Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

I suppose my opinion is already clear on the likelihood of seeing Dreamcast and Saturn games on the Wii, but I can’t stop thinking about it anyway. The way I see it is, it would take a middleware solution at most and emulation software at the very least to make these games run on the system in their original form: pop in an old Saturn or Dreamcast disc and the game launches the same way a Gamecube or Wii disc does.

The Wii is certainly powerful enough to run these games. The Gamecube is, from an architecture standpoint, not too far from the Dreamcast. This fact is what made first party Dreamcast-to-Gamecube ports so easy. So all we would need is an emulator that can read Sega’s GD-ROMs and we’re off and running. How hard could that be?

But with Nintendo, it’s not about how hard something is, it’s about whether it makes sense to their business model, and that makes more sense than any of us are willing to accept. As much as I’d love to hit eBay and pick up a stack of old Saturn and Dreamcast games for almost nothing and play them on my Wii (Hello, Soul Calibur! Hello, Panzer Dragoon Saga!), my understanding has been that reverse-compatibility is only something that is used near the beginning of a product cycle by most people. That is to say, it’s included as an incentive to early adopters or people who pick up a new system because their old one broke like Paul did.

The question becomes whether Nintendo believes that adding Saturn and Dreamcast support to the Wii would help sell systems, and whether Sega would be willing to go to the trouble of producing a software solution that would not generate them any profit, seeing as how they’re no longer selling the GD-ROMs, and digital delivery is not happening due to insufficient storage, at least not now, and perhaps not ever.

Compounding the depth of all this is whether Nintendo and best pals Sega, Hudson, and SNK might be thinking that the Wii’s a little bit different of an animal from consoles past, and it’s obvious that old games are already a hit on the system. Let’s hear it: would you play Saturn and Dreamcast games on the Wii? Would you want to own a Wii more than you currently do if it had this ability? Would you go through the trouble to obtain old discs to play these games or would you prefer to pay for digital delivery? What about even older systems, like TurboGrafx SuperCD games?