“Running DS games on the 3DS: The Technical Details - Nintendo 3DS” |
| Running DS games on the 3DS: The Technical Details - Nintendo 3DS Posted: 15 Sep 2010 06:08 PM PDT The 3DS will have to utilize either hardware- or software-based emulation in order to play DS games. Each carries with it a set of pros and cons. Which one will it be? It's clear just from looking at screenshots that the hardware under the hood of the 3DS is brand new and significantly more powerful than the DS's. While its identity is still unconfirmed, I'm almost sure that the CPU and GPU in particular are based on vastly different software/hardware architecture than that of the DS. Differing hardware architecture means that backwards compatibility will need to be accomplished by software- rather than hardware-based emulation.  Let's just be reasonable here: there is simply no way the ancient DS hardware could be producing graphics this good. Hardware-based emulation The original PS3 utilized reliable hardware-based emulation to play PS2 games. The difference between those two is that with hardware-based emulation, the game runs natively on the system; this allows for maximum compatibility and reliability across different games, many of which may be optimized to take advantage of very specific hardware features that are very difficult to replicate through software. Essentially, a game will never know it's not running on a system it wasn't originally made for. This type of emulation is usually desirable because of its 100% compatibility with all games for an older system and because it reproduces them very faithfully. The Wii uses this approach to play GameCube games as well as it does, and is able to do so because its architecture is virtually identical to its predecessor's. Even if a system doesn't use the same architecture as its predecessor, though, it's still possible to utilize hardware emulation by including the CPU and GPU of the older system on its motherboard. The solution works, but it raises console production costs significantly to the point where the price of a system begins to scare potential buyers away. Sony's PlayStation 3 comes to mind: the original model of the system included the PlayStation 2′s so-called "Emotion Engine," giving the system full compatibility with the PS2′s legendary game library. Software-based emulationSoftware-based emulation takes a different approach. Instead of running the game as-is directly on the hardware it's meant for, a program tries to set up a fake, virtual system for the game to run in. This program, known as an emulator, takes all the code a game is trying to run and converts it to code that is compatible with the system it's running on. For example, a Nintendo 64 emulator on a computer will receive instructions from a game to play a sound. Playing a sound is coded differently on a Nintendo 64 than it is on a computer, so the emulator converts the instructions to a format the computer's CPU will understand as an order to play a sound rather than the seeming pile of gibberish it would see otherwise. The biggest downfall of software-based emulation is that converting game code to native system code generates an enormous CPU overhead. The Wii's CPU, for example, is clocked at a humble 729 MHz or so, but emulating it smoothly calls for at least a dual-core 3+ GHz Intel processor. To avoid this problem, emulators often strip down the amount and type of code they can interpret, which, while allowing it to run on lesser hardware, also brings down compatibility rates of games and introduces various glitches. Which one will it be? The Xbox 360 proves the viability of software-based emulation, given enough time to mature. The 3DS will have to use one of these two methods to play DS games. As I've already stated, the hardware in the 3DS will probably be too different from the DS's for hardware-based emulation to be possible. Nintendo probably won't cram a DS CPU into the 3DS, either, because it will bring the cost up unnecessarily high (and we're already a little worried about it). This means they will have no choice but to use software-based DS emulation. Generally, there always tend to be compatibility (and often stability) problems with this approach; usually, this is resolved by maintaining a list of games that are problematic (because they rely on system features that the emulator doesn't support) and preventing them from running. I'm not saying that this isn't impossible to deal with; software-based emulation has been proven to work well before. The Xbox 360 uses it to play games for the original Xbox, and computers can reliably play most games for older consoles like the SEGA Genesis, SNES, and Nintendo 64. The Wii even does it for all the systems it supports on its much-touted Virtual Console. Usually, given enough time, it is possible to bring software-based emulation to the stability and reliability of the hardware-based variant, but isolated issues with specific games almost always remain, even if they're relatively minor. Today, the Xbox 360 supports almost every Xbox game, but that wasn't always the case. Originally, a small handful of games were compatible and it was only through countless updates to the Xbox 360′s emulator that Microsoft gradually allowed the rest of the library to work on the new console. I wouldn't want to run into a similar situation with the 3DS and get one only to find out that a very limited part of my DS library will work on it, and that the rest of it will only become compatible over time. This means that I would be stuck carrying both my 3DS and DSi around until Nintendo has made all of my DS games compatible. It's unlikely that Nintendo has already figured out how to emulate every single DS game perfectly on the 3DS's new hardware, so I'm a little worried that a large portion of the DS library will effectively be unavailable to it at launch. Read more about how Nintendo DS games will work on the 3DS here. By Peter D. on 16 September 2010 This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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