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NERD behind Nintendo Classic Mini: NES emulation (i.e. it's not the Wii U emulator)

Shiggy

Member
Good news to those who were afraid the Nintendo Classic Mini: NES would use the same NES emulator the Wii U uses. The NES emulator and operating system was created by Paris-based Nintendo European Research and Development (NERD) from scratch.

It is not the first foray into software emulation for NERD. The studio was already responsible for the DS emulation on Wii U, making it only the third team outside of NCL working on Virtual Console emulation (the others are NST for N64 emulation on Wii and M2 for GBA emulation on Wii U).

It's still unclear whether this is purely a NERD product. With a "Made in Germany" on the controller (edit: this seems to have been misrepresented by IGN), and a lack of Japanese release (edit: the Famicom Mini was announced only after this thread) as well as the software side being handled by NERD, it seems at least plausible. NCL may have still been involved on the hardware side. NERD seems to have quite some leeway and is well respected at NCL. Right now, they are also working on software for NX.


NERD's previous works include:
- development of "super-stable 3D"/face tracking system for New Nintendo 3DS
- enabling support for digital releases of Wii games on Wii U eShop
- video player for the Wii U internet browser
 

phanphare

Banned
NERD's previous works include:
- development of "super-stable 3D"/face tracking system for New Nintendo 3DS
- enabling support for digital releases of Wii games on Wii U eShop
- video player for the Wii U internet browser

oh wow, that's an excellent track record

the new 3ds's 3d is great and the wii u's internet browser is a beast for streaming content
 

Raysoul

Member
NERD's previous works include:
- development of "super-stable 3D"/face tracking system for New Nintendo 3DS
- enabling support for digital releases of Wii games on Wii U eShop
- video player for the Wii U internet browser

Strong portfolio. I wonder how big will they contribute to the NX.
 

L~A

Member
NERD's previous works include:
- development of "super-stable 3D"/face tracking system for New Nintendo 3DS
- enabling support for digital releases of Wii games on Wii U eShop
- video player for the Wii U internet browser

That's pretty damn interesting, always wondered what they were doing at NERD.

About the emulator, I wonder if it'll be used outside the NES Mini?
 

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
Pretty much anyone other than the internal VC emulation team seems like great news.
 

georly

Member
These guys are seemingly the true heroes behind nintendo's hardware. Hope they have a heavy hand helping out on NX and weren't occupied by this thing for too long.

Hope their efforts apply to NX for VC, at least.
 

Shiggy

Member
What's the source?

This tweet by the company's Chief Production Officer.


Ok, not really that. Here's more:
screenshot2016-08-26abysc2.png

screenshot2016-08-26a0ssn2.png



Old news. DrTre81 made a video about this weeks ago.

Who? Cannot find any reports on this on Google.
 
These guys are seemingly the true heroes behind nintendo's hardware. Hope they have a heavy hand helping out on NX and weren't occupied by this thing for too long.

Hope their efforts apply to NX for VC, at least.

Yea, I'm also hoping they were working on NX VC alongside of this. It would make sense and it would be nice for Nintendo to launch with a robust VC ready. At least I can hope.
 

AdanVC

Member
Thank god! Now I'm actually interested of getting one even if I already know of memory all the games will be included. Cannot stand the vaseline smear look of the NES games on the Wii U : /
 

Peltz

Member
Oh god!!, so its emulation not a clone hardware ( FPGA)...that means input lag then!!!!
If you thought this was clone hardware, I don't really know what to say. That would make no sense and be prohibitively expensive for Nintendo's target audience with this device.

Edit: DP
 
If you thought this was clone hardware, I don't really know what to say. That would make no sense and be prohibitively expensive for Nintendo's target audience with this device.

Edit: DP
This. There was always literally a 0% chance it was anything but pure emulation. I don't understand how anyone thought otherwise.
 

asagami_

Banned
Kinda interesting is a new emulator.

I wonder if the NX virtual console is going to be the long promised dream machine that will play everything Nintendo game.
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
That's pretty damn interesting, always wondered what they were doing at NERD.

About the emulator, I wonder if it'll be used outside the NES Mini?

Would be a complete waste of time if it wasn't. Someone ought to open a Mini up and see what kind of CPU architecture it uses, might hint at the NX ;P
 

Retrobox

Member
Absolutely based NERD adding another bullet point to their resume.

Of course the quality hasn't been proven yet, but the track record leaves me confident
 

Tain

Member
Here's hoping these dudes know how to make a sick CRT shader and are as good at mitigating lag as M2 seems to be.
 

Koren

Member
When I saw they were recruiting, I was interested... But deciding to leave a "safe", interesting, and well-paid job for something probably interesting but not much more is hard...

But they're indeed doing nice things there.

Post-processing filters.
Not that important, but is this really a post-processing filter?

I would have thought that the culprit lie in the NES palette > RGB color conversion. I don't understand why you would do post-processing to darken colors when you already need a color conversion at the heart of the emulator, seeing how colors work in NES.

Whatever...
 

Koren

Member
This. There was always literally a 0% chance it was anything but pure emulation. I don't understand how anyone thought otherwise.
I'm wondering whether hardware emulation* could be a solution for this kind of stuff, though... That doesn't seem to be that a strange idea.

* As in FPGA and the like.
 

Regiruler

Member
Face-tracking is shit by nature even if the implementation is as best as it can feasibly be. The refresh is far too distracting. I suppose that could be considered a plus.
 

Shiggy

Member
Face-tracking is shit by nature even if the implementation is as best as it can feasibly be. The refresh is far too distracting. I suppose that could be considered a plus.

The face tracking works extremely well. What are you talking about? Ever since upgrading to the N3DS, I'm using the 3D functionality.
 

LewieP

Member
Those three products/features NERD shipped previously are all really solid. Didn't know they were behind them until now.

Although I thought M2 did most of the 3DS VC stuff, not just GBA (which technically aren't VC I don't think...)
 
Do NERD use any open source code from freely available emulators out
Not even a tiny chance. Besides, Nintendo has all of the NES documentation on-hand and numerous in-house NES emulators to work from. No reason to use code from hobbyists.

Retro actually tried to use an open source SNES emulator to include Super Metroid with Metroid Prime (they actually had the emulator ported and running on GCN) but Nintendo told them they absolutely could not use it, and Retro wasn't going to spend the time and effort making their own.
 
Nintendo has an history of hiring hobbyists to make emulators for them. They had one of the iNES contributors at the time for the Game Boy emulator for N64, as far as I know, the guy is still working at Nintendo. There's also the developer of Nesticle who made the SNES emulator for GameCube.
 
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