Jump to content

Nintendo is releasing a mini NES...


The Nikanoru
 Share

Recommended Posts

Meh.  3rd-party things like this have existed for a long time.  I'd rather have a Raspberry Pi with RetroPie or PiPlay and a custom case.  A similar price point and much more useful.

Granted, the "Classic Edition" NES does have a pretty good selection of its best games, so it'd be a good entry-level gift for someone who missed the actual NES era, or who's played basically nothing since then and just has some nostalgia for the greatest hits.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, MindWanderer said:

Meh.  3rd-party things like this have existed for a long time.  I'd rather have a Raspberry Pi with RetroPie or PiPlay and a custom case.  A similar price point and much more useful.

Granted, the "Classic Edition" NES does have a pretty good selection of its best games, so it'd be a good entry-level gift for someone who missed the actual NES era, or who's played basically nothing since then and just has some nostalgia for the greatest hits.


For the love of God, man, it's a miniature NES with a healthy-ass supply of NES classics right from the get go, accepts Wii Classic controllers, has an HDMI output AND is an official Nintendo product that you have to do nothing but plug it in, and you shit on it?

Such distasteful elitism. The closest thing wrong here is that it's oddly missing some other games on it, but at $60.00 it's such a good deal all the way around that it's a ultimately a moot point.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 minutes ago, Meteo Xavier said:


For the love of God, man, it's a miniature NES with a healthy-ass supply of NES classics right from the get go, accepts Wii Classic controllers, has an HDMI output AND is an official Nintendo product that you have to do nothing but plug it in, and you shit on it?

Such distasteful elitism. The closest thing wrong here is that it's oddly missing some other games on it, but at $60.00 it's such a good deal all the way around that it's a ultimately a moot point.

I actually agree with Meteo for once lol

Yeah you could do all that with a Raspberry Pi, but the average consumer wouldn't know how to do that. This is much more accessible and a much better deal.

And, again, the controllers are fully compatible with Wii and Wii U so even if you don't want the system the controllers can be used elsewhere.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

38 minutes ago, Mirby said:

I actually agree with Meteo for once lol

Yeah you could do all that with a Raspberry Pi, but the average consumer wouldn't know how to do that. This is much more accessible and a much better deal.

And, again, the controllers are fully compatible with Wii and Wii U so even if you don't want the system the controllers can be used elsewhere.

The accessibility is the only plus, and in my experience, the folks who are most interested in games over 20 years old are willing to put in a little bit of effort to get set up.  It's a mush worse deal if you consider that the games loaded into it are a fixed list, and with a Pi, at only a slightly greater total cost, you can put anything you want on it, including games from a dozen different systems.  There's the legality issue, of course--I'm not sure how many people this would appeal to who already have legal copies of the games in question on a cartridge, e-shop purchase, etc.

I'm not saying it doesn't make sense for some people, I just think the overall excitement level is overblown considering what else is already out there, and has been for years.

Also, the controllers aren't "fully" compatible with Wii and Wii U.  They play Virtual Console games only.  And of course, they're only 4 buttons, so effectively only NES virtual console games.  I do wonder if you can use a Wii Classic Controller on the Classic Edition NES.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Mirby said:

I actually agree with Meteo for once lol


Umm... thanks...

Back to MindWanderer, what you're forgetting is that it's oftentimes not just "a little effort", it can become a pretty big effort to emulate depending on how closely you're trying to recreate the experience. As someone who's spent the last 2.5 years getting mod-happy with consoles as a bizarre side effect from depression medication, I can tell you straight up that "get X hardware unit, get Y accessory and then Z software, BOOM. Done." is far from accurate. At least 50% of the time there's always something missing, something wrong and trying to get help for it on Google or a forum is a crapshoot with great emphasis on crap. The software and tutorials become out of date, key component software breaks down because the dev group split up, or there's a problem with the OS software or the SD card or thumbdrive or FTP, and even after you spend several days trying to fix it, you get it working and discover the emulation/emulator wasn't nearly as well developed or functional as you hoped.

Now I've yet to try a Raspberry PI or the emulators on it, but having spent considerable trouble trying to emulate on a Wii and Original Xbox alone, I can safely assume that would be the same problem for one reason or another. Emulation's simply a lot more complex and difficult than it used to be IMO - you pay the price for gaming one way or another.

If gamers want "get X hardware unit, get Y accessory and then Z software, BOOM. Done." then the mini-NES is that right there. That's literally what it does and I don't have to mess with drivers or anything. It comes from the real source, so it feels a lot more like the legitimate gaming experience than it would through a third-party emulator.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Meteo Xavier said:

If gamers want "get X hardware unit, get Y accessory and then Z software, BOOM. Done." then the mini-NES is that right there. That's literally what it does and I don't have to mess with drivers or anything. It comes from the real source, so it feels a lot more like the legitimate gaming experience than it would through a third-party emulator.

I would say this point right here has kept retro console gaming itself on the market for many years.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

52 minutes ago, Meteo Xavier said:

having spent considerable trouble trying to emulate on a Wii and Original Xbox alone

All valid points, but FYI, those are two of the hardest consoles to emulate.  The XBox emulators never really left infancy.  Dolphin is only recently getting good, but hardware is a huge problem, ripping disks is a pain and a half, and pirating disk images is tough because they're huge and Nintendo actively cracks down on them.

I've done NES, SNES, Genesis, and Game Boy (Super|Color) completely painlessly, Playstation 1 with some issues but that was ~15 years ago, and MAME with a little bit of effort and a handful of game-specific compatibility and performance issues.  I understand PS2 and Game Boy Advance are really solid right now, but I can't vouch for them personally.  PS1 and PS2 can even just read your game disks in a CD/DVD-ROM drive, no need for ROMs or rips.

53 minutes ago, Meteo Xavier said:

I'm waiting for... whoever owns Turbografx now to wise up and make their own remodernized PC-Engines or whatev...

At least these are coming to the Wii U Virtual Console now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am definitely finding this appealing despite owning physical copies or virtual console downloads of close to half the games on the list. It would be nice if they'd include a cartridge port for NES games not already installed into the system. I wonder if they will enable restore points like on the Wii U VC games.

Edit: I actually read the posted article now (heard about it elsewhere first with fewer details), so I'm glad they're including a save state function.

Edited by FenixDown
Link to comment
Share on other sites

34 minutes ago, MindWanderer said:

All valid points, but FYI, those are two of the hardest consoles to emulate.  The XBox emulators never really left infancy.  Dolphin is only recently getting good, but hardware is a huge problem, ripping disks is a pain and a half, and pirating disk images is tough because they're huge and Nintendo actively cracks down on them.

I think he's talking about emulators on the XBox and Wii.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Slimy said:

I think he's talking about emulators on the XBox and Wii.

I am indeed. The Wii I was able to mod to my satisfaction but it required days' worth of work for. The Original Xbox? Forget about it. For whatever reason, my Charter internet absolutely, positively will not let me FTP into it. It would sooner completely rewrite my internet configuration than allow me to FTP in. Oh, and it's one of those Halo Xboxes that only has a >50% of being modded anyway (which mine thankfully succeeded), and you have to get a certain game to do it. I have to get my brother to help me do anything on there when I need it and a bunch of the emulators on there don't work as they should.

My issues there basically killed my want to keep pursuing modding and emulating with other systems. The basic point I'm getting at is emulation and all that really doesn't work as easily for some as it does others for a multitude of reasons, and that by itself justifies having things like the Mini-NES in the world.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Awesome idea and tempting to buy, but I'm wondering why they decided to limit it to ONLY these 30 games with no possibility of adding any more. Seems like a lot of wasted potential, given the nostalgia factor so many people seem to have with "that one game" that wasn't really mainstream. For instance, Top Gun.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

OK, now I want a GameBoy Color version of this. Throw about 30 or 40 games on it (Pokémon Gen 1 and 2, Oracle series and Link's Awakening, Mega Man, Mario series, Castlevania, etc) and make the game use a low-power use wireless link system. BAM! I'd buy one. Maybe two.

3 hours ago, Soul Splint said:

Awesome idea and tempting to buy, but I'm wondering why they decided to limit it to ONLY these 30 games with no possibility of adding any more. Seems like a lot of wasted potential, given the nostalgia factor so many people seem to have with "that one game" that wasn't really mainstream. For instance, Top Gun.

Why offer one system when you can sell five different ones?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Meteo Xavier said:

My issues there basically killed my want to keep pursuing modding and emulating with other systems. The basic point I'm getting at is emulation and all that really doesn't work as easily for some as it does others for a multitude of reasons, and that by itself justifies having things like the Mini-NES in the world.

MindWanderer was talking about Raspberry Pi's. They're just regular computers with Linux on them. Emulating the NES is as easy as downloading https://retropie.org.uk/ and then just DLing ROMs of your favorite NES games.

That being said, I don't give a shit about Raspberry Pi's and they don't look like a NES, so I'm gonna buy a mini-NES.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am sure that all of the posters in this thread have a different bar for what good emulation is.  My current desktop rig, which plays Overwatch on medium settings at 1920x1080, will only run Higan to play SNES games at about 40 FPS -- which is unplayable.  It obviously runs Snes9x and ZSNES fine though, good enough to stream to Twitch and record to my desktop simultaneously while playing at full frames.  So it depends on what resources you have, and what performance you are willing to accept.

Meteo: Did you ever get GBA emulation working well on the Wii?  Whenever I try it starts to frameskip like mad after a very short while, and I just assumed that the processor simply wasn't fast enough to keep up.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 7/15/2016 at 2:22 PM, MindWanderer said:

picture

In what world does that look like an NES to you? Have you actually owned an NES?

You could've at least picked an image that actually, you know, looks like an NES, like:
2013-11-06-01.11.20-1024x768.jpg

(Yes, that's a Pi in there)

The point still stands; I don't care about Raspberry Pi's, or setting up an emulator environment, and I don't care enough to rip open an NES just so I can put a Pi inside of it. If I wanted to emulate stuff, I'd do it on my actual computer and spend $0 instead of $75.

Emulating is also not supporting Nintendo (something I'd like to do).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...