How inaccurate are Nintendo's official emulators? [video]
29 comments
·September 8, 2025bitbasher
Byuu/Near was a pioneer for emulator accuracy and was laughed at most of the time because his emulator (bsnes) consumed a lot of memory and cpu.
gregdeon
What a pioneer. RIP Byuu.
x187463
The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid. It's amusing to consider I was sitting there playing NES games inside a GameCube game rather than playing the GameCube game itself.
Maybe it's licensing or something, but the fact that Nintendo doesn't simply have its entire catalogue available via virtual console is a real shame. The passionate console hacking/reverse engineering community has managed to make near-perfect emulators for everything up to the Wii, and pretty good support for the Switch. Accessing this takes only a few minutes to accomplish on the high seas, but somehow Nintendo takes years to add a few games to their own service.
nemomarx
Nintendo is more likely than most publishers to delay releases to avoid competing with themselves. Their new virtual console strategy is a slow drip feed that won't distract from their main titles or impact sales at all, so a subscription fee.
If they every have a badly selling console like the Wii u again expect them to ramp up emulators to look generous and add a lot of value quickly.
nkrisc
Is the market for Nintendo games really so small that decades-old titles will meaningfully compete with their current ones? Surely the demand for SMB must be minuscule compared to the demand for their modern games among consumers?
Is Breath of the Wild really going to lose sales to Legend of Zelda? Are there really consumers who will only buy one or the other?
nemomarx
Not to NES games, but it might distract from news about it (minor effect on sales) and their emulation catalogue is now up to GameCube games. So the question is whether a five or ten dollar copy of wind Waker could distract from an 80 dollar tears of the kingdom.
They also have more marginal games - captain toad or whatever - sold at the same price as their big titles. Those seem pretty vulnerable imo.
dole
For a comparison, try to find a good legal version of Namco Pac-Man on mobile that isn't locked under a Namco Museum Vol. 1 IAP. The Namco Museum app itself is "free" and you get 1942, but have to buy the others.
null
DSMan195276
FWIW licensing is definitely part of why some 'obvious' stuff is still missing, Nintendo doesn't own the rights to games that they didn't develop themselves (generally speaking).
Ex. We'll probably never see the first six FF games on Switch Online, Square Enix is just unlikely to agree to that for a variety of reasons.
HelloUsername
> The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid
Sounds similar to Donkey Kong 64 (1999) that had an arcade machine inside a level that let you play the original Donkey Kong (1981): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwPRHdhhVK8
> Nintendo doesn't simply have its entire catalogue available via virtual console
Not entirely the same, but Nintendo does offer a lot of their classic games through the Nintendo Switch Online membership: https://www.nintendo.com/us/online/nintendo-switch-online/cl...
krs_
> Sounds similar to Donkey Kong 64 (1999) that had an arcade machine inside a level that let you play the original Donkey Kong (1981)
Interesting tidbit about that is that it was carefully recreated from scratch by Rare, rather than being emulated, because Nintendo doesn't have/own the rights to the original source code. They originally had Ikegami Tsushinki do the programming for the arcade version, who later claimed ownership of the source code and eventually won the lawsuit.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-secret-history-of...
ndiddy
Nintendo and Ikegami settled out of court. I'm assuming Nintendo got the rights to the arcade version as part of the settlement, as the arcade version of Donkey Kong got a release on Switch as part of Arcade Archives. https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/arcade-archives-d...
nemomarx
What I think they're pointing out is that the Wii, Wii u, and 3ds did have the virtual console and basically the full back catalogue available on it. It took the lifetime of the switch for the new service to get a comparable line up.
0points
> The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid.
The nesticle emulator blew my mind as a kid.
kingkawn
The emulator community may be why it is not potentially profitable for Nintendo, since most of the nostalgia market has already been served for free
thrance
Yup, they're sitting on millions of hours of work because of some nefarious business logic. Probably they determined that making old games available would negatively impact the sales of their new products, at least enough to be a problem. Whatever the reason, a shame.
jasonjayr
This discussion from about 9 months ago explains it:
AndrewOMartin
Id software open sourced the Doom engine, so anyone could play custom levels or enjoy community assets without directly benefiting Id. That's why Doom, and by extension Id software, disappeared so swiftly into obscurity.
tokai
But Doom hasn't disappeared into obscurity at all.
maxlin
Cool video! I do wonder though, how much cases there were those arbitrary compatibility quirks being sacrificed for performance. I could imagine a shoddy job trying to support everything axing performance.
wk_end
To some extent this is probably the case, especially with that GBA emulator. An NES emulator for the GBA isn't quite a miracle but it would definitely make the poor little 16MHz ARM in there sweat.
It was probably only semi-deliberate, though. Even more than for hobbyist emulators, the point of these was to play games - and in these cases, some specific games too. And for most games, most of these inaccuracies are going to be pretty imperceptible in practice.
So if I were the poor Japanese salaryman entrusted with making this emulator, I'd start by implementing the NES hardware in the simplest, most obvious fashion, and only go further where necessary to get these particular games running. It just so happens that, in emulation, more often than not "simplest and most obvious" also usually translates into fastest.
helqn
This should be an article, not a video. You have a video which is practically all text. wtf!!
brettermeier
You might not know, but: Audiobooks are extremely popular, even though printed versions exist...
mrlatinos
Believe it or not, most movies, television, videos begin with a text script.
MVG (Modern Vintage Gamer) has covered this in a number of videos, his stuff is excellent - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou66ppC8stI