[kimbernator]

> near-perfect emulators

And there's the reason Nintendo isn't doing it. The top priority for them by a massive margin is consistency. The QA they perform for their own products would require an absolutely enormous amount of staff, all for a minuscule payout because there just is not the kind of demand for those games that would justify such a return.

[trehalose]

Nintendo's own Switch release of Super Mario Sunshine used an outdated version of Dolphin, one of those imperfect emulators. (People were remarking on the emulator bugs as soon as it was released.) They saw a demand and didn't let QA get in their way.

[jsheard]

That's not true, the Switch version of Sunshine runs on an in-house Gamecube/Wii emulator called Hagi. Nintendo have always rolled their own emulators, although curiously their NES emulator uses a ROM header format which originated in the unofficial emulation scene, so they must have used unofficial docs for reference.

Even if Nintendo wanted to use existing emulators, they wouldn't touch a GPL project like Dolphin anyway. They do use open source libraries in their games but never, ever GPL ones for fairly obvious reasons.

[ndiddy]

> although curiously their NES emulator uses a ROM header format which originated in the unofficial emulation scene, so they must have used unofficial docs for reference.

Tomohiro Kawase, the guy who did the Animal Crossing NES emulator, was a part of the emulation community in the 90s and contributed to iNES. It makes sense that he kept using that header format when he started working at Nintendo.

[LocalH]

I wouldn't even say that use of a header format itself is indicative of wrongdoing, even if Tomohiro hadn't went on to work for Nintendo.

However, if Nintendo had released any NES ROMs with a "DiskDude!" header? Then maybe. AFAIK this never happened though, and the big leak proved that they had a full final (and sometimes post-final or unreleased final) archive with split PRG/CHR, so they didn't need to use DiskDude! ROMs.

[ndiddy]

Yeah I think it was just the developer working with what he was familiar with. For example, the emulator used for the 3DS NES Virtual Console titles was developed by a different team at iQue. It uses its own bespoke header format called TNES rather than the standard iNES header.

[trehalose]

Ah, sorry. I remembered people at the time of its release saying it was Dolphin because some of the bugs were identical. I guess I misremembered that speculation as fact. I didn't even know Dolphin was GPL. Thanks for correcting me.

[jsheard]

There might also have been some confusion because the Gamecubes official codename was Dolphin, so Nintendo's emulator may well have the string "Dolphin" in it despite having nothing to do with that Dolphin.