Hey everyone,
With used Wii U consoles costing about as much as their Switch counterpart, I was wondering whether or not a Wii U was worth it at this point. The recent news about the Switch not really replacing the other consoles in terms of backwards-compatibility has me rethinking this though. I currently only own a N3DS which covers most things handheld for Nintendo and I would love to play some Wii and Gamecube games. My guess is that the Switch cannot currently be considered a rival to the Wii U when it comes to "x-consoles-in-one". Could Homebrew theoretically change that once it becomes an option? Are there any revelations about the Switch I might have missed? I'd just like some input on this.
Thanks in advance
I'll try to answer this:
There's two cases:
(A) We unlock "Homebrew" on the Switch- custom code can run.
(B) We actually "Jailbreak" the system, such as a custom firmware, to run unsigned code (or sign our own code).
Scenario A allows emulators and the like.
Scenario B allows actual Nintendo games to be loaded, and thus piracy of Switch games and hacks of them, in addition to emulators.
In either situation, for the most part, the results are about the same: We can run emulators of old games, *IF* we ever get to this point.
We can assume the Switch will be able to easily emulate anything N64 and older. Can the Switch emulate GameCube, Wii, and Wii U?
The Wii U accomplished this easily, but the Wii U shared a CPU architecture. It didn't need to fully emulate the CPUs- it was basically like a VM. Emulating the CPU sucks out a lot of performance. You usually need, for a rough back of the thumb estimate, 10x the performance or more of the underlying system to emulate it. Look at how much gaming PCs struggle with Dolphin, for example.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say outright- no, the Switch will never be able to emulate a Wii U at full speed. And even if you could, a lot of the games would be unplayable due to only one screen.
Can it emulate a GameCube or Wii?
Maybe. We won't know until people write one. And it will be a
lot of work. So maybe, maybe not.
Can the Switch emulate a DS or 3DS? Probably pretty easily, actually, since they use ARM processors like the Switch does.