NiGHTS

[frescies]

I'm so stoked that NiGHTS: Journey of dreams comes out in December (a sequel for which I've waited 11 years). The original was the only reason to own a Sega Saturn in my opinion.

Although this is so far-fetched (as the Saturn is one of the hardest consoles to emulate), a petition has sprung up to beg Sega to port the original to the Virtual Console.

I thought I'd share this with you in case there are any fanatics of the original game out there:

http://www.petitiononline.com/NiDwiivc/petition.html


Weirder things have happened (like the aforementioned sequel... brought to life mostly by huge fan-based demand)

 

[GFLPraxis]

NiGHTS shipped on a 700 MB CD. The Wii has 512 MB of memory. Do the math

 

[frescies]

DOH!

erm... maybe... hmmm...

I know!!! ...they could redo the music in MIDI... If I'm not mistaken, most of the space taken up on that disk was the music (which was full aiff, right?)

 

[0098386]

It could be compressed.

Or Nintendo could just let us use external drives and stuff for more than just "backing up" VC purchases...

 

[GFLPraxis]

Yeah, the game probably didn't take up the whole disk and they could probably compress it. You still have two major problems:

1) It's still going to be bigger than any game on the Virtual Console, and there's currently no way to run games off SD cards. So it'll make you run out of space REAL quick.

2) The Sega Saturn is one of the only consoles of its era that, to this day, no homebrew guy has managed to make a working emulator of, because the hardware is so stupidly complicated. It's got something like 8 processors if you count the video cards.

* Two Hitachi SuperH-2 7604 32-Bit RISC processors at 28.63 MHz (50-MIPS) – each has 4 KiB on-chip cache, of which 2 KiB can alternatively be used as directly addressable Scratchpad RAM
* SH-1 32-bit RISC processor (controlling the CD-ROM)
* Custom VDP 1 32-bit video display processor (running at 7.1590 MHz on NTSC Systems, 6.7116 MHz for PAL Systems)
* Custom VDP 2 32-bit video display processor (running at 7.1590 MHz on NTSC Systems, 6.7116 MHz for PAL Systems)
* Custom Saturn Control Unit (SCU) with DSP for geometry processing and DMA controller (running at 14.3 MHz)
* Motorola 68EC000 sound controller (running at 11.3 MHz / 1,5 MIPS)
* Yamaha FH1 DSP sound processor, "Sega Custom Sound Processor" (SCSP), running at 22.6 MHz
* Hitachi 4-bit MCU, "System Manager & Peripheral Control" (SMPC)

It might be quite a bit of trouble to make an emulator.

Still, it's theoretically possible to do; it just makes it more unlikely that Nintendo and Sega will actually sit down and do it.