T w e n t y S i d e d
Remember that time Nintendo released a console named after an embarrassing bodily function? Remember that time everybody was laughing at Nintendo for thinking handheld motion controls were the future of console gaming? Remember when Nintendo followed up their hit GameCube console with…two GameCubes taped together?
The “success” of a console can only be judged in context and with understanding; there are very few absolutes. The Wii did some important things, but only lasted five years…half of the hardware generation it was part of. It was replaced with the WiiU, which only lasted five years as well, and was basically a trial run for what would become the “Switch,” Nintendo’s actual next-gen console. The WiiU was technically a “better” system than the Wii, but is generally considered a lesser success. Our interest in the WiiU is because it actually has the ability to play every Nintendo console that preceded its release.
Officially, the WiiU plays WiiU games, Wii games, and anything that could be bought through the Nintendo Online Store. In that regard it followed in the footsteps of the Wii and the DS. Nintendo was becoming increasingly focused on digital purchases over discs or carts. Most console gamers will be familiar with the practice…all of the major manufacturers are pursuing this model. The tricky bit that differs from console to console is *how* the playing of games from older systems is enabled.
“Backward Compatibility” is the concept that a newer gaming system designed to play games made for *that* system can also play games designed for a previous console by the same manufacturer. I will be simplifying this discussion for brevity’s sake (but it still ends up too long), but this is accomplished with through hardware, software, or some combination of the two. We can use the 8-bit, 16-bit, and immediately following generations to illustrate these concepts.
The 16-bit Sega Genesis had most of the chips for a Sega Master System on the circuit board, and even though the cartridges were of different size and shape, Sega chose to include the programming to allow the Genesis to identify and load SMS cartridges, using an adapter to adjust to the right size and shape. In a sense, when you bought a Genesis, you were getting most of a built-in Sega Master System. Conversely, the Super Nintendo couldn’t play Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges. It certainly had the processing capability, it had the proper chips and Nintendo could have enabled processing NES programming, but SNES cartridges were designed with a different size and format, and Nintendo never produced an adapter. You could not plug a NES cartridge into an SNES. Even if you could, it wouldn’t have detected and loaded the cartridge, because the programming of the SNES didn’t allow for it. Only in the last few years has someone, likely through sheer boredom, created a rom hack and adapter that allows the SNES to play *some* NES games.
In the next full generation of hardware, the Nintendo 64 could not accept SNES or NES cartridges. There was an unlicensed, third-party adapter for the N64 that allowed the connection of NES and SNES carts, but these were short-lived and are now rare and expensive. They also only worked with some games. Nintendo clearly did not intend to implement backward compatibility, while Sega did.
However, Sega abandoned this commitment to backward compatibility with the Saturn, which could not play games from any previous Sega console. Probably best to not read too much into this as a decision, because of how badly Sega fumbled their home console business moving on from the 16-bit era to the 32-bit era. Or maybe it was clearly intentional: the Saturn’s “memory card and accessory slot” is *almost*, but *not quite*, the right size and shape for a Genesis cartridge. (The 32X, which was advocated primarily by Sega America, very likely was never even considered when designing the Saturn.) Just as telling is the lack of Sega CD compatibility, as the Saturn didn’t have to make any physical change to accommodate playing CDs…it already did. Sega’s final console, the Dreamcast, also failed to include backward compatibility with the Saturn, although that is even more understandable than the Saturn’s shortcomings. The Dreamcast was rushed to release and ultimately proved an inadequate competitor in the Sixth Generation of consoles; the lack of backward compatibility was the least of its problems.
Before we move on it should be noted the first few iterations of the Sony PlayStation 2 could play Sony PlayStation discs just as if you were inserting them into an original PlayStation. The PlayStation 2 did this, as with the Genesis/SMS, by having the PlayStation main processor included in the system. Likewise, the first two PlayStation 3’s could play PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 1 discs via hardware compatibility: they had a PS2 built in. The third model stripped out some of the PS2 hardware and replaced it with software emulation of one of the PS2’s chips, which reduced compatibility with PS2 games. Subsequent PlayStation 3 consoles retained the ability to play PlayStation One games at the hardware level, but not PS2 games. These later systems, however, *did* retain the ability to play *some* PlayStation 2 games via the “PS2 Classics” game releases. More about that in a minute, because it’s important.
Lastly, Microsoft made a brief foray into limited backward compatibility with original Xbox games on the Xbox 360, but quickly adapted to the “digital edition” model. Even as a majority of 360 games and most Xbox One games can be played on a Series S/X, the process is still tied to activating a compatible digital download after demonstrating your ownership of a game from an older console. 360 backward compatibility actually connects with this discussion; however, and will be back briefly when we talk about retro-Xbox-gaming. Which is really just the Xbox and the 360, let’s be honest.
At this intersection, the hardware compatibility road turns into a disused set of ruts and we take a turn toward software emulation. The terms “software emulation” or “emulation” refer to using a program to replicate the hardware functions of a system for the purpose of running software designed for that system. The benefit of software emulation is that increasingly, “code,” the actual written content of the program, is portable. What you write can be made to run on almost any computer. For instance, you could write a program that “emulates” a Nintendo Entertainment System. The process by which you make that code work as a program running ON any given computer, or console, is called “compiling.” All “compiling” means is you ran your code through another program designed specifically for arranging that code into a particular package or file than can be understood by the computer you want to run it on. So you could write that emulation program on a PC, then “compile” it to run on a PlayStation 3, or a WiiU.
The first Nintendo console that INCLUDED backward compatibility was the Wii, which could play GameCube games. The Wii enabled this backward compatibility by…being a GameCube. Not *having* a GameCube built in on the circuit board…in architecture the Wii was basically two GameCubes running in parallel. So once again this was hardware level compatibility, which is usually the best method of enabling the playing of older games. However, starting with the Wii and the 3DS, Nintendo enabled software emulation of older Nintendo systems. This was called the “Virtual Console” and allowed the playing of NES, SNES, GBA/GBC/GB, and DS games that could be downloaded from the eShop. You couldn’t use your actual cartridge or disc, you had to download a new version. That was because the Wii, for instance, did not have a full, universal, emulator program installed. Each Wii had important parts that enabled that functionality, but the code necessary to run each individual game was part of the digital download. Each title was essentially the programming of the original game “wrapped” within an emulator program that was set up specifically to run THAT game. This would be similar to downloading an old PC game that uses DOSBox from Good Old Games…GOG streamlines the DOSBox configuration for you so that it runs the best it can.
The WiiU inherited the Virtual Console, and added the ability to play GameCube games offered through the eShop, and of course Wii games via their disc, or Wii games downloaded digitally. This gives us a system that, conceptually, more-or-less natively, will play every Nintendo game made up until the current generation console, the Switch. Of course, you have to *pay* for all that, and the WiiU isn’t even a Nintendo-supported system, anymore.
Which is good, because that means you can mess around with it and make it run things it’s not supposed to run without making Nintendo mad. Just don’t try to connect it to the current eShop.
I’m not going to go into detail on how you “hack” or “jailbreak” a console. These words are usually the slang terms that describe the process of using some sort of software updating or system reset technique to load special programming into the startup code of the system, which will then allow the installation of custom programs, such as additional software emulators. This allows your WiiU Controller to look like this:
Older systems, anything before the Wii and DS, are run by emulator programs that load within the Wii Virtual Console. That is, the icons labeled “Nintendo,” “Gameboy Advance,” “Super Nintendo,” and “Genesis” will actually reboot the Wii U and launch it in Virtual Wii mode. Once the console is running like a Wii, it will automatically launch whichever emulator you selected. Within that emulator, you select the proper sub-system if necessary, then the game you wish to play. Sub-systems are a factor with the Gameboy Advance emulator, which runs Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance Games; and the Genesis emulator, which actually runs *ALL* Sega 8-bit and 16-bit systems, including the Game Gear and Sega CD.
The icons that are folders; WiiU, Wii, GameCube, and DS, contain emulator-wrapped games that launch directly. Wii, GameCube, and DS games will all reboot into the Virtual Wii mode, but WiiU games will just launch directly. You can actually do this emulator wrapping, commonly called “injection” on the Virtual Console, for *all* Nintendo systems *and* the TurboGrafx-16 and MSX (MSX computers were made in a partnership between Microsoft and The ASCII Corporation to create a standardized computer for western Pacific Rim countries) computer games. But not Sega games, at least not yet. That is because all those systems were supported as Virtual Console releases naturally, so the “injection” process can be replicated by 3rd party software for games that may not have been officially supported.
The WiiU, sadly cannot effectively emulate Sony games, even the PlayStation One. But that’s where we bring the PlayStation 3 back into play.
Three of the first PlayStation 3’s, the ones commonly referred to as “fat” PlayStation 3’s, had some level of hardware compatibility with not only PlayStation games, but also PlayStation 2 games. Two of these systems, the original 20GB model and the 60GB model, had essentially an entire PS2 built onto the circuit board.
I own an original 60GB PlayStation 3.
It’s not for sale.
It’s also my backup plan.
Because I also own a first generation “slim” PS3. These PlayStation 3’s don’t have PlayStation 2 hardware compatibility, only PlayStation compatibility. However, about the time the “slim” PS3 entered production, Sony was packaging select PS2 games as “PlayStation 2 Classics.” These titles used the same technique as the “injected” digital downloads offered by Nintendo: the game was recompiled with an emulator designed for that specific game. Ergo, you could play these games on a PS3 even if it didn’t have PS2 hardware. Between the PS2 classics programming, and the remnants of hardware compatibility that were still present in all PS3’s until the release of the “super slim” models, you can hack all early PlayStation 3’s to play almost all PS1, PS2, and PS3 games direction from the hard drive.
So…
My “slim” PS3 now looks like this:
Each of those folders, as you can see, contains a list of all PS3, PS2, PS1, and PSP games copied to the system’s hard drive. PSP emulation is a bit iffy, so don’t count on that aspect working for any given game.
To sum up:
A Sony PlayStation 3 *can* play PS3, PS2, and PS1 games natively in the case of original “fat” PS3’s, or through hybrid hardware/software emulation in the case of “slim” PS3’s, especially first-generation “slims.” Yes, there are some exceptions and caveats. It has also been so thoroughly hacked that you can install third party software, such as mature 8-bit and 16-bit emulators. I’ve already done that on my WiiU, though. Also, a hacked PS3 has some ability to play PlayStation Portable games, but don’t throw away your PSP 3000, yet.
A WiiU *can* play WiiU and Wii games natively. Both installed to any particular external hard drive you connect to it, or by just using the disc. It also essentially has built in emulation of all previous Nintendo console and portable systems, although you need a hacked WiiU to really take advantage of this.
So now, I have the ability to play, via a console connected to my Sony 4K HDTV, with native HDMI, every Nintendo system prior to the current generation, every Sony system through the PS3, and every Sega system of the 8-bit and 16-bit generations. Saturn emulation isn’t a mature technology for universal use, and I’m still waiting for my AV cord for my Saturn. But even then, there’s only a few games I want to play on the Saturn…it’s not a full-time system requirement. And the Dreamcast…almost everything great on the Dreamcast had a release, sooner or later, on one of the other contemporary systems.
We’re almost done talking about hardware, folks. Soon it will be time to actually talk about the GAMES!
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Apologies for the late post. Paige did everything on time. Myself and one of our editors both thought the other had scheduled it.
People seem to deride both the Gamecube and the Wii U as commercial flops – but the numbers don’t seem terrible to me, they just look lower than their “competitors” in equivalent eras, or other generations. Still in the many millions. In the same way that the XB1 just sold fewer than the PS4, but surely wasn’t a flop. But then I have no idea how many consoles & games they’d need to sell to make a profit, especially if the consoles themselves are sold at a loss.
I’d say that if the company itself considers it a flop then it’s probably a safe bet to call it a flop, and Nintendo certainly seems to want us to forget the console ever existed.
This is sort of insightful but I feel like there should be a huge asterisk on this.
The Big 3 game companies usually have a pretty good idea on their costs and sales. But they also have a wildly warped perspective assuming maximum investor profit, infinite growth, and the idea that video game consumers are willing to spend increasingly gigantic amounts of money for a game plus “perpetual” costs for Season Passes, etc. forever despite most of these products traditionally having been a ‘one and done’.
Depending on who you get your quotes from, you get realistic albeit vague responses about sales goals OR you get absolutely unrealistic expectations.
I’m thinking about this old Rocketeer quote from https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=21985 and some old Tomb Raider articles :
“Tomb Raider sold a million copies in the first two days, and has sold over 4 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling titles of the year, the most successful game that the franchise had ever had, once again failing to meet sales expectations. All of these titles were considered commercial letdowns by the publisher.”
Yeah, but you picked the worst possible example. Square-Enix is famous precisely for having ridiculous sales expectations that they absolutely never meet.
It is also important to consider the delineations of “financial success,” “volume success,” “marketing success,” and the many other ways you can measure a product. Increasingly important to western financial systems, especially apparently in the worlds that work with IP/Content development, is the ability to show that a product broke even or lost money. This is, I would imagine, mostly an issue when contracts involving dispursements, revenue sharing, distributed ownership, and other production tools that involve the calculation of profits, and is only one way to measure success. I vaguely remember reading a few years ago that the Playstation 2 didn’t start earning a profit until sometime into its second decade…but of course the PS2 was just a tool. The point was to sell the games and the movies, for which profit margins were much higher and, as we’ve just discussed, could be likely be “sold at a loss” while still making billions. Hardware is hardware; it is concrete. IP is much more malleable. Pretty sure I also read at some point that no Xbox and no other Playstation after the 2 *ever* made a profit, technically, but I could be wrong about that. It’s the software and the subscriptions that make the money, not the hardware. Nintendo likely uses a similar financial model now; but I suspect trying to make a profit off of their consoles is why they were always “lesser” in hardware, but used more creative design and programming.
I don’t understand the willingness to spend for subscriptions and season passes, but I have subscribed to MMORPGs before, so I guess it’s not that different. And people, so far, seem willing to keep doing it. I have no doubt there’s a point of maximum returns; I don’t know where anybody is on the curve, though. The “warped” perspectives on profit and growth…those things are pretty much required in our current economic reality. I’ll only speak for the American corporate model, although I suspect much the same is going on in Europe. We are pushing our financial models, and thus the underlying requirements of the corporations they describe, to maximize margin, primarily by finding newer, or more extreme, ways of cutting costs. And it must continue. I assume there is still a market for stable investments, but I perceive an increasing desire for constant growth in more and more industries. In my opinion, it all leads to a big, big collapse, but what do I know?
“I don’t understand the willingness to spend for subscriptions and season passes, but I have subscribed to MMORPGs before, so I guess it’s not that different.”
I feel like there’s a difference between some MMRPGs and some ‘games as service’, but some of them are definitely not providing their rotating fees. I’m confident there was a 20-sided article about this topic very topic (or it kicked off a discussion about it).
Most decent MMORPGs are providing more content and keeping the servers running. The season pass model doesn’t “feel” like it’s offering the same value. Games being online has been something available in some form longer than many people here have been alive, but perpetual fees were never part of the bog standard shooter or even the games with a shelf life didn’t charge cash while modern games that becomes vapor ware in two or three years (or even every year) have the gall to charge monthly/seasonal fees on top of a box price that hovers around triple digits.
I guess the galling thing here is that many of the costs that are seen as standard today were not even dreamed about before. Game publishers have somehow convinced the general public to accept less product for more money and it sometimes feels that nobody remembers a time when that wasn’t the case.
That is a good point; what you’re paying for comes with completely different expectations. It’s honestly something I’m not very familiar with.
Yes, it’s all subjective and has to be judged in the proper context. There are even certain points-of-view from which the Sega Dreamcast was a success, despite its three-year lifespan…it just wasn’t *enough* of a success. There have been, of course, many consoles that were clearly the wrong idea at the wrong time: the Sega 32X comes to mind. Then there’s the whole world of consoles that were attempts to launch a Gameboy competitor. The portable market has demonstrated time and again there’s only room for a couple of portables at a time, and in the era of the smartphone, one of those two slots is already taken.
I’d argue that all three of the portables slots are taken – two by Android, the other by iOS.
Android has the “freemium/ad-supported” market basically sewn up.
Then Android has the smaller portion of the “paid for” market, while iOS has the larger.
I’m a PC peon, mostly because owning a PC I couldn’t justify buying a second system that would only handle games on my limited means (I probably could now but by now I have literally thousands of games in my PC backlog so it doesn’t seem like a practical investment) but even I remember how everybody was making fun of the Switch before its release.
Also, I would like to say that PC has an advantage here but seeing the number of hoops I sometimes had to jump through to get some stuff working, or the issues that they had while working (a lot of older titles outright hate the fact that I have a two monitor setup). Even with GOG there are a few titles that just stubbornly refuse to cooperate though I will sing praise of the company overall.
Man, you’re not overly familiar with Nintendo’s corporate side, are you? This is the same company that killed the 3DS eShop so you could no longer buy games on it but still decided to release a patch months later with the express purpose of killing piracy support.
Nintendo’s idiotic stance in this whole subject has never ceased to make me mad. Yes, I understand being upset at pirates… when they actually affect your bottom line, but when they go after games that cannot be bought legally because you won’t sell them then you have two logical choices: either start selling them again via re-releasing, porting or remastering or just let them be, since they don’t affect you whatsoever. But diverting resources to the express purpose of stopping piracy of games you are not selling and therefore you won’t be losing any money by them being pirated is insane. You’re literally losing more money by wasting time and resources in this whole deal than you would by just letting people play them with no intervention.
So, bit of info on this all emulation thing from the Xbox side. Up until recently the Series S and X were considered to be excellent emulation machines. They had emulation support for a large amount of consoles not just from the Microsoft side, but Sony, Nintendo and Sega too, as well as older systems like Atari and the like. And you didn’t even have to mod or hack the console to use them, which was unprecedented. But recently they’ve started to crack down on this and not only they have removed support for emulation software, but also started to issue bans to people who were using it. I have no evidence of this, but I also have no doubts this comes from pressure from other companies (Nintendo without a doubt, and Sony maybe).
Here’s the thing, though: emulators can still be used with no issue by having the console in developer mode (which is the sort of thing you need to have to turn your console into a dev kit and only requires a one-time payment of like $20). People who use the emulators swear by this procedure, but I don’t know. I suppose there’s something about a console being in developer mode that stops the other companies from complaining, but who’s to say.
An interesting bit is that you can use Xbox emulators with genuinely purchased games to make them run better. You can use the emulator, for instance, to have Red Dead Redemption run at 60 fps, which you can’t with the normal version because it’s capped at 30. Just one more nail in the coffin of Rockstar’s recent RDR underwhelming port announcement.
I didn’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole on what you can get away with on the WiiU. Once you hack most consoles, you have to be wary at best about connecting them back to an official store, or certainly allowing system updates. Hacked WiiU’s seem to be flying under the radar mostly, although Nintendo has come out with firware updates that disable custom installations. The WiiU was affected by the closure of the 3DS shop…until then a hacked WiiU could play 3DS injections same as DS. I haven’t looked into it but I’m assuming 3DS games have to “phone home” when they’re launched.
Sony still regularly updates the PS3’s firmware, but not every update requires a full re-hack…but it’s still better to just set your PS3 to not look for system updates. I have read up on setting an Xbox Series S to developer mode for emulation, but there are a few things that made me turn away from pursuing that path at the moment. Two co-equal things, really. First, I already own every system I’m writing about at the moment; I don’t own any Xbox version past the 360. Second, what I’m most interested in emulating (on a CONSOLE, remember) is the original Xbox and the 360. Original Xbox emulation through XEMU, on the PC, will only play about 40% of the titles I’m interested in…running XEMU on console is more problematic. 360 emulation is in a lesser position. What works, works well in part, but only a handful of titles are mostly glitch-free. I have been intrigued by PSP emulation, however. As I mentioned in this post, PSP “wraps” for the PS3 are iffy, but the PC-based PSP emulator seems a bit more capable, and allegedly has carried over this compatability to the Xbox Series S/X.
On the other hand, I own two PSP 3000’s; and PSP 3000’s have a mini-hdmi connection. And one of my PSP’s is HEN-enabled, so I’m not too terribly motivated on that front. There are a couple of early Final Fantasy games that you could argue enjoyed their best version on the PSP, and at least one of them just will not run on the PS3.
I have started laying the groundwork for more Xbox work. Just as with the Saturn, I strongly suspect my Xbox and 360 are going to be sticking around. I will definitely be returning to Xbox gaming in the future.
I have a WiiU so hearing that with a little work I can get access to a massive game library is nice to know. Finding time to actually play those games, when I already have a massive steam backlog, is another thing entirely.
I’m really enjoying this series!
I’ve been meaning to hack my 3DS and WiiU now that the shops are gone, but I didn’t get around to it yet. Luckily, I haven’t installed the last update on the 3DS yet.
Glad you’ve been enjoying it! Hope you get to keep reading!