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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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That's not the point of it though. Not about whether you could fix or maintain it when operating it, it's about not operating it if presents a notable risk of failure. The Smithsonian doesn't start grinding cornmeal in a bowl from the Mississippians. The Connecticut Museum doesn't take it's colt rifles out the range for target practice. These organizations would use a replica to demonstrate what it was like, as opposed to risking damaging an original article.
Thats also not even necessary true either. While they may have invented there various consoles, at some point it will be nearly impossible to acquire replacement parts. They don't manufacture the ICs or mainboards or the various discreet components. So if there's no old stock, how would they "fix" a broken N64 (or later) console? It might be theoretically possible to fab a NEC VR4300 to replace a dead one, but probably cost hundreds of thousands, and it wouldn't be broken anyway if you hadn't left if running 16 hours a day so some sweaty tourists could play on real hardware.
And why would they? It would cost more, be more work, and have less reliable results than using a completely replacable computer running an emulator. The entire consumer facing side of the equation is worse if they run the games on the actual hardware, as long as the consumer doesn't see it, which is really down to how they design the exhibit.
Do you think the public is understanding enough to accept that "The NES is really old and it broke so you can't play super mario bros today", when it's the only day you are gonna be there? Temper tantrum, bad reviews, loss of face. From what I understand, Japan actually cares about all that, so Nintendo probably does as well.
Oh no, poor Nintendo, how could they possibly afford a custom IC fab? They only have more money than God.
The way I see it, they have two choices. Make the investment to supply their museum with original hardware, or be ok with emulation. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, and that's shitty.
That would just be wasteful, and wouldn't really be the same thing? Analogue already makes N64 FPGAs make things that are almost N64s, and Nintendo doesn't seem to care.
Your forgetting that Nintendo emulates there own games all the time, literally since the GameCube.
There argument has never been about what they can do, it's about what you can do. Now they are wrong under US law, but it's not like it's hard to go find ROMs of these games, they aren't even on torrents or shady websites, you can download them directly.
I disagree. If they actually care about the preservation of their history (which is the whole point of museums), they should be willing to invest a tiny fraction of their incredible wealth to do that, if they want to run it themselves.
I'm not forgetting anything. That's my whole point. Nintendo has their own emulators, in both software and hardware. Why are they running some Windows emulator on a Windows PC in their own museum? It makes me think that they just took one of the myriad open source emulators (that they're probably trying diligently to get shut down) and installed that, and it wouldn't surprise me if they're playing ripped ROMs on it, given that they include ripped ROMs on their own emulation libraries (that they charge people to access, btw). Because they've proven that they're hypocrites when it comes to emulation.
Right, again, that's my point. Emulation is fine and dandy when Nintendo does it, but not when anyone else does it, yet they still benefit from those other emulators. That's shitty.
They could replace all the parts in a SNES or NES with components indefinitely, because inside are either off the shelf components or specifically made components made after schematics from Nintendo. So even if nobody makes such parts anymore at the moment there is nothing (but time and money) that would stop Nintendo to order new parts based on their schematics.
Most issues with old consoles can even be fixed by hobbyists and if they can't that's because they don't have access to the needed information to create new versions of the tailor made components.
So there should be no issue for Nintendo to supply their museum with replicas forever. Yes it would cost way more money then using Emulators, but it would be way more appropriate for their own museum. But no they have chosen the lazy route.
Offering visitors a nes or SNES classic - which are recent, official, Nintendo products would be less embarrassing than using a windows PC.