Fans of the early-2000s era GameCube version of the original Animal Crossing likely remember the game including a handful of emulated NES titles that could be played by obtaining in-game items for your house. What players back then didn’t know is that the NES emulator in Animal Crossing can also be used to play any generic NES ROM stored on a GameCube memory card.
One has to wonder if there’s any code from open source emulators in there.
I’m trying to think of what opensource NES emulators were out there in 2001. Back then, I think I was still using Nesticle (Not open source).
As far as I can tell, there weren’t any opensource NES emulators back then, at least definitely not any worth using. There were some freeware and commercial emulators out, though.
So, probably none.
Animal Crossing for Gamecube came out in 2005, not 2001. That was the N64 version.
Nesticle was released in 1997 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NESticle
https://web.archive.org/web/20161116081727/bloodlust.zophar.net/NESt…
And according to their site, they did release the core source after a hacker stole it, back in 1998.
Furthermore,the project’s source inspired many other emulators after that based on Nesticle, according to the descriptions in Zophar.net
Edited 2018-07-13 06:42 UTC
That’s completely false, Animal Crossing for Gamecube came out in 2001 in JP, 2002 in NA.
https://i.imgur.com/pheouYf.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/fMD32zr.jpg
Edited 2018-07-13 07:56 UTC
It was released December 2001 in Japan.
Also, Nesticle was also written in pure x86 assembler, so it source would have been useless for the PowerPC-based Gamecube.
Was there any Mac NES emulators at the time?
iNES was out, but that wasn’t opensource.
Emulators tended to be largely closed-source back then, with MAME probably being the major exception.
Hell, even some of the opensource emulators we use today were closed source at the turn of the century.
Was there any Mac NES emulators at the time?
Given it only had to work reasonably well on a handful of first-party games (which on the NES also means far fewer mappers), it’s not at all inconceivable they made their own emulator.
I suppose you would also be able to get this working on a Wii if it’s one of the earlier models that supports GameCube games.
Hm? The smaller/Eu Wii model doesn’t support GC games? :/ (it’s kinda odd that Nintendo would do it like that, considering Wii has the same GPU as GC and just “more” of CPU and memory)
One has to wonder if there’s any code from open source emulators in there.
Because it is entirely inconceivable that programmers at the company that designed, manufactured, and programmed for both consoles wouldn’t be able to write an emulator for a fairly simple console on a much more powerful console themselves?
Well, writing a full featured emulator as a almost hidden feature in a pretty confidential game would be kinda adventurous to justify the time and cost investment. Not even speaking of the overall reliability of this emulator compared to the other ones from the same era.
Reminds me the complete version C64 emulated Maniac Mansion in Day of the Tentacle.
Exactly; there’s no reason to suspect that Nintendo wouldn’t just make their own NES emu, it has enough of talented programmers (and in 2000, certainly still quite high proportion of them had even relatively fresh memories of being intimely familiar with NES hardware)
I’d also be willing to wager that the core was already functional before they decided to put it in the game: some developer was writing it in his spare time for whatever reason, and said “Oh hey I have a NES emulator we could use?” and the actual costed development was fairly low.
Source ?
My own imagination, and knowing how engineers actually tend to think.