Dolphin is still a wonder of engineering. Still one of the most impressive emulators. It's one of the few emulators that has an organized team of people who are willing to work together, instead of having all the developers make their own, worse emulators. GameCube and Wii emulation is infinitely better for it.
Dolphin is great but I wish Nintendo would just get behind / build an emulation platform for all of it's legacy content and sell it to me for $100 - $150.. The NES Classic is a great example of what they could do (minus the awful shortages).
Yes, this would be great, but I don't see how they could ever achieve it the way you or I envision. Emulators like Dolphin allow us to play (almost) any game from the associated era. As far as I know Nintendo can't just re-release all the games developed for their consoles; the publishers/rights holders would have to do that. So while yes, Nintendo could release an official emulator for PC (like they do for their consoles) the library of compatible games would be rather small (just like on their console emulators).
Alternatively they could of course build an emulator just like Dolphin which plays normal disc/cart images, but again what use is that? The average consumer can't rip their own images, and downloading images that you don't own the original for is illegal. So there's not much utility to Nintendo's target market. Plus, I believe this could potentially erode the relationship that Nintendo has with publishers. Publishers demand a platform that will help them maintain control over the IP. If Nintendo releases an official, unlocked emulator they're saying to publishers that Nintendo will protect their IP ... but only for so long. That's in contrast to today where publishers are effectively guaranteed infinite protection.
On the bright side, emulation will likely be better for this latest generation of consoles, because they've become increasingly similar to PCs.
They have something similar to this via Virtual Console on the Wii U and 3DS. You can buy select older games and play them natively.
If we ever want the kind of thing you're discussing to be feasible or people like those who work on Dolphin to get compensated for the great work they perform, we need to fix our copyright laws.
I'd easily pay $400+ if there were a Nintendo switch like console that would play all legacy consoles up to and including GameCube. If Wii is too hard to include in that, so be it.
Even if they did that, some important games would be missing due to licensing issues (e.g. Goldeneye on the N64). Unless you mean a console that could fit all the original cartridges, not just play downloaded copies of them.
Emulators can be used for more than just playing games. Consider debugging and reverse engineering; hacks, fan translations and homebrew software development; input recording and tool-assisted speedruns... I doubt an official emulator is going to support any of that.
More fundamentally, emulators act as executable documentation for the hardware, preserving it and its entire software library. Official emulators are likely to be closed-source, providing as little knowledge about the emulated system as possible.
Nintendo has rightly identified that their biggest potential competitor is themselves. They will never release SSBM with netplay because then a large portion of people would never buy another Smash Bros game again.
You can't even buy the original 18 year old Smash Bros on the virtual console!
>"They will never release SSBM with netplay because then a large portion of people would never buy another Smash Bros game again."
SSBM is hardly a perfect game, I'm sure Nintendo could improve upon it if they tried.
However, I do agree they're their own worst enemy. I don't see why they would be against Project M when it was giving them such valuable feedback about what the active player base wanted.
They weren't actively against Project M. For the most part, they turned a blind eye to it. It's just in a bit of a legal grey area that makes it the elephant in the room.
It definitely provided insight to the competitive scene, but many people forget just how many people play this game casually - items on, no stage bans. Nintendo tries to cater to both audiences simultaneously, with moderate success in Smash 4. Melee catered to the competitive, Brawl to the casual, and Smash 4 has proven itself the most flexible title in the series. I'd say they're doing well as it is.
