Thread by @LuigiBlood

"as the example of Super Mario Bros. on Wii Virtual Console highlighted" UGH.......... so I have to explain again?

https://twitter.com/nintendolife/status/1378724048595738624

Nintendo hired a contributor who worked on sound emulation for iNES in the late 90s. Tomohiro Kawase, aka Kawasedo, was responsible for the NES emulator in Animal Crossing on N64 / GCN.

Animal Crossing already included NES ROMs with iNES headers... except it also had FDS dumps... which are oddly enough, not in the public *.fds format as we know it.

I think this is a case of the developer just using standards that were considered good enough for the time. And the gigaleaks only proves that Nintendo is probably the japanese game company that does the most work on archival.

Reminder that last year, we have literally master files of NES & GB/C games, and master FDS dumps, which the Zelda master couldn't be dumped properly and had to be done through the Disk Writer cartridge in 2016... by Kawasedo himself for the 30th Zelda 1 anniversary.

Those master NES files do NOT have the iNES header and are seperate PRG and CHR files, and we also have tools leaked that are specifically aimed for making iNES & TNES (3DS) ROM files.

HOWEVER... sometimes there are slip ups and I think it's just because of timing and logistics. I heard on NES NSO there was a bad dump of Yoshi on NES. It got replaced with the proper master in a later update.
It just might be because they were pressed in time.

However, archival is one thing, but barely anything gets to be accessible and playable to the public, there's still a huge point to be made here, of course.

I still am very much angry at Nintendo for not doing enough. I'm also very angry about remakes as a whole being more of a thing and essentially preventing the originals to be accessible.
In some cases, I wish emulation was chosen over ports, even.

However I don't like using plain misinterpretations to bring a point just for the sake of it.

The whole Super Mario Bros. thing is literally just a developer using standards that he worked with, the file being identical is not necessarily meaning anything.

The file being identical just means that the ROM was dumped just right on both sides... it doesn't mean where it came from.

Except if the iNES header contains "DiskDude" in reserved space, that would be pretty dang clear to me it's a pirated ROM to me.

When it comes to source material, the gigaleak brought:
-N64 SDK source code
-a bunch of first party SNES source codes and even development assets
-some N64 source codes, and more from there.

I don't doubt since the 90s that Nintendo did their diligent job as best they could.

And Virtual Console and SNES Mini also brought revisions of certain titles that literally never came out in the past such as how Panel de Pon is actually a later version of the game with bug fixes and improvements.

The true challenge about retro rereleases is how they're on the same market as new games, and most of the time, people will look at new games and buy them. So I wouldn't be surprised if Virtual Console was never really that popular.

But this is a problem no one has ever tried to solve, as much as Microsoft is pushing BC, that's one thing, but games aren't necessarily pushed again.

I definitely feel Nintendo's way of handling it has huge potential with a retro game pass. But that's not going to be enough.

And NES Remix was successful enough to get a sequel. There are insanely popular indie games that look retro too.

Clearly there's something to be done, and Nintendo is supposed to be somewhat of a fan of reusing old things to bring new things.

That however means effort, but making games is already effort by itself, and I don't see why they cannot push emulation more, and possibly features that unofficial emulators have but could be a lot better on official ones.

Unofficial emulators are made in mind to work with as many games as possible, but also the unknown. This means UX cannot easily be as controlled and easy to use in a bunch of odd cases.

Official emulator development for the public have the chance that it knows what to support, and this kinda changes a lot on UX design and be even easier to use than actual emulators on PC or RetroArch which is still a piece of shit

I think I went too much on things so I think my point is getting across regardless.