Re: NES, SNES emulation on the Wii

It takes very little power to run NES and SNES emulators; Netbooks can run these without any flaws. I've run an NES emulator on an original Playstation One without any problems. The Wii isn't as powerful as a 360 or PS3, but it has enough juice to handle NES, SNES, Genesis, and some N64 and PS1 emulation.

The Wii is the easiest of the three current consoles out there to hack. As long as you didn't update to 4.3 recently the IOS can be hacked. If you have an older model you can run things off DVDs, if you don't it's easy to run things off a portable harddrive (and makes things load faster). No hardware modification is required. You can go online if its hacked. You can make backups of the nand memory in case you screw up modding it. If you accidentally upgrade the firmware all it does is erase your homebrew and leaves the console unharmed.

I thought about this a lot, but there are three reasons I've been put off.

#1: The Wii really isn't all that powerful, so NES emulators are going to be slightly second-rate, and SNES emulators much more so. My Core 2 Duo is far more suited to such tasks.

#2: Nintendo keep trying to break homebrew. I have better things to do than play exploit cat-and-mouse games with Nintendo for the next few years.

#3: It may be on TV, but component cables, a 37" plasma screen, and a GameCube or Classic Controller hardly make for an authentic retro experience. My PC, with full choice of control pads and enough power for custom filters (such as the NTSC filter and/or the new phosphore3x filter) actually gets me closer to my childhood really.