong? there was quite a big difference.

In fact n64 is (alot) more powerfull than psx. But it was kind of a bitch to program for because of the very small texture memory (thats why n64 look so blurry) and you need to use mircocode to really get the best out of the system but n64 regulary pushed alot more poly's than psx could ever handle.

The same goes for the GC, its alot closer to xbox than it is to ps2. Just look at RE4 on both consoles and see the difference.

I dont think this is really a matter of opinion because it are all facts.

 

none of this is really relevant to Wii's video hardware, but i think you are looking at things too two dimensionaly. too say SNES was "faster" or even more powerfull than Gen isn't really correct. there was wuite a bit about Gen that made it quite a bit better in many regards. in fact, many SNES games suffered from framerate issues where Gen games did not.

the same goes for PSX/N64 and PS2/GC. i could easily pull up examples where sony's hardware outperformed nintendo's, but it all means nothing. the fact is that nintendo launched after sony and delivered a product that wasn't a huge leap above what sony (or sega, as the case may be) had delivered.

as for Wii, nintendo has kept DS's specs under wraps well enough that i believe they will try to do the same with Wii. it's quite possible that we'll never find out exactly what's under the hood, and with good reason. nintendo doesn't want to embarras themselves if their numbers don't line up with the other crowd.

 

Mortal Kombat just proved that SNES had a much better sound chip. I don't recall graphics being much better. I own an original 1992 Mortal Kombat SNES cart, and have sorta recently played the Genesis one. Obviously the Genesis cart has blood instead of "sweat", but otherwise, visually, they aren't much different if I recall correctly. The fact of the matter is Genesis had a Motorola 68000 at 7.6 MHz for a CPU while the SNES had some pathetic 3.5 MHz 65c816 CPU. As a result, the console struggled with nearly every game. Most carts had a co-processor inside to help the machine out. Even Pilotwings, a near-launch title, had a DSP inside. BTW, I don't own a Genesis, just a SNES.

SNES came out later and was barely faster. It had better gfx and audio, but was crippled otherwise.

N64 had better hardware by virtue of being something like 2 yr newer hardware. Still, without an audio DSP, it was far behind what PS1 could put out sonically. Much of N64's extra processing power went to audio playback, be it MIDI, tracker music, PCM, MP3, etc. PS1 also had MPEG decode hardware. For 3D, N64 was ahead in features, but its performance wasn't exactly striking. Later in its life, devs managed some amazing feats with N64, but even those games have strikingly obvious deficiencies (especially audio quality). Obviously the cart thing was just and odd move and has baffled people for years with trying to figure out just what the strategy was there. BTW, I own a N64 not a PS1

Cube was a sweet little machine though. They really lucked out with the hardware people behind that (some N64 engineers there). It was way less powerfull theoretically than Xbox, but could usually leverage its high-efficiency design to equal it.

 

This I totally agree with. I guess Nintendo just wanted to wait for a standard HD setting.

 

I thought it was known that it was due to Nintendo controlling production and getting insane royalty fees.

 

256 vs 64 colors is a pretty significant difference. The SNES was also capable of some pretty cool sprite effects that the Genesis just couldn't do.

You say that like graphics and audio are irrelevant to talking about practical system power. SNES had more graphics features, better sound, more RAM, bigger possible cartridges and a much superior controller in the box. The only thing it was beat in by Genesis was CPU speed.

PS1 vs N64 performance comparisons don't really work, because no PS1 game had to do the texture filtering work that N64 games did. And if we include the machine staring at you while it loads in our average fps computation...

 

Sure, but tons of SNES games (all of them?) have framerate issues courtesy of that pathetic CPU.

Yeah obviously N64 had more features. But, it was also a lot newer technology.

The catch to both SNES and N64 is that they were both newer than their direct competitors, both by at least a year. As such, their inability to outclass their older peers across the board tells volumes about how Nintendo doesn't spend heavy on top-notch tech. It's not like the SNES CPU or N64's software audio are horribly complex issues that were just unable to be solved. Quite the contrary. I wonder if SNES rivals N64 in audio capability?