Nintendo insisted that the 3DS was not being replaced by the switch, in the same way that they told me that the game boy line would keep going after the DS began.
Nintendo has never really wanted to discontinue a platform. Their vision was always that developers could support old and new platforms together through funky cross-compact measures.
• Did you know that the SNES’s CPU starts up in a “NES 6502 compatibility” mode, sort of like x86-64 processors starting up in 16-bit real mode? It’s fully possible to design and build a game entirely for the NES as a 6502-assembler codebase; and then to “port” the game to the SNES, by taking that very same 6502-assembler codebase, and just adding a few minor SNES-level “enhancements” that temporarily switch to 65c816 mode, do something, then switch back to 6502 mode. Since the market penetration of the NES was so high, many games in the early 90s were “dual-released” this way.
• Did you know it was possible to create a GBC cart that would act as a fully-fledged SNES game (i.e. mapping a separate SNES game ROM) when plugged into a SNES through a Super Gameboy? Or to have “progressive enhancement” logic in the GBC ROM itself that draws full-color sprites (OBJs) when played on a Super Gameboy? AFAIK, literally nobody has ever fully exploited this, not even demoscene devs.
But, well, third-party devs just seemingly have no interest in releasing for old platforms. They want to “be where the action is.” And Nintendo can’t carry the momentum of a platform all by itself. (Plus, Nintendo’s software dev-teams are too busy acting as stewards and shepherds for how to make use of the newest-gen hardware capabilities — by making games for them, and by interfacing with third-parties — to have any labor left over for making games for older consoles.)
That being said, Nintendo did try to keep the gameboy line going after the DS. They released the GB Micro. It was its whole own thing, with its own product code (OXY) that signalled that they had likely built up separate factories just to build it. But basically nobody bought it.
(But really, I think Nintendo was speaking to developers there, not to gamers. They meant that there’d still be a point, as a game studio, in producing GBA games, because the DS would also play them.)
>>Did you know it was possible to create a GBC cart that would act as a fully-fledged SNES game (i.e. mapping a separate SNES game ROM) when plugged into a SNES through a Super Gameboy? Or to have “progressive enhancement” logic in the GBC ROM itself that draws full-color sprites (OBJs) when played on a Super Gameboy? AFAIK, literally nobody has ever fully exploited this, not even demoscene devs.
> Did you know it was possible to create a GBC cart that would act as a fully-fledged SNES game (i.e. mapping a separate SNES game ROM) when plugged into a SNES through a Super Gameboy? Or to have “progressive enhancement” logic in the GBC ROM itself that draws full-color sprites (OBJs) when played on a Super Gameboy? AFAIK, literally nobody has ever fully exploited this, not even demoscene devs.
Fully exploited. Space Invaders was a partial exploitation at best. It was just a tiny stateless SNES ROM-image, that got loaded from the GB cart's ROM into the SNES's tiny work RAM, and then executed from there (leaving approximately zero WRAM for actual gameplay state. Good thing it was Space Invaders!)
A full exploitation, IMHO, would look more like the thing Pokemon Stadium did with Pokemon RBY — but done purely in-cart in the GBC game. A SNES game that "interacts with" a GBC game through the SRAM, such that you're playing the same game, two different ways, when you put it in your SNES vs. when you put it in your Gameboy. (Pretty much like Dragon Quest XI Definitive Edition's ability to reboot the game between 3D and 16-bit mode.)
Of course, to do that, you'd need actual separate ROM chips in the GBC cart for the SNES game, so that the SNES ROM-image could be larger than WRAM yet still fast. All that ROM would be untenable to fit into a GBC-cart sized cartridge even in 2003, the last year of the GBC's lifetime. It'd be perfectly doable now, though!)
It's a good question. I don't think anyone's ever put together a definitive list. I don't even remember any specific examples off-hand, just that some games would be mentioned as being dual releases in Nintendo Power coverage. (This happened a lot more with NES + GB or SNES + GB dual-releases, but these are obviously not "source ports" but rather ground-up rewrites, so not interesting here.)
Of course, some of those are sequels that just happen to share a name; some are ground-up-rewrite-style dual releases; and some are just unofficial ports — people trying to recreate a SNES game on the NES or vice-versa, without access to the original code. But there are likely a good few in there that were SNES-enhanced-NES-code dual-releases.
If someone here is a gaming content-creator, there's a very unique deep-dive essay waiting to be written here, about how these games work. (Retro Game Mechanics Explained, I'm looking at you.)
IIRC neither of those games are examples of uses of the SGB OBJ layer. They're just uses of the SGB CHR layer (custom borders) and of setting sprite palettes distinct from the tile palette (seemingly-custom sprites.) Correct me if I'm wrong, though!
According to https://tcrf.net/Super_Game_Boy#OBJ_TRN_.28Object_Transfer.2..., the SGB OBJ_TRN command wasn't even intended to be used by games! And it was removed in all revisions of the SGB after the first. It's no wonder it went unused. I wonder what Nintendo were thinking, including it in the first place!
But also, to be clear, when I said "fully exploited", the "fully" part is important. :) I didn't mean that nobody has ever used these features in some trivial way in a GB game. (IIRC, the definitive example of a trivial use of the SGB OBJ layer, is in Donkey Kong '94.) I meant that nobody has ever really pushed these features to their limits. There's a lot that can be done with the SGB (https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/SGB_Functions) that I've literally never seen a game doing, let alone doing something interesting with.
Using all the SGB features together, you could likely cook up a SNES-looking or GBA-looking game, running purely on the GB's Z80 CPU! Surely not something a time-constrained game studio would care to do; but a hobbyist, as a passion project? Sure, why not?
> Nintendo insisted that the 3DS was not being replaced by the switch, in the same way that they told me that the game boy line would keep going after the DS began.
If the Switch had been a market failure (or had the DS been, back in its day), Nintendo probably would have kept the older system alive. But once it became clear that the Switch & DS were runaway successes, they could wind down the older hardware without losing their major source of revenue.
Obviously. But it should be understood that "is not being replaced by" is always a time-windowed statement. In the grand scheme of things, everything new replaces everything old eventually.
Something tells me this is Nintendo hedging bets