How is "cost" valid only for emulation?
They listed multiple reasons, and of the reasons they listed, only "cost" is takes effect in emulation (since it changes the system's emulation capabilities on the whole in exchange for being cheaper).
If the translucency is Kirby's Dream Land 3 works,
then the emulator is already rendering at the full resolution internally and then downscaling it for output (more or less), so outputting the full resolution to begin with shouldn't be an issue.
Only a handful games used /actual/ hi-res screen modes on the SNES
And unfortunately most of those games are the ones I want to play.
Like I said earlier, if this was a portable N64 that wouldn't play OoT or Super Mario 64 properly I bet people would have a different outlook...
just because the games I care about aren't the games YOU care about, MY reasons for not buying the device are invalid?
even the ones that used it can be played just fine.
I prefer to play games without messed-up text and missing special effects. This is a reason I was looking for a portable emulation device to surpass my PSP in the first place, it's an older device with a low resolution and suffers many of the same issues (when the scaling's not being used).
Also noteworthy is that most CRT screens didn't display an exactly crisp image in these resolutions.
Not only is a bit of blurring preferable to entirely-missing pixels, but
many games were developed with the blurring in mind (thus the recent popularity of things like
CRT-style shaders for emulators on the PC where it's viable).
CRT shaders aren't really viable on portables anyways due to the screen being smaller anyways, I'm just pointing out there's efforts to recreate it.
If you use a higher resolution, you push more data around
It's already doing the higher resolution internally, it's just unable to display it due to the screen's limitation, which is why data goes missing.
It's not an issue with the device's software, it's an issue with the hardware, and it's not a power issue. It's simply due to the screen resolution being too small to present everything that's being rendered. This isn't something that can be fixed with a software update, it needs a hardware revision, which is why I'm not buying the Zero (with the presented specs).
that has a RAM bandwidth cost, which is translated into more battery usage.
No it's not. All RAM is electrically powered all the time, and the difference between writing to "free" RAM and "used" RAM doesn't even exist on a physical level (which is what's behind
technologies like superfetch).
(GPU scaling uses more battery,
If the GPU is downclocked by default (most likely is) and needs to be clocked higher in order to do it (depends on the total power of the GPU), then yes. If not, then no. Is the GPU used scalable on the device purposely (say, the clock rate able to be set via homebrew), or does it only change the GPU clock in reaction to it's rendering load?
I have a hard time believing something
as modern and powerful as the GCW Zero would need to clock higher in order to scale an image nearest-neighbor, especially since the PSP (much older and simpler hardware) can scale filtered and unfiltered using it's media engine (dedicated media decoder chip).
Does it turn most functions of the GPU off (akin to
C sleep states) and just use framebuffer graphics when the GPU isn't needed or something?
IPU scaling uses more battery, etc.,
I doubt you're referring to the Invisible Pink Unicorn, was this a typo?
and keep in mind that there's much more to emulation than just snes!)
Which is why it's possible that they knew about this issue but deemed it a worthwhile sacrifice to make the device cheaper (and so appeal to people more easily, eat into less of their initial capital, etc.)
And how is that not nitpicking? you're finding minor issues
Bash? I've stated multiple times the GCW Zero is impressively powerful, but I will not personally buy this device because it cheaps out on the screen and takes a hit on the emulation front because of it (which is ironic as this device was specifically designed to not repeat the mistakes of the Chinese devices, but this is one such mistake).
(It affects only a handful of titles/screens and their actual effects towards gameplay are less than minor)
Going from 1080p to 480p on a 360 game has a less-than-minor effect on the actual gameplay too, so are people wasting their time in specifically buying an HDTV since they can still
play the game at the lower quality?
not only that, you also provided dubious evidence about the emulation of the faux transparency effects employed by a few SNES titles.
I wasn't aware that the emulator rendered at the higher resolution internally, so for games that don't attempt to display at that resolution (and count on the blur inherent in NTSC video) the special effects will work fine. Obviously my stance there has changed, since I've mentioned multiple times that it's already doing it internally (as the screenshot showed).
However for the text example, I used a screenshot from a GCW to show the problem.