Revolution old-school Nintendo downloads to be FREE

[quote name='SpottedNigel']The first option involves having another system laying around, and the second option is illegal and depending on computer owned, crappy[/QUOTE]

So you have another console. What's the big deal? Are gamers not allowed to have more than one???

Second option is, yes, illegal. However, is Nintendo going to be offering Bubble Bath Babes for download? No. They never would. You'll still either need an emulator or the original console. It's great that we can play Mario Bros. on the Revolution, but we can do that on the NES, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance.

NES and SNES ROMS can be played on a high Pentium without much trouble. 64 games are the only ones that require a decent chunk of power.

I'll have no real interest in the Revolution until Nintendo shows something about their console about how they actually plan to be competitive in the next gen, or why I should buy a brand new system to play games that are on consoles I already own. I'm sure I'll end up buying one at launch (always do), but they really need something special to actually become more than a third string company.
 
[quote name='gamereviewgod']So you have another console. What's the big deal? Are gamers not allowed to have more than one???

Second option is, yes, illegal. However, is Nintendo going to be offering Bubble Bath Babes for download? No. They never would. You'll still either need an emulator or the original console. It's great that we can play Mario Bros. on the Revolution, but we can do that on the NES, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance.

NES and SNES ROMS can be played on a high Pentium without much trouble. 64 games are the only ones that require a decent chunk of power.

I'll have no real interest in the Revolution until Nintendo shows something about their console about how they actually plan to be competitive in the next gen, or why I should buy a brand new system to play games that are on consoles I already own. I'm sure I'll end up buying one at launch (always do), but they really need something special to actually become more than a third string company.[/QUOTE]

I haven't given a great deal of thought to the revolution, but I think what you are saying is something I agree with; that being, the only thing that we truly know about Revolution is that it is, at the moment, a "backwards looking" console, and is as of yet showing nothing revolutionary.

I hope that the next-gen stuff they do is great, but, for the moment, I can play The Legend of Zelda on plenty of systems, including my top-loading NES.

myke.
...although, at the least, 64 emulation would be unique; I don't think they ever successfully emulated it, have they?
 
[quote name='jkam']Actually just a question and not meant to be a smart ass comment.....Nintendo has already gone on to release some of our old NES games on the GBA. They didn't even do as well in the US. Other than in that area how is nintendo making money on these older games? I would think it wouldn't kill them to at least give away the NES games. SNES still hasn't been fully tapped with the portables. I see what you mean basically they won't be able to charge for these games but there is a huge used game buisness on which they aren't making anything from any way. I guess I'm asking what am I missing here?[/QUOTE]

Those GBA games were sold at an incredible profit margin. Although the NES Classic line didn't do as much business here as in Japan, the amount of ROM used was incredibly tiny by today's standards. These were games measured in kilobytes and the emulation layer added very little to that. Even at a mere $20 retail this allowed for a superb margin. As close as Nintendo has ever come to real Player's Choice pricing on mask ROM games.

Demonstrably, these games have real continuing monetary value, just as the ancient games in the Namco Museum and Pacman Collection for the GBA, each with over a million units sold in the US. Protecting the perception of value and the copyright to the properties is well worth it. While Pacman can no longer command a $40 or greater price as it once did long ago on consoles, the market for it at just a few dollars (often by download to the consumer's media) is orders of magnitude larger. Pacman and many of its arcade contemporaries are doing a fair business on cellphones as well as the GBA and every other platform that gets a Namco Museum port. Which is to say, damn near all of them. PSP soon to be the latest addition. It isn't clear if they have a native DS offering but the GBA versions serves there. Plenty of other arcade machines are likely under consideration for the DS. The touchscreen would be pretty cool for Crystal Castles in an Atari Collection.

The value is the owners handle it right. They must not overprice or underprice. The former will just sit on store shelves or go undownloaded, and the latter marks a change that sticks forever after. Once you give something away it has been devalued in the eyes of everyone who remembers. I think Nintendo has pondered this when trying to decide what to do with the GameCube remakes of the N64 Zelda games. They helped get a lot more people to pre-order Wind Waker but their limited availability is just leaving money on the table. The question is how should they be priced? Treating them as a Player's Choice item, $20 for both OOT and URA version, would suit me just fine but some might argue that was too little. In either case, not being available at all for retail purchase does nobody any good but those selling it on eBay.

Nintendo has always had a bad attitude towards used game sales but this is understandable. In Japan they went so far as to try to make it illegal. Rentals became more acceptable after they and other companies reached a profit sharing arrangement with the big chains like Blockbuster and that led to them running special promotions through those chain to encourage the rental business. The big difference back them was having to do all the distribution on mask ROM chips.

Winston Churchill liked to say democracy was the worst form of government ever tried, except for all of the others. So it is with ROM chips. Just about everything about them sucks. The cost per capcity unit is always high relative to other forms relative tot he era. The production is a hassle. The initial mask is costly and there is a lot of time and testing cost each time you change the mask for a production line. If you're making a million chips that spreads out that cost pretty thin but for only 50,000 units the cost per cart is a lot higher. This is the primary reason games that become suprise hits on the NES and SNES often failed to receive another production run to serve the interest. If 500K sold out but the estimated remaining demand was only for another 100K it might be too expensive per unit to bother.

Scheduling was another huge problem. Having too much production capacity is expensive while idle for the plant owner or primary contractor, such as Nintendo, so production capacity was never adequate during boom periods. This meant chip manufacturing had to be scheduled months in advance. If a company underestimated the popularity of a game and didn't order enough (or lacked the capital to meet Nintendo's upfront payment requirements) it could be at least three months before a hole opened up in the schedule. By that time the games popularity might has waned or enough used copies were in circulation to meet demand.

(A similar thing happened when 'The Matrix' came out on DVD. There wasn't enough capacity them to meet demand so Warner Home Video pushed back the release of several other titles under their distributuion to free up the factory for more Matrix discs. Some of the partner companies on those delayed titles were very pissed but paying them off was only a minor drag on Matrix profits.)

This is why so many publishers didn't want to support the N64. On a PS1 title, once you'd paid off the development costs the profit margins went through the roof. You could keep ordering more units from Sony and still make a good profit even after the SRP had gone down to GH levels. And Sony could fill those orders on very short notice. In Japan they won support from small retailers by allowing them to manage their inventory on a weekly basis. Sega couldn't do this because they were dependent on CD production lines they didn't own and it took them a while to catch on to what Sony was doing. Changing masters in a CD/DVD line takes just a few minutes and costs very little. The difference in per unit cost for an order of 5K was very little more than for 50K. The same line might produce a dozen different products in the same day.

ROM chips had two major advantages. The carts were pretty durable compared to floppies and not sensitive to magnetic fields. And they required the most minimal equipment to use. The old consoles were little more than a chipset, a few ports, and an edge connector for memory. The old machines had so little RAM because they only needed it for program variables and the video display. Since everything was character mapped the video display RAM was quite minimal. The program on the cartridge ran directly from the section of memory mapped to the cartridge slot. (For instance, on the Atari 8-bit computers and 5200 the ROM port address started at 32K and went up to 48K. Carts bigger than 16K had to use bank switching.) Rather than drawing a bitmap in video memory there was just one byte for each tile which was read out of ROM and made into a video signal going out to the TV on the fly.

Anyways, back when RAM was sold in 1K chips, mapping carts directly to system memory made a HUGE difference in cost. And that was before anything like a floppy drive was involved. My first floppy drive, an Atari 810, cost me $400 in 1981. That was a lot more than the base mechanism price, especially since it was an external intelligent device but you get the idea. Nintendo tried pushing floppies for NES games, even making several titles exclusive to floppy but it didn't sell nearly well enough for them to make it their standard and likely had much influence on their later resistance to optical discs.

Cheap optical media and distribution by download changes all of that. Even flash memory becomes effective as the games in question become regarded as miniscule in size. I don't know if Nintendo has done anything on DoCoMo phones in Japan but most of their third party supporters from the 8-bit and 16-bit era have jumped in. The exact original ROMs may not be as attractive today but that just creates a market for them as retro fare while other buy those given a graphic facelift ala Mario All-Stars. Keep the gameplay identical but get rid of some of the former ugliness due to hardware limitations. It costs money to produce those new version but since the games are so simplistic even with the facelift the cost is pretty low and offers work for programmers not trained for the current platforms.

So used games were once inevitable because it was so difficult to serve the market with any agility using ROM chips. But that hasn't been the case for a long time. Any company that lets its worthy properties gather dust is failing itself.


Somewhere in there might be an answer to your question. I've lost track.
 
This really ought to get its own thread. Feel free to make it.

http://mozlapunk.web-log.nl/log/2722430

Famitsu: 221 games ready for Rev. Downloading.

Sega should give a Genesis/Saturn emulator to Nintendo and start making some fat money pies

Rumored List

NES
1. 10-Yard Fight
2. Anticipation
3. Balloon Fight
4. Barker Bill's Trick Shooting
5. Baseball
6. Clu Clu Land
7. Dance Aerobics (may require dance pad, I halfway wanted to put this in questioned)
8. Devil World
9. Doki Doki Panic
10. Donkey Kong
11. Donkey Kong 3
12. Donkey Kong Classics
13. Donkey Kong Jr.
14. Donkey Kong Jr. Math
15. Dr. Mario
16. Dragon Warrior
17. Duck Hunt
18. Excitebike
19. Famicom Wars
20. Final Fantasy
21. Fire Emblem Gaiden
22. Fire Emblem: Ankokuryuu to Hikari no Tsurugi
23. Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino and Hoppy
24. Golf
25. Gum Shoe
26. Gyromite
27. Hogan's Alley
28. Ice Climber
29. Ice Hockey
30. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Taito)
31. Kid Icarus
32. Kirby's Adventure
33. Kung Fu
34. Mach Rider
35. Mario Bros.
36. Mario Time Machine
37. Mario is Missing!
38. Mario:Fun with Letters
39. Mario:Fun with Numbers
40. Metroid
41. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
42. Mother (Earthbound)
43. NES Open Golf
44. Nintendo World Cup
45. Nuts & Milk
46. Pin-Bot
47. Pinball
48. Play Action Football
49. Popeye
50. Pro Wrestling
51. Punch-Out!!
52. R.C. Pro-Am
53. Rad Racer
54. Rad Racer 2
55. Short Order/Eggsplode
56. Slalom
57. Snake Rattle & Roll
58. Soccer
59. Stack Up
60. Star Tropics
61. Super Mario Bros.
62. Super Mario Bros. 2
63. Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels
64. Super Mario Bros. 3
65. Super Spike V'Ball/World Cup Soccer
66. Super Team Games
67. Tennis
68. Tetris
69. Tetris 2
70. The Legend of Zelda
71. To The Earth
72. Track meet
73. Urban Champion
74. Volleyball
75. Wario's Woods
76. Wild Gunman
77. World Class Track Meet
78. World Cup Soccer
79. Wrecking Crew
80. Yoshi (Mario & Yoshi)
81. Yoshi's Cookie
82. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
83. Zoda's Revenge: Star Tropics II


Super NES
84. Derby Stallion 98 (NP)
85. Donkey Kong Country
86. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong's Quest
87. Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble
88. EarthBound
89. F-Zero
90. FX Fighter
91. Fire Emblem: Monshou no Nazo
92. Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu
93. Fire Emblem: Thracia 776
94. Hyper V-Ball
95. Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball
96. Ken Griffey Jr.'s Winning Run
97. Killer Instinct
98. Kirby Super Star
99. Kirby's Avalanche
100. Kirby's Dream Course
101. Kirby's Dream Land 3
102. Kirby's Ghost Trap
103. Legend (some say the movie inspired Zelda but the timing is off, sorry im a history buff)
104. Mario Paint
105. Mario and Wario
106. Mario's Early Years: Preschool Fun
107. Mario's Super Picross
108. Metal Combat: Falcon's Revenge
109. NCAA Basketball
110. NHL Stanley Cup
111. Panel de Pon
112. Picross NP Vol. 8
113. PilotWings
114. Shigesato Itoi's No. 1 Bass Fishing
115. Sound Fantasy
116. Star Fox
117. Stunt Race FX
118. Super Famicom Wars
119. Super Mario Kart
120. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
121. Super Mario World
122. Super Metroid
123. Super Punch-Out!!
124. Super Scope 6
125. Super Soccer
126. Super Soccer 2
127. Super Tennis
128. Tetris & Dr. Mario
129. Tetris Attack
130. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
131. Tinstar
132. Uniracers (Unirally, the game sucked bad you raced unicycles with no rider)
133. Winter Gold (FX Skiing)
134. World League Baseball
135. Yoshi's Island: Super Mario World 2
136. Yoshi's Safari

Nintendo 64
137. 1080° Snowboarding (a personal fave)
138. Animal Forest (Animal Crossing for you Americans)
139. Banjo-Kazooie
140. Banjo-Tooie
141. Blast Corps
142. Bomberman 64
143. Bomberman Hero
144. Buggie Boogie
145. Cabbage
146. Catroots
147. Climber
148. Command & Conquer
149. Creator
150. Cruis'n USA
151. Cruis'n World
152. Cu-On-Pa
153. Custom Robo
154. Custom Robo V2
155. DD Sequencer
156. Dezaemon DD
157. Diddy Kong Racing (w00t)
158. Donkey Kong 64
159. Doubutsu Banchou
160. Dr. Mario 64
161. Echo-Delta
162. Emperor of the Jungle
163. Excitebike 64
164. F-Zero X
165. Gendai Dai-Senryaku: Ultimate War
166. GoldenEye 007
167. Hey You, Pikachu!
168. Jack and the Beanstalk
169. Ken Griffey Jr.'s Slugfest
170. Killer Instinct Gold
171. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards
172. Kirby's Air Ride
173. Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside
174. Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr
175. Mario Golf
176. Mario Kart 64
177. Mario Party
178. Mario Party 2
179. Mario Party 3
180. Mario Tennis 64
181. Mickey's Speedway USA
182. Mini Racers
183. Mischief Makers
184. Mysterious Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer 2
185. NBA Courtside 2: Featuring Kobe Bryant
186. Paper Mario
187. Perfect Dark
188. Pilotwings 64
189. Pokemon Puzzle League
190. Pokemon Snap
191. Pokemon Stadium
192. Pokemon Stadium 2
193. Pokemon Stadium: Gold, Silver, Crystal Version
194. Ridge Racer 64
195. Riqa
196. Shigesato Itoi's No. 1 Bass Fishing
197. Sin and Punishment: Successor to the Earth
198. Star Fox 64
199. Star Wars Episode I: Racer
200. Star Wars: Battle for Naboo
201. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
202. StarCraft 64
203. Super Mario 64
204. Super Smash Bros.
205. Tetrisphere
206. The Legend of Zelda DD (Ura Zelda) (Master Quest in America)
207. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
208. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
209. The New Tetris
210. Waialae Country Club: True Golf Classics
211. Wall Street DD
212. Wave Race 64
213. Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey
214. Yoshi's Story

Satteleview games
215. BS F-Zero 2 Grand Prix
216. BS Special Tee Shot
217. BS Zelda

64 DD games
218. SimCity 64
219. F-Zero X Expansion Kit
220. Kyojin no Doshin 1 (Doshin the Giant)
221. Mario Artist: Communication Kit,Paint Studio,Polygon Studio, Sound Studio, Talent Studio

Source
http://boards.ign.com/Revolution_Lobby/b8270/89119200/?13
 
It's interesting in scan 2 that they show a picture (bottom right) of a Final Fantasy game - it looks like the American "Final Fantasy 2" - but the only Final Fantasy on that list ^^ is the one on NES.
 
If I were Sega I'd stay platform agnostic to reap the most benefit. Microosft already has a venue for this sort of thing via Xbox Live Arcade and it seems pretty likely Sony will have something simlar.

Hudson, which developed the PC Engine (TurboGrafx) and much of its library should also look into pursuing this. SNK, Namco, Konami, Taito, any big arcade player should be looking at keeping their IP producing revenue by this means.
 
That list is hilarious.

They're saying Goldeneye on the 64 is going to be free? So Microsoft if going to let Nintendo take a Rare game and EA is going to let them have the Bond license and they're going to let us have it for free? Um no. That's common sense, and that kills the list from providing any factual information at all.
 
Tetrisphere returns yet again?!?!? I LOVED that game... a DS port would be so damn amazing.
 
This may also be a positive for older IPs. If their parent companies track the # of downloads it could be as data - the more people who download, the more popular the property. They could use this as a basis for a modern day remake or next gen sequel.
 
[quote name='mykevermin']
...although, at the least, 64 emulation would be unique; I don't think they ever successfully emulated it, have they?[/QUOTE]

so long as you have a somewhat recent system with a decent video card, anyone can pull it off, hell, they run fine on my laptop (which is not a gaming system)
 
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