http://patpend.net/articles/ar/sil10.html
It’s interesting that Nintendo was contemplating a commercial SNES emulator for Windows. That would have made things a lot simpler for us console/PC fans. No need to track down used cartridges, a simple and cheap system of purchasing old school games…
(I know virtual console exists, but I’ve never put much faith in console digital distribution systems. The wii u VC debacle, and Sony’s announcement about PSN downloads and the PS4 just confirm my fears.)
Given enormous amount of ROM piracy online that took place since then, killing project seems like a rather stupid blunder. Nintendo stood at least fighting chance of getting some revenue from all those nostalgic thrillseekers armed with Web browsers.
But given company’s conservative nature, missing out on this kind of opportunity isn’t least bit surprising.
This is only sort of related, but I just ordered a USB NES controller to play Super Meat Boy. I’m one of those people who literally cannot separate the idea of Nintendo from the idea of their own childhood. Right now, no kidding, I’d probably pay a hundred bucks for a full-featured Gamecube emulator. C’mon, Nintendo!
Actually now that they have an HD console I’ll probably just get one and then play Virtual Console games on it… but it’s not at all the same.
bsnes is pretty good. SEGA hired Steve Snake, the author of KEGA Fusion to port their Genesis stuff to PS2 and other platforms.
Thanks. That was a good read. However considering that there are only 2 people who worked on silhouette, the writer of the article and his partner, wouldn’t it be easy for Nintendo to track down who released it? Also since silhouette was designed and coded through official Nintendo resources isn’t it a property of Nintendo?
I think that Nintendo (US) was flirting with the idea of emulation back then because it’s future was so uncertain considering the gigantic market share they lost to Sony.
As the anonymous dev mentions in the link, the guy who came up with the idea of going ahead with a consumer friendly emulator was axed in the end.
Now that Nintendo is much healthier financially and in terms of market share, there is no hope of them entertaining the idea of commercial emulation on the PC seriously.
They would’ve gotten some of my money, if this had gone ahead. Plenty of great games on the SNES never saw release around here. I only got to play them on a PC, from 1998 forward.
There was and is a lot of suspicion that Silhouette was really just a variant of Snes9x. The interfaces are almost identical (icons included), and they both use the same file formats (.sms ROMs, .frz savestates). Gary Henderson (one of the two original creators of Snes9x) was considered the most likely culprit–Nintendo supposedly killed the Snes9x project, but Henderson apparently said somewhere that he would keep working on it regardless, he just wouldn’t release the work. So the theory is that he released a new version anonymously, with the whole “Silhouette” thing as a sort of ironic cover story. Of course Nintendo could just deny Silhouette came from them, but hey, the story already has an answer for that (“I wouldn’t be surprised if they denied that it ever existed”). Also interesting to note that Snes9x had two original developers and this is also the number of people who supposedly worked on Silhouette. Anyway, the next year they just open-sourced their work on Snes9x and that brings us more or less up to date. AFAIK nobody has ever confirmed that Silhouette was a hoax and nobody has ever verified the internal-Nintendo-project story, so it’s all still speculative.
There was and is a lot of suspicion that Silhouette was really just a variant of Snes9x. The interfaces are almost identical (icons included), and they both use the same file formats (.sms ROMs, .frz savestates). Gary Henderson (one of the two original creators of Snes9x) was considered the most likely culprit–Nintendo supposedly killed the Snes9x project, but Henderson apparently said somewhere that he would keep working on it regardless, he just wouldn’t release the work. So the theory is that he released a new version anonymously, with the whole “Silhouette” thing as a sort of ironic cover story. Of course Nintendo could just deny Silhouette came from them, but hey, they have a bulletproof answer for that (“I wouldn’t be surprised if they denied that it ever existed”). Also interesting to note that Snes9x had two original developers and this is also the number of people who purportedly worked on Silhouette. Anyway, the next year they just open-sourced their work on Snes9x and that brings us more or less up to date. AFAIK nobody has ever admitted it was a hoax and nobody has ever verified the internal-project story, so it’s all still speculative.