[Bahamut]

They probably have an emulator already built, given that they sell NES Virtual Console games & have quite a history having ported their games to various platforms (goes as far back as the Game Boy Color I believe with having ported Super Mario Bros. - that is over 16 years ago).

[foldor]

If we're counting ported games, I might count Donkey Kong on the NES as their first attempt, though I'm sure someone can find an earlier example.

[Bahamut]

Well, I guess they do have a longer history if you count arcade games too. You're probably right on that front.

[rangibaby]

id Software's Keen series was a result of them porting Mario for PC but being denied a license by Nintendo.

[ataylor284_]

Reimplemented, not ported. They wrote it from scratch, using innovative techniques to get the smooth side scrolling that was supported by hardware in consoles.

[bydo]

Back in the day nearly every "port" was a full reimplementation, from the code to custom graphics and sound. Such are the perils of writing to bare metal.

[mattl]

There are lots of ports from the 8-bit home computer era which don't have this problem. See for example, the number of ZX Spectrum ports to the Amstrad CPC machines.

[Narishma]

Yes, and they usually were terrible ports. They ran poorly and didn't take advantage of the CPC's better hardware.

[mrob]

Commander Keen was an impressive achievement for the time, but it did not have console quality smooth scrolling. It ran at only 35fps, not the 60fps of the NES Mario games.

The earliest (better than) console smooth scrolling PC game I can think of is Monster Bash, which runs at 70fps.

[bydo]

Romero discusses this briefly here: https://vimeo.com/148909578