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There are reasons Nintendo has burned a ton of goodwill to the point where it made the difference in my not buying a Switch. But buying a game on one console ge

by gdulli 10y ago

There are reasons Nintendo has burned a ton of goodwill to the point where it made the difference in my not buying a Switch. But buying a game on one console generation and having it work on the next has rarely been the norm. Nintendo did decide at one point to pour a lot of separate money into developing the Wii U game for the Switch as well. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to make a game work on multiple consoles. And unfortunately when you buy a copy digitally you also lose the ability to sell or trade it, so I never do that. I had the opposite experience with Apple. My iPhone 3 got unacceptably slow when the next major version of the OS came out. There were games/apps I couldn't use anymore unless I wanted to do a factory reset to the older OS. That was after only 2 years. I got off the platform a long time ago and haven't had that problem since.

logfromblammo 10y ago
You can play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games on a Game Boy Advance or SP or Micro, or even a SNES or GameCube with special hardware accessories. You can play Game Boy Advance games on a Nintendo DS or DS Lite. You can play GameCube games on a Wii, and Wii games on a Wii U. There was a specific effort to include hardware from the previous generation in the next, for at least one step of backward compatibility. The GBA had a separate Z80 in addition to the ARM7TDMI to do that. The DS and DS Lite had dual processors and dual cartridge slots, but the DSi ditched the GBA slot. Thus, those were technically capable of running ROM images of GBA games if you found a way to load them and start the ARM7 processor in the correct mode. The 3DS can, of course, play DS and DSi cartridges, having both ARM11 and ARM9 processors. So it is apparent that Nintendo has supported backward compatibility by essentially packaging two hardware systems into one box. That isn't what I would do, but that's what they did. They burned goodwill with me for not writing decent SDKs for their hardware, such that about every game has to do a roll-your-own reach into the hardware. Which doesn't translate to the next generation of hardware. Stupid. Just write a damned SDK, and make the 3rd party dev shops hate you less. I always keep my old cartridges, even though most of my old hardware is no longer capable. It's my proof of license, for when I download the ROMs to play on emulators.

by gdulli 10y ago

logfromblammo 10y ago

You can play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games on a Game Boy Advance or SP or Micro, or even a SNES or GameCube with special hardware accessories. You can play Game Boy Advance games on a Nintendo DS or DS Lite. You can play GameCube games on a Wii, and Wii games on a Wii U. There was a specific effort to include hardware from the previous generation in the next, for at least one step of backward compatibility. The GBA had a separate Z80 in addition to the ARM7TDMI to do that. The DS and DS Lite had dual processors and dual cartridge slots, but the DSi ditched the GBA slot. Thus, those were technically capable of running ROM images of GBA games if you found a way to load them and start the ARM7 processor in the correct mode. The 3DS can, of course, play DS and DSi cartridges, having both ARM11 and ARM9 processors. So it is apparent that Nintendo has supported backward compatibility by essentially packaging two hardware systems into one box. That isn't what I would do, but that's what they did. They burned goodwill with me for not writing decent SDKs for their hardware, such that about every game has to do a roll-your-own reach into the hardware. Which doesn't translate to the next generation of hardware. Stupid. Just write a damned SDK, and make the 3rd party dev shops hate you less. I always keep my old cartridges, even though most of my old hardware is no longer capable. It's my proof of license, for when I download the ROMs to play on emulators.