Rootbeer

Yawn!

Wake me up when somebody casemods a 1.8" hard drive into an Odyssey^2 cartridge, or maybe a photo printer into a Neo*Geo cart.

"Rare can port these games to XBL because they are the oringal developers they just need to code it for the 360 not emulate the 64. Many companys do this when they release those classic game packs."

Um... those classic game packs are almost always just a collection of original game code, bundled with an emulator.

Up until about 10 years ago, most console games were written 100% in assembly language for the hardware they were written for. Porting ASM from one platform to another is extremely difficult and time-consuming work; it just doesn't happen.

"Ms can put any old nintendo games they want on xbla, as long as rare holds the license, and the dev rights."

Possibly; we don't really know the contractual terms under which those games were licensed originally: who retains IP rights to the code, whether the game was produced as a work-for-hire, etc. Without that information we can only speculate.

"I'd rather have those provided via Xbox Live Arcade anyway, even when I get a Revolution. Then I wouldn't have to use a non-standard controller for a standardly controlled game."

Are Gamecube controllers "standard" enough for you? I'm about 90% certain that Nintendo will let you use those for retro gaming on the Revo. It's not like you'll be flicking the remove to move Super Mario around, Power Glove-stylie.

"how awesome it would be if the virtual console let you play old games online against people. That's almost positively not going to happen"

Why not? The only data you need to exchange between 2 copies of an NES emulator playing the same game are the program counter register (to keep the emus in sync) and the controller status registers. There's no reason you couldn't get performance at least as good as any other networked game from such a setup. Heck, you'd even have plenty of bandwidth left for live voice chat.

It's not impossible that that's the big surprise announcement they're still teasing for the Revolution...

Were the global real-time clock in the DS over/underclocked, I would expect to see the kind of behavior shown in the video. It wouldn't be just the CPU cramming more instructions into each frame; it would be a different frame rate in the video subsystem, a different sample rate in the audio subsystem, etc.

However, I doubt that the global RTC (assuming there even IS one) in a DS could be patched out to an external device without introducing timing problems, and especially not without taking the DS's casing apart. I call shenanigans.

Gosh, there sure are a lot of twins and triplets in the audience tonight...