Nintendo and ARM?

Just something I've been thinking about for a while.
What if nintendo got a jump start on Valve and created the unified gaming experience themselves.

I fully expect to see steam on mac/windows/linux/android within a few years with a fully unified gaming experience in the living room, the commute and the pc. But what if Nintendo jumped the gun.

They're consolidating their home and mobile console development teams into one big team.

What if they created a scalable gaming platform. One ARM based home console and one ARM based handheld. That both use the same exact development kit. Games are automatically scaled to run on both devices.

Game saves stored in the cloud and one purchase of the game which works on both devices. Their new home console would always have games. And people who prefer playing on the couch might also buy the handheld since they would already have games for it.

Add to that proper monetization of ROMS. like apple did with mp3s. Made them cheap and convenient and people will buy them rather than pirate. Especially if they are seemlessly available for play on both the tv and the handheld for one purchase.

Anyway, that's my Nintendo vision/rant. Whats your thoughts?

I am not fully in tune with ARM processors, but do they have the graphical scalability that the current generation (x86 for ps4/xb1/ppc for wiiu) have? I just can't imagine it happening as the move away from x86 would also make it even less likely for ports as the other two have taken that route.

Janus67 said:

I am not fully in tune with ARM processors, but do they have the graphical scalability that the current generation (x86 for ps4/xb1/ppc for wiiu) have? I just can't imagine it happening as the move away from x86 would also make it even less likely for ports as the other two have taken that route.

Click to expand...

The way I see it, with the Wii and the WiiU, Nintendo kind of puts graphics second, so they may be perfectly OK trading GPU performance for the selling point of buying one game and having it work between a handheld and a traditional console. You're right about developers/publishers not being too eager to move things over though. There may be a few exceptions (I'm going to get blasted for mentioning that which must not be named, but EA already has a decent selection on Google Play), but for a platform that's already missing out on quite a few big name titles, that could be a problem.

It's true that nintendo put graphics second, but that could also be seen as a faltering point by a decent population of the gaming community. Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying my WiiU; SM3DW, Pikimin3, and Zelda: WWHD all look excellent, in their own stylized way, but the console just doesn't have the processing capabilities that the other two do to handle the multi-platform blockbusters to their scale. I personally would not be bothered if Nintendo invested the money spent on creating a gimmicky controller into better hardware capability and just used "normal" controller (pro-controller-style) and just had games entirely made that way. This way other publishers/developers wouldn't have to spend excess resources not only porting to a different architecture, but also adding "value" by taking advantage of whichever gimmick Nintendo came out with this time.

I think traditional nintendo games have been less demanding on the graphics front than playstation and xbox titles and still outsold them both. (Talking wii game sales.) I think nintendo tried to get some of the hardcore console gaming audience back with the more powerful WiiU hardware but ultimately they couldn't provide a killer feature. It's just a ds on your tv. Nintendo needs to get with the digital distribution model first. Then they need to create a killer feature. This I think would be one they are uniquely positioned to do provide. Android and linux are not yet in a position to become pc's scalable little brother. But nintendo could create a unified development platform for both home and mobile next year if they really wanted to.

EDIT: It also actually doesn't need to be ARM. It could be done with medium power x86 cpu in the home console and a low power x86 in the handheld. That would make it easier to port from pc/other consoles.

Not to make this into a 'what I would like to see Nintendo do' thread, but for the digital distribution (which is a huge mess because of the individual accounts that are linked to hardware, etc). I think they would do very well if they had a $10/mo (or something) for all access to the VC library, now they would actually have to have those games available of course as well. How the VC libraries are different between Wii and WiiU is just stupid.

Yeah the VC system needs an overhaul. While a subscription would be nice they could also make them cheap and portable. With a homogeneous hardware platform you could play your snes games on the big screen or you handheld, with cloud saves. All tied to an account. Hell they could let you log into your account from a pc and play the snes games in a web browser if they ever wanted to expand outside of their own hardware.

Nobody would care.

That's what would happen if Nintendo developed such a system.

Nintendo is still the "Disney" of the video game industry... but that industry has grown up. It now includes people looking to play games on the way to work, and about a billion office workers looking for something to play while they're sitting on the toilet at work.

Now there are still grown-ups out there that like to play with Mickey Mouse dolls... just like there are still at least a million or two people in the world that love Mario so much they'd even go so far as to actually buy a Wii U... but that's such a tiny part of the market that Sony and Microsoft don't even consider Nintendo real competition anymore.

Furthermore Nintendo wouldn't develop such a system and... further still... if they did: It would suck.

I mean let's be realistic here: A cloud-based networking infrastructure brought to you by nintendo?

I'd trust Gamespy before I trusted Nintendo (and that's saying a LOT.)

Nintendo should simply stop being STUPID and release a cheap system with maybe a last-generation bluray drive... so that, at the very least, people could use it as a slightly more expensive bluray player... and there's also a big market for children's tablets... so they could make like a 10 inch or 7 inch tablet (using Android if they were smart...) and release old Wii and Gamecube games for it for around a buck a piece.

Nintendo has no business selling any piece of hardware for 300 bucks because they haven't designed anything in the past 10 years or so that's worth that much. I think it's time for them to finally take a hit in terms of making profits on every system sold (since they aren't actually selling any) in favor of getting back a user base that isn't the laughing stock of the industry.

If the came up with a 100 dollar tablet and a 150 dollar HD home system that could play movies, everyone would buy one. Because at that price point they wouldn't have a reason NOT to buy one. (I've been extremely critical of post-gamecube Nintendo, but even I bought a Wii back when they were still "impossible" to find and I found one for 150.)

I actually hooked my Wii back up this weekend and me and the lady had a lot of fun with it. Playing Super Mario Brothers Wii coop.

It's just such a pain to look at. Super Mario World on a SNES emulator on the HTPC looks 1000x better than SMBWii does on a dedicated console...

Why would you release a console in 2006 that only outputs 480p video? All the games have low polygon counts, blank single colored textures, basically n64 graphics... Why can't you run n64 graphics at 720p at least when you know that 90%+ of your userbase is gonna be using an HDTV to play ?

I think the n64-style graphics look GREAT... SM Galaxy and Metroid Prime looked great.. when I had the wii hooked up to my CRT TV. But they look like absolute garbage on any non-interlaced screen.

I don't have much hope for the future of a company that would overlook something so huge. The Wii U was a band-aid solution to a problem that never should have existed. If the original wii had AT LEAST 720p output, they never would have had to make a Wii U. They could have just released that goofy tablet controller as a Wii add-on if they wanted to.

I already spent several hundred dollars on my Wii and I'm not going to do it again on a Wii U. And there's probably millions more with my mindset.

If Nintendo wants any more of my money, they will have to offer a product that's radically different from their current line-up.

wii graphics and n64 graphics look nothing alike to me.
probably because most of the games were 240i on n64.

if you get component cables for the wii its a major improvement. that was the first thing I bought, I didn't wait till official ones came out I bought the first set I could.
interesting thing I remember, when Nintendo sent out review units one of the reviewers made note of there being a 720p option but with out any component cables there was no way to make use of it, shortly before public launch an update removed that option...

I always thought that was odd

Niku-Sama said:

wii graphics and n64 graphics look nothing alike to me.
probably because most of the games were 240i on n64.

if you get component cables for the wii its a major improvement.

Click to expand...

I bought the component cables too, it was definitely an improvement, but still bad. It should have been 720p at least.

High polygon counts with very simple textures and effects is the shared style I was referring to between n64 and wii. It's a style they use in pretty much every first party title.

My Radeon 9600 pro that I got in 2003 for like $130 could play any 2006 game (battlefield 2 etc) at 1280x1024 which is what, 4.26 times the resolution of the Wii which came out nearly 4 years later at $250? They basically released a gamecube with motion controllers and called it a day. It looks gorgeous on my old CRT but total garbage on any LCD.

I love the style, just hate having it look completely blurry and aliased on the screen I actually play games on. I don't want to sit in the spare bedroom with the CRT and play my wii. For nintendo to overlook this and then try to release a new system which is basically the same thing with HD support and a glorified dreamcast VMU and charge you again for all the games and peripherals is insane. Wii U's gpu is based on the radeon 4670 which is now nearly 6 years old? They need to get on board with reality.

64:


wii: