Let's talk about Nintendo Virtual Console

I have recently remembered the old times when I used to play my Game Boy classics in both my Game Boy Color and GBA SP and, because of this, I can't help to think about Nintendo Virtual Console emulator and its current titles. When I see all the titles that were released, all the things they've made with the Super Game Boy, the Game Boy Tower emulator from Pokemon Stadium and, more specially, all the palettes we could select in Game Boy Color mode, I feel that a lot of great options have been forgotten and lost forever. If you don't know exactly about what I'm talking about, here's a good example of what kind of features are missing (the video does not include the SGB "powers"):


I have no problems about the idea of the service and it's great that other people enjoy the system, but I believe that, for experienced players or even people that pay attention to these things, what it is offered isn't actually enough for us. I haven't much experience about NES, SNES or other VC platforms and I've read that there are other types of complaints as well, so I would like to know your opinion about this topic.

• Have you played VC games?
• Have you thought about this before?
• If you did so, what kind of defects have you found to the system?

I love Nintendo's Virtual Console service! In fact, most of the games that I purchased as downloads are Virtual Console re-releases of some of the past Super Mario series games.

Probably the only major issue that irks me with VC is not being able to change the color palette on the 3DS VC re-releases of black-and-white Game Boy games (including Pokémon Red and Blue) other than swapping between true grayscale and the "green screen" of the original Game Boy.

The VirtualConsole to me is a wonderful concept that has been very poorly executed. For starters, the emulation quality is often subpar (colour is all wrong, can't emulate FX SNES games, etc.). Each download is a combination of a game file (rom) and custom-tailored emulator with the rom injected to play it - which seems bizarre to me.

You could have a single emulator service built into the console OS, that could be regular updated on a push.

It also could have been an opportunity to provide "definitive editions". In the rom hacking community, there are a lot of patches out there that are bugfixes or minor non-breaking improvements. It would be great if these kinds of things existed on the VC.

Or, better yet, an effort could be to consolidate titles. For instance, Super Mario Bros. is available in both NES and GBC flavours. The GBC version has a lot of a neat features (red coins, yoshi eggs, You VS. Boo, overworld map) - but the GBC screen resolution really cramps everything up. The NES version, despite lacking all these neat features, is infinitely more playable. If only they could combine it. "Backport" the new stuff to the NES version.

Another example would be the extended Winky's Walkway level in Donkey Kong Country GBC. And the new level: Necky Nutmare. Why not bring these to the NES version? Heck, why not take those original assets and render them out again at a higher resolution, even?

Other examples include: GBA games without the overcompensation in a brightened palette for the backlight-less hardware. And I lost my train of thought for more. Oh well.

But yes, I agree with you that the GB emulation in particular is mighty sad. GBC palette options for original GB games are one thing. Lacking Super Game Boy enhancements (borders, colours, sound, multiplayer) is another. But there's also a number of old games that have light palettes built-in to the Super Game Boy and the GBC bootstrap. And these special palettes are lost to the ages now.