Rumors have been going around for a while that Nintendo is already finalizing their successor to the Wii, with many calling it the "Wii HD". Patcher has been blabbing about for ages about how there will be a Wii HD unveiled the next year (although wrong every year), and even more important, a guy from Nintendo of France "leaking" the specs of the next Wii (from the same guy that leaked the CORRECT specs of the Wii itself before anyone else did).
 
Thanks to the latest in computer graphics, the long running emulator Dolphin finally became capable of running Gamecube and Wii games on a computer, in any screen resolution you want. But guys around the net have been noting that things you didn't notice on the Wii can now be visible thanks to the larger definition. Which is weird, because that shouldn't happen. If you make an SD game, no need to make a texture bigger than what can be shown from the resolution on a part of the game where you never get close to inspect in-game.
 
This has been noted on New Super Mario Bros. Wii:
 

I love it when crazy conspiracies have photographic evidence. Wii HD sounds good to me.

I hope not, im not going to spend more money on a system that should have been hd to begin with it couldn't have been that hard to slap a hdmi or use the component and slap a scaler chip in there.

I will not be surprised if it does happen. Only yesterday I was looking a Super Mario Galaxy 2 pondering if this was Nintendo's first official HD game, a game which has graphics designed to be output in HD also. 

" I hope not, im not going to spend more money on a system that should have been hd to begin with it couldn't have been that hard to slap a hdmi or use the component and slap a scaler chip in there. "

Its an interesting topic. Sure weird to think that the 360 has already been around as long as the original XBOX.

No, they aren't. Day 1 Wii games looked just as good and great in HD. Why would they make content lower quality than they're capable? I'm not sure what they think is "invisible" in 480p, that 480p image doesn't reflect what it's really like, some TVs may have better upscalers than the shit shown.

Scaling back production numbers sounds like a perfectly natural result of the slower, yet still great, Wii sales. I mean, they did have to keep ramping up production to meet demand until late 2008 or later. It makes sense that now the demand is more than simply met they scale back down. Clearly they couldn't keep producing the same insane numbers they did when the system was struggling to meet the public's demand.

NSMBWii is a 300mb game that is based on the DS game's engine. Maybe, just maybe, they didn't reduce asset size because there was no damn need to do it?

The "native resolution" of the hud is certainly less than 1080p. 720p perhaps, but it's too blurry and smudgy to be 1:1 at the 1080p zoom level. 
 
Even the fonts look blurrier than they would be if it was 1080p. Look at the lack of sharp line between the black and white edges: there's a few pixels of blurring going on.
 
Also yeah, even some elements of the SSBB hud looks sharper than 480p. However that's not to say Wii games look bad in 1080p. In fact they look much better than expected.

When the change comes, I will change with it.  I am not bothered one way or the other.  I look forward to Wii HD when it comes and I hope it is just a simple upgrade of the current Wii.

" @WilliamRLBaker said:

" I hope not, im not going to spend more money on a system that should have been hd to begin with it couldn't have been that hard to slap a hdmi or use the component and slap a scaler chip in there. "

Wii HD would be the Wii's successor, the same as the PS4 and the next Xbox.  It's kinda dumb saying you shouldn't have bought the PS2 since the PS3 would have come out 6 years later.  And remember that the Wii being in HD back in 2006 would have resulted costing even more than a PS3 (the most expensive things of the Wii was the motion control technology), which would have had instant failure when the depression came in 2008. "

" @Willy105 said:

" @WilliamRLBaker said:

" I hope not, im not going to spend more money on a system that should have been hd to begin with it couldn't have been that hard to slap a hdmi or use the component and slap a scaler chip in there. "

Wii HD would be the Wii's successor, the same as the PS4 and the next Xbox.  It's kinda dumb saying you shouldn't have bought the PS2 since the PS3 would have come out 6 years later.  And remember that the Wii being in HD back in 2006 would have resulted costing even more than a PS3 (the most expensive things of the Wii was the motion control technology), which would have had instant failure when the depression came in 2008. "

It may be a dumb thing to make the PS2-PS3, Wii-WiiHD comparison. The PS3 is not a PS2 with High Def. "

" @Alexander said:

" @Willy105 said:

" @WilliamRLBaker said:

" I hope not, im not going to spend more money on a system that should have been hd to begin with it couldn't have been that hard to slap a hdmi or use the component and slap a scaler chip in there. "

Wii HD would be the Wii's successor, the same as the PS4 and the next Xbox.  It's kinda dumb saying you shouldn't have bought the PS2 since the PS3 would have come out 6 years later.  And remember that the Wii being in HD back in 2006 would have resulted costing even more than a PS3 (the most expensive things of the Wii was the motion control technology), which would have had instant failure when the depression came in 2008. "

It may be a dumb thing to make the PS2-PS3, Wii-WiiHD comparison. The PS3 is not a PS2 with High Def. "

It may be a dumb thing to make claims about what a currently nonexistent or at least not revealed system is or isn't. Wii HD is simply an abstract description. For some it may mean a Wii with HD output, which sounds very unlikely, for others it's the Wii's successor, with whatever new features and capabilities Nintendo wishes to include. In the case of Willi105 I guess it reffers to the next Nintendo system, whatever it ends up being. "

may

  • modal verb ( 3rd sing. present may; past might) 1 expressing possibility. 2 expressing permission. 3 expressing a wish or hope. 
 
See number 1 and try harder.

" @Willy105 said:

" @WilliamRLBaker said:

" I hope not, im not going to spend more money on a system that should have been hd to begin with it couldn't have been that hard to slap a hdmi or use the component and slap a scaler chip in there. "

Wii HD would be the Wii's successor, the same as the PS4 and the next Xbox.  It's kinda dumb saying you shouldn't have bought the PS2 since the PS3 would have come out 6 years later.  And remember that the Wii being in HD back in 2006 would have resulted costing even more than a PS3 (the most expensive things of the Wii was the motion control technology), which would have had instant failure when the depression came in 2008. "

It may be a dumb thing to make the PS2-PS3, Wii-WiiHD comparison. The PS3 is not a PS2 with High Def. "

And I don't see why you're working with that particular assumption and wish for everyone to work with that assumption. Willy started this thread with his own assumptions of what a WiiHD may be, which is clearly just the Wii's successor. He could have said Wii2 or Wii plus. Whatever. We don't know. His opening line explains that he's talking about a potential Wii successor and not any particular assumption over what it is well enough.

" @Willy105: We're working on the assumption that a Wii HD will be a Wii that plays Wii games in High Definition. If that were to be the case the difference between the Wii and the Wii HD couldn't be compared to the PS2 and PS3. That's all I'm saying, I don't see what the Gamecube has to do with it. "

Weren't a lot of Dreamcast game textures at a higher res than the machine could handle? I remember them saying that with the XBLA release of MvC2.

"...yes it is. If the Wii is a Gamecube with a new controller, then the PS3 is the PS2 with HD.  Forgive me for using fanboyish terms, but that's how you are doing it.
 
It's very fanboyish, but they even follow the same design. It plays the same type of games, it uses the same controller, plays movies, and is everything what the PS2 stood for.  Say what you want about the Wii, but it definitely is less like it's predecessor than the PS3 is."

Anyway, these are just rumors.
 
We never know what will happen next-gen.
 
Nobody predicted how this gen would go for sure.

If they do, I hope Capcom ports their 360 / PS3 titles over to the Wii... if that would be possible with the "new" specs.

It would take a lot more than creating a handful of higher quality assets to run Wii games on higher spec hardware properly.  Emulators are a different story, you're using far more expensive and high end hardware, that's doing a lot more work.  That wouldn't be a commercially viable solution.
 
Whenever you're dealing with polygonal scaling or texture scaling of any kind, most of the time you're not going to have perfect 1:1 assets to resolution equality.  edit - hell that's why texture filtering and mip mapping exist!
 
Details such as those 'comic book' dot patterns for the backgrounds could just as easily be dithering of lower bit depth textures.

Nice to know pirates are doing better than legitimate customers in the graphics department.

I'm not sure what I'm looking for here. All 3d games look better going through a PC emulator. How do you know they're not using some kind of shader addon or any number of other things which has seemingly 'added' to the texture? And its not a significant bump either. Sometimes textures seem to have more detail because the texture is made with a certain max size in mind, the largest it will show up in the game, and is rendered accordingly with that. So obviously you take that same texture and make it smaller for some smaller object, you'll suddenly have "new" textures pop in when you play it on the high res emulator. There are legitimate reasons for the textures to be there, and I think its probably pretty common, especially in a game like this that repurposes multiple textures so the game "feels" the same throughout. What was in the background is now in the foreground, and so on.

"Nice to know pirates are doing better than legitimate customers in the graphics department."

But uh. You are a pirate if you use Dolphin, because you're downloading illegal bios. 

" But uh. You are a pirate if you use Dolphin, because you're downloading illegal bios.  "

I don't think there will be a Wii HD in the near-future, because I just don't think the market really demands it. And I don't think it suits Nintendo's style anyway.

I was kinda thinking of this when I played the game on an SD TV. 
For the longest time, it seems that only Nintendo (and rarely if ever, third parties) output their games in a full widescreen. Some other games are usually in a 4:3 stretched mode, leaving two black bars at the sides. 
So it surprised me when I saw that NSMBWii was running in a widescreen resolution on an SD TV. The game was kept in a letterbox format instead of a 4:3 format. 
 
Just saying...

" @Willy105:   Dude, I hate to disappoint you but if you look at those pics, you'll note that the platform textures look exactly the same in both 1080p and 480p.  You're confusing higher triangle counts (koopa head, eyes etc is scaled up to the same size in a larger area 720x480 vs 1920x1080 so the triangle count is also increased to compensate) and anti aliasing (frramebuffer multiplied by AA mode type then scaled down to target resolution) on the actual 3D rendered items and characters with potential WiiHD future proofing.  This is a common trait of 3D emulation and higher target resolutions. "

Confirmed then?

No.

" @SeriouslyNow said:

" @Willy105:   Dude, I hate to disappoint you but if you look at those pics, you'll note that the platform textures look exactly the same in both 1080p and 480p.  You're confusing higher triangle counts (koopa head, eyes etc is scaled up to the same size in a larger area 720x480 vs 1920x1080 so the triangle count is also increased to compensate) and anti aliasing (frramebuffer multiplied by AA mode type then scaled down to target resolution) on the actual 3D rendered items and characters with potential WiiHD future proofing.  This is a common trait of 3D emulation and higher target resolutions. "

Well the textures are not going to change, but you can definitely see more of them that you couldn't before. Which is the reason for this post. "

" @Willy105 said:

" @SeriouslyNow said:

" @Willy105:   Dude, I hate to disappoint you but if you look at those pics, you'll note that the platform textures look exactly the same in both 1080p and 480p.  You're confusing higher triangle counts (koopa head, eyes etc is scaled up to the same size in a larger area 720x480 vs 1920x1080 so the triangle count is also increased to compensate) and anti aliasing (frramebuffer multiplied by AA mode type then scaled down to target resolution) on the actual 3D rendered items and characters with potential WiiHD future proofing.  This is a common trait of 3D emulation and higher target resolutions. "

Well the textures are not going to change, but you can definitely see more of them that you couldn't before. Which is the reason for this post. "

No mate.  The textures are made for the target resolution and the reason you can 'see more of them' use due to raised aniso and FSAA.  That's all.  This is very common with 3D emulation.  For example the Sony Playstation did not have hardware perspective correction yet this is a common feature of all modern PC 3D acceleration cards since the 3Dfx Voodoo days, so games like Gran Turismo when emulated via ESPXE or Bleem! (two popular Playstation emulators) it looked so much better than it did on a real Playstation because the road and side details didn't get warped as they did on a real Playstation. "

" @Willy105: 
 
Sorry mate, wrong again.  Either you didn't read what I wrote or don't understand it.  Perspective Correction is not made by the emulation software, it's default feature of all modern 3D acceleration graphics chipsets and cards which support bilinear filtering (which means all of them since the era of the 3Dfx Voodoo).      The Polygon increase comment applies to all 3D emulated games as long as the target resolution is larger.  Perspective Correction was used as another example where default features of one type increase the quality of the output of the thing being emulated .  As to the texture, FSAA is about increasing the IQ of the rendered screen.  It's hard to know what AA type was applied but if it was any of the Q modes then the picture is broken into blocks and the edges are analysed in a grid, that grid is rotated, sharpened, rotated back and then passed  back to the framebuffer where each frame is stitched back together.  This will indeed sharpen some textures, especially those at the edges of polys. Nvidia also has some texture sharpening support for OpenGL which can by enabled independently of AA via Rivatuner.  Texture sharpening does not indicate a higher resolution texture.You're grasping at straws mate.  Really.  I'm not making bad comparisons,  You're just hoping I am. "

" @SeriouslyNow: Is this a joke? You cannot add polygons to a 3d model. A GPU can add polygons to a patch, but an emulator is not going to add polygons to a model. The resolution of a 3d model is completely independent of the display resolution. I call bullshit unless you can provide me documentation otherwise.  "

" @torus said:

" @SeriouslyNow: Is this a joke? You cannot add polygons to a 3d model. A GPU can add polygons to a patch, but an emulator is not going to add polygons to a model. The resolution of a 3d model is completely independent of the display resolution. I call bullshit unless you can provide me documentation otherwise.  "

That depends on whether the emulation is Low Level (LLE) or High Level (HLE).  Dolphin is a High Level emulator, much like the first working Nintendo 64 emulator; UltraHLE .  It doesn't require a bios because it does not emulate what is not necessary.  The Gamecube and Wii both use rather old and commonly known practices when it comes to screen rendering, so HLE is enough to be able to get many games to run.  So when the emulator is told to draw the screen space at a resolution which the Wii could never do it scales all the 3D objects via tessellation to match the target res, so that the rest of the scene will look referentially the same as it would on a real Wii.  Call bullshit all you want, I'm not going supply anything.  Go look for yourself. :) "

" @SeriouslyNow said:

" @torus said:

" @SeriouslyNow: Is this a joke? You cannot add polygons to a 3d model. A GPU can add polygons to a patch, but an emulator is not going to add polygons to a model. The resolution of a 3d model is completely independent of the display resolution. I call bullshit unless you can provide me documentation otherwise.  "

That depends on whether the emulation is Low Level (LLE) or High Level (HLE).  Dolphin is a High Level emulator, much like the first working Nintendo 64 emulator; UltraHLE .  It doesn't require a bios because it does not emulate what is not necessary.  The Gamecube and Wii both use rather old and commonly known practices when it comes to screen rendering, so HLE is enough to be able to get many games to run.  So when the emulator is told to draw the screen space at a resolution which the Wii could never do it scales all the 3D objects via tessellation to match the target res, so that the rest of the scene will look referentially the same as it would on a real Wii.  Call bullshit all you want, I'm not going supply anything.  Go look for yourself. :) "

The first part of this post is irrelevant. The second is just a reiteration of what you already posted, with no backing to your statement. You are flat out wrong. An emulator can't 'tessellate' more detail into a model than already exists. This is simply not how tessellation works. There are ways to make a model look better through software, such as displacement mapping, but this isn't going to magically improve the image quality beyond what is created by the developer.  This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. "

LOL

" LOL "

Meh. I just want to play Muramasa.