Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
I don't think you emulate hardware. You emulate how the data and code is handled, but you typically don't emulate the speed, power, and processing style of the computer chips in those consoles.
Things were very different back then. They didn't just code things and then throw them at computer parts and expect it to handle things. They very closely manipulated the inner workings of those computer chips in such a way that they knew the details of those components.
If you set the same limitations as the hardware, that is you manually doing so in your emulator. I think that was the point being discussed: that it would have to be purposely coded to function the same as the original hardware. Just writing emulation to play the game wouldn't do that by default.
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
It does if you want it to run with the minimum of spellchecking. That's why I gave the PS Vita example. It has a faster read speed option, but it defaults to the original. Because the faster read speed can cause problems. Console emulators run like an imaginary version of the old console, limitations included.
Either way the games should have those limitations, because these types of releases aren't just about being able to play the games, they're about preservation. And if the games are different than the original release then they haven't preserved anything.
No I don't.
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
My main complaint with how the review characterized it was this line specifically (emphasis mine):
Even though it’s not quite detrimental, the graphical glitches I found myself often experiencing in the game were borderline unacceptable, with pixels and colors simply acting sporadically, especially towards the edges of the screen.
It's like... really? Arguing that they should have removed sprite flicker, etc is one thing. But calling it "borderline unacceptable" just doesn't sit right with me.
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
That's really the crux of it. The reviewer is arguing for an improved, renovated version of the games, and you want an archival 1:1 of the original game. The complaint is valid from his point of view, and not from yours.
For what it's worth, I like remasters more than rereleases. I can get copies of the old games. Heck, I could already get em on the Wii U and 3DS VC, right? Would've been nice for them to get the Sonic CD treatment is all. I don't hold it against the collection, but it's worth pointing out to the folks reading the review that they're the same as they ever were.
Performance issues when relating to that era are a tricky beast. I get the reasoning. In 20 years time, I don't think people will be claiming the performance issues in an Assassin's Creed game is integral to its preservation. On the flip side, stuff like sprite flicker, sound limitations, and slowdown are arguably part of 8-bit charm.
It's sort of like listening to music on vinyl. Sure the crystal clear digital MP3 version is completely superior in every way. And if that's all you cared about... then you wouldn't be listening to vinyl. And yet people do. Because of the aspects that are otherwise "inferior".
Final example: Super Mario Maker has a mode that degrades the image and makes it look like it's playing on an old 80's CRT TV. These TV's are complete shit today, so why would anybody ever use this mode, much less program it in?
Nostalgia, that's why.
You could say the whole nature of nostalgia is one of "You had to be there to appreciate it". As far as games go, you can't really go wrong with the "more options" route. Have a switch that lets you turn it on or off.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
I would like a non derp mode without any technical limitations to see how it plays. They can retain the strict emulation too. Having both modes would go a long way to making the collection seem less of a cheap cash in to me.
Like, I don't think retaining the 30FPS frame rate of Ps3 Last of Us was something to be preserved. Ditto the absolute train wreck Ps2 frame rate of Shadow of the Colossus. Therefore, yeah I say get rid of flicker and slow down. I want to see it play tight like a Shovel Knight Era sidescroller.
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
Wait, PS4 Last Of Us wasn't 60fps!? What was even the point? :I
Also yeh, I think Shovel Knight may have spoiled me on retro games for a while.
imo when it comes to nes era games, the technical limitations fed directly into design so frequently that it makes more sense to preserve the weird quirks caused by them
I don't think you emulate hardware. You emulate how the data and code is handled, but you typically don't emulate the speed, power, and processing style of the computer chips in those consoles.
Things were very different back then. They didn't just code things and then throw them at computer parts and expect it to handle things. They very closely manipulated the inner workings of those computer chips in such a way that they knew the details of those components.
If you set the same limitations as the hardware, that is you manually doing so in your emulator. I think that was the point being discussed: that it would have to be purposely coded to function the same as the original hardware. Just writing emulation to play the game wouldn't do that by default.
You're still missing something crucial. An NES is a combination of two things - the physical hardware and the firmware. The firmware is a software interface that reads data from the game code and converts it into machine instructions. So a game like Mega Man, when it's made, is aware of the limitations of the hardware it's going to run on. There might be machine instructions that say The sprite at index 0 has it's position stored in register X (where register x corresponds to an actual hardware memory location. The sprite at index 7 has it's position stored in register X+8. Now if the NES only has 8 registers available, and they want 9 sprites on screen, they might say something like "copy the position in register 7 to somewhere else in memory, and put the position of sprite 9 in register 7." That "somewhere else" might be a memory address that's slower to read from.
Now here's the thing. If you emulate the NES firmware on something will a thousand registers, the game instructions are still going to say "copy the position in register 7 to somewhere else in memory, and put the position of sprite 9 in register 7." The game doesn't know shit about what it's being run on. Even if you wrote some kind of NES firmware that has support for those extra registers, there's no way to convert the game's machine code back into source code and then recompile it for your new firmware. And nobody out there is making new NES games that are going to take advantage of it. Why would you do that? It's just PC game development at that point.
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
That's really the crux of it. The reviewer is arguing for an improved, renovated version of the games, and you want an archival 1:1 of the original game. The complaint is valid from his point of view, and not from yours.
For what it's worth, I like remasters more than rereleases. I can get copies of the old games. Heck, I could already get em on the Wii U and 3DS VC, right? Would've been nice for them to get the Sonic CD treatment is all. I don't hold it against the collection, but it's worth pointing out to the folks reading the review that they're the same as they ever were.
Not really. I would be fine if they had removed all the flicker and slowdown. In fact, I think I would prefer that. I just dislike the idea that the graphics are "unacceptable" because they are presented the way they literally have been in every single iteration of these games ever released. It's especially insulting given how much work they put into really high quality emulation.
Sprite flicker is from simply displaying too much on the screen than the hardware could handle. Sorta like the graphical version of dropped frames. So something has to vanish. And developers learned you could squeeze a little more out of the graphics if you were willing to put up with this little glitching. Either way emulating on faster hardware wouldn't do a thing for it. Incidentally this is why the big detailed bosses of the era were against pitch black backgrounds, because the cost of that detail meant you couldn't have much else.
Slowdown on the other hand I assume is exactly the same then as it is now. You're giving the CPU too much to do, and it's slowing down. And if you emulate it later on, that CPU that once groaned at that workload now just does it without blinking.
At the very least, I assume that's how it would be anyways. I don't have professional insight or anything.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
That's really the crux of it. The reviewer is arguing for an improved, renovated version of the games, and you want an archival 1:1 of the original game. The complaint is valid from his point of view, and not from yours.
For what it's worth, I like remasters more than rereleases. I can get copies of the old games. Heck, I could already get em on the Wii U and 3DS VC, right? Would've been nice for them to get the Sonic CD treatment is all. I don't hold it against the collection, but it's worth pointing out to the folks reading the review that they're the same as they ever were.
Not really. I would be fine if they had removed all the flicker and slowdown. In fact, I think I would prefer that. I just dislike the idea that the graphics are "unacceptable" because they are presented the way they literally have been in every single iteration of these games ever released. It's especially insulting given how much work they put into really high quality emulation.
Didn't know the eShop version was gonna be that much cheaper. Might get it after all ($30 seemed a bit much).
It's a bug, there was something on twitter where Capcom was telling people (hilariously) not to buy it at that price. What are they gonna do, charge you after?
You better get it if it's still that cheap, it will go back up soon if it hasn't already.
Didn't know the eShop version was gonna be that much cheaper. Might get it after all ($30 seemed a bit much).
It's a bug, there was something on twitter where Capcom was telling people (hilariously) not to buy it at that price. What are they gonna do, charge you after?
You better get it if it's still that cheap, it will go back up soon if it hasn't already.
Read that tweet again. It "should be" $14.99
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
Performance issues when relating to that era are a tricky beast. I get the reasoning. In 20 years time, I don't think people will be claiming the performance issues in an Assassin's Creed game is integral to its preservation. On the flip side, stuff like sprite flicker, sound limitations, and slowdown are arguably part of 8-bit charm.
It's sort of like listening to music on vinyl. Sure the crystal clear digital MP3 version is completely superior in every way. And if that's all you cared about... then you wouldn't be listening to vinyl. And yet people do. Because of the aspects that are otherwise "inferior".
Final example: Super Mario Maker has a mode that degrades the image and makes it look like it's playing on an old 80's CRT TV. These TV's are complete shit today, so why would anybody ever use this mode, much less program it in?
Nostalgia, that's why.
You could say the whole nature of nostalgia is one of "You had to be there to appreciate it". As far as games go, you can't really go wrong with the "more options" route. Have a switch that lets you turn it on or off.
Actually, there are a few reasons to play on an old TV though. For one, visual lag is still a thing on newer TVs as opposed to old ones and can be huge in some older video games. Also, there are a few specific cases where some designers took advantage of how TV screens displayed pictures back then, and worked around that. Those games actually end up looking worse on new, crisp TVs. The most obvious example would be Lunar 2 (the sega CD version). There are certain color effects that look REALLY bad on new perfect TVs, that looked completely normal on older ones.
Nostalgia helps, but when a lot of gaming back then was built around the equipment of the time, it tends to just work better on it.
Also thanks @Delzhand , that is a much better explanation of what I was trying to say. I still don't understand that stuff well enough to explain it.
As for the arguments with regards to newer games running at lower FPS and comparing it to NES/SNES era stuff, that is so apples to oranges it is not even funny. For one, games nowadays are much more openly programmed to the point where they could run on almost any other hardware with minor tweaks. They are not so closely coded to the core of the system's hardware they were made for. Oh, and as was stated, the hardware limitations back then had a DIRECT impact on how games were designed. This is not even remotely the case now. The only thing hardware dictates now is fps and polys. There is very little people do with the games that they design that they have to say "well that aspect of our game can't work because the hardware isn't fast enough". Again, I am likely bad at explaining this, but really do not even try to compare it because it doesn't compare.
Anyway, as I said before it could have, and should have, been an option weather to have the MM games run authentic or not. I know for a fact it is possible to have the option at least. It might take a bit of work is all.
Kai_San on
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
Didn't know the eShop version was gonna be that much cheaper. Might get it after all ($30 seemed a bit much).
It's a bug, there was something on twitter where Capcom was telling people (hilariously) not to buy it at that price. What are they gonna do, charge you after?
You better get it if it's still that cheap, it will go back up soon if it hasn't already.
Read that tweet again. It "should be" $14.99
Oh really? That's surprising. I think it retails for more.
Didn't know the eShop version was gonna be that much cheaper. Might get it after all ($30 seemed a bit much).
It's a bug, there was something on twitter where Capcom was telling people (hilariously) not to buy it at that price. What are they gonna do, charge you after?
You better get it if it's still that cheap, it will go back up soon if it hasn't already.
Read that tweet again. It "should be" $14.99
Oh really? That's surprising. I think it retails for more.
amiibo tax
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
Didn't know the eShop version was gonna be that much cheaper. Might get it after all ($30 seemed a bit much).
It's a bug, there was something on twitter where Capcom was telling people (hilariously) not to buy it at that price. What are they gonna do, charge you after?
You better get it if it's still that cheap, it will go back up soon if it hasn't already.
Read that tweet again. It "should be" $14.99
Oh really? That's surprising. I think it retails for more.
amiibo tax
I mean the version without the amiibo. But maybe I'm wrong.
Didn't know the eShop version was gonna be that much cheaper. Might get it after all ($30 seemed a bit much).
It's a bug, there was something on twitter where Capcom was telling people (hilariously) not to buy it at that price. What are they gonna do, charge you after?
You better get it if it's still that cheap, it will go back up soon if it hasn't already.
Read that tweet again. It "should be" $14.99
Oh really? That's surprising. I think it retails for more.
amiibo tax
I mean the version without the amiibo. But maybe I'm wrong.
These games should not have slowdown or little graphical fuck ups. They should be pristine representations of what should have been, if not for the limitations of the time.
Now, having a "Retro" mode for when you feel nostalgic, with all of the original glitches and problems is perfectly fine. But not cleaning the games up proper is just being lazy.
Should they put a background on the large boss fights
Should the clone fight use new unique AI instead of repurposing elec man's because they didn't have the memory
Should they add more enemies where they would have before but didn't due to sprite restrictions
Should they put a background on the large boss fights
Should the clone fight use new unique AI instead of repurposing elec man's because they didn't have the memory
Should they add more enemies where they would have before but didn't due to sprite restrictions
Now you're just being silly. No one complains when PS1-2 era games are re-released running at higher resolutions and smoother framerates.
As mentioned before: It's an artifact on how they programmed the NES games back in those days. PS1-2 era games are made in a completely different manner. It's not comparable at all.
As I said before, I think the nes era games are unique when it comes to those sorts of fixes because so much the the design was tied to the restrictions
As mentioned before: It's an artifact on how they programmed the NES games back in those days. PS1-2 era games are made in a completely different manner. It's not comparable at all.
Indeed, it's not as if they can go 'assemble my assembly code for WiiU or 3DS' in their project settings, they're probably lucky if they have the code at all anymore.
If I had to guess on the design, they have what is basically a Virtual Machine. The Virtual Machine sets up the hardware and emulates the calls between the ROM and the hardware it's running on. They probably package the original ROM dump of the cartridge with this virtual machine in a neat little executable package for their console stores, since this would be the easiest way.
They probably could write bugfixes for various games, but you'd be fixing 30 year old hardware in code, and that would not be feasible because you'd need code-bases for every game in existence for that hardware, since each took advantage of these limitations in different ways.
Remastering is a different beast, they'd just be rewriting the game, and that is not an easy task at all. That's expensive, and you're probably looking at something far more expensive than a $5 NES game on the store. Are you willing to drop $40-60 on Mega-Man from the NES? Maybe. Probably not worth it economically.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
Should they put a background on the large boss fights
Should the clone fight use new unique AI instead of repurposing elec man's because they didn't have the memory
Should they add more enemies where they would have before but didn't due to sprite restrictions
Now you're just being silly. No one complains when PS1-2 era games are re-released running at higher resolutions and smoother framerates.
Like kind of try to read what many people have pointed out in pretty significant detail.
Those things are like, not even remotely comparable. One is a visual change and nothing more. One has a direct impact on HOW the game is played. It is not the same.
If you need the tl;dr version - after the 16 bit era, how games were made drastically changed. Comparing any aspects of one to the other is silly.
What many people are just kind of glazing over here is you are mostly asking for a remake. These were rereleases in a compilation. Remakes require redoing them from the ground up (at least when it comes to this era of games) in which case, usually MUCH more is done to update it. Or when it isn't, it is likely because they were half assing it and likely the redoing it from the ground up was done EXTREMELY half assed.
To think in simpler terms, think about GOG and dosbox. The way games worked back before roughly 1995 or so was that they were tied very tightly to the CPU's clock cycles. This is why, when bringing a game like Warcraft 1 or 2 (the DOS versions) into windows now-a-days, you need to adjust a lot of stuff to account for just how fast everything is now (and why dosbox slows it's cpu usage down when you tell it to).
A lot of the code really depends on known things about the CPU, and how the memory is mapped. This lets you do things like address a sprite, then do some color changes and shift it from a cloud to a bush (mario bros). But a lot of game internals rely on this stuff too, not just the visual stuff.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
You can notice that shift in game design with newer vs older games more easily too. Newer games, after that era, perform better on newer hardware without much redesign. Because they completely divorce themselves from the idea of how they did it back then and abstract out and away from the hardware.
Those games, mostly (DirectX kind of FUBARed their earlier compatibility at some point in the past), function even better today. Just look at Wacraft 3 vs Warcraft 2 (non battle.net edition). Getting it installed is relatively painless for WC3, WC2 requires you to perform summoning rituals, assuming your card is soundblaster compatible, or, you have dosbox doing most of the work.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
Just look at Wacraft 3 vs Warcraft 2 (non battle.net edition). Getting it installed is relatively painless for WC3, WC2 requires you to perform summoning rituals, assuming your card is soundblaster compatible, or, you have dosbox doing most of the work.
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
This is somewhat off topic, but I wanted to post this because I had literally watched it right before this topic came up.
The biggest thing that affects your understanding of this is how much you know and understand how assembly worked. Also the difference between assembly and modern programming languages.
This video has a lot of interesting stuff on its own, but around 6:59 it gives a straightforward example of the difference between how system back then (the gameboy in this example, but the NES was pretty much the same thing) and how current games are programmed.
Yeah I took a moment to find out that NES games were written in assembly. I had a single class in assembly in college.
There's no way I could ever make a usable game in assembly. That language is incredibly hard to use.
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
My opinion on programming seems to be the same as my opinion on games. For some reason I find Assembly very interesting and not that hard to follow. It took me a little bit to get beyond the idea of not having a direct if/then statement, other than that I kind of like that level of control. But I also have masochistic interests with my games too, loving me some unfair hard gaming.
Also it helps that some of my earliest understanding of programming was descriptions of how glitches and exploits worked in 8bit and 16bit era games. IF you ever read a good explanation about things like Pokemon's missingno or FF6's sketch glitch, you likely know at least something about assembly.
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Things were very different back then. They didn't just code things and then throw them at computer parts and expect it to handle things. They very closely manipulated the inner workings of those computer chips in such a way that they knew the details of those components.
If you set the same limitations as the hardware, that is you manually doing so in your emulator. I think that was the point being discussed: that it would have to be purposely coded to function the same as the original hardware. Just writing emulation to play the game wouldn't do that by default.
It's like... really? Arguing that they should have removed sprite flicker, etc is one thing. But calling it "borderline unacceptable" just doesn't sit right with me.
For what it's worth, I like remasters more than rereleases. I can get copies of the old games. Heck, I could already get em on the Wii U and 3DS VC, right? Would've been nice for them to get the Sonic CD treatment is all. I don't hold it against the collection, but it's worth pointing out to the folks reading the review that they're the same as they ever were.
It's sort of like listening to music on vinyl. Sure the crystal clear digital MP3 version is completely superior in every way. And if that's all you cared about... then you wouldn't be listening to vinyl. And yet people do. Because of the aspects that are otherwise "inferior".
Final example: Super Mario Maker has a mode that degrades the image and makes it look like it's playing on an old 80's CRT TV. These TV's are complete shit today, so why would anybody ever use this mode, much less program it in?
Nostalgia, that's why.
You could say the whole nature of nostalgia is one of "You had to be there to appreciate it". As far as games go, you can't really go wrong with the "more options" route. Have a switch that lets you turn it on or off.
Like, I don't think retaining the 30FPS frame rate of Ps3 Last of Us was something to be preserved. Ditto the absolute train wreck Ps2 frame rate of Shadow of the Colossus. Therefore, yeah I say get rid of flicker and slow down. I want to see it play tight like a Shovel Knight Era sidescroller.
Also yeh, I think Shovel Knight may have spoiled me on retro games for a while.
No it WAS 60Fps. Yet under the "preserve the original, warts and all" idea, that would be bad.
It was a 3DS code. I thought it was PC.
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You're still missing something crucial. An NES is a combination of two things - the physical hardware and the firmware. The firmware is a software interface that reads data from the game code and converts it into machine instructions. So a game like Mega Man, when it's made, is aware of the limitations of the hardware it's going to run on. There might be machine instructions that say The sprite at index 0 has it's position stored in register X (where register x corresponds to an actual hardware memory location. The sprite at index 7 has it's position stored in register X+8. Now if the NES only has 8 registers available, and they want 9 sprites on screen, they might say something like "copy the position in register 7 to somewhere else in memory, and put the position of sprite 9 in register 7." That "somewhere else" might be a memory address that's slower to read from.
Now here's the thing. If you emulate the NES firmware on something will a thousand registers, the game instructions are still going to say "copy the position in register 7 to somewhere else in memory, and put the position of sprite 9 in register 7." The game doesn't know shit about what it's being run on. Even if you wrote some kind of NES firmware that has support for those extra registers, there's no way to convert the game's machine code back into source code and then recompile it for your new firmware. And nobody out there is making new NES games that are going to take advantage of it. Why would you do that? It's just PC game development at that point.
Not really. I would be fine if they had removed all the flicker and slowdown. In fact, I think I would prefer that. I just dislike the idea that the graphics are "unacceptable" because they are presented the way they literally have been in every single iteration of these games ever released. It's especially insulting given how much work they put into really high quality emulation.
Slowdown on the other hand I assume is exactly the same then as it is now. You're giving the CPU too much to do, and it's slowing down. And if you emulate it later on, that CPU that once groaned at that workload now just does it without blinking.
At the very least, I assume that's how it would be anyways. I don't have professional insight or anything.
Welp, agree to d I guess.
It's a bug, there was something on twitter where Capcom was telling people (hilariously) not to buy it at that price. What are they gonna do, charge you after?
You better get it if it's still that cheap, it will go back up soon if it hasn't already.
Read that tweet again. It "should be" $14.99
Actually, there are a few reasons to play on an old TV though. For one, visual lag is still a thing on newer TVs as opposed to old ones and can be huge in some older video games. Also, there are a few specific cases where some designers took advantage of how TV screens displayed pictures back then, and worked around that. Those games actually end up looking worse on new, crisp TVs. The most obvious example would be Lunar 2 (the sega CD version). There are certain color effects that look REALLY bad on new perfect TVs, that looked completely normal on older ones.
Nostalgia helps, but when a lot of gaming back then was built around the equipment of the time, it tends to just work better on it.
Also thanks @Delzhand , that is a much better explanation of what I was trying to say. I still don't understand that stuff well enough to explain it.
As for the arguments with regards to newer games running at lower FPS and comparing it to NES/SNES era stuff, that is so apples to oranges it is not even funny. For one, games nowadays are much more openly programmed to the point where they could run on almost any other hardware with minor tweaks. They are not so closely coded to the core of the system's hardware they were made for. Oh, and as was stated, the hardware limitations back then had a DIRECT impact on how games were designed. This is not even remotely the case now. The only thing hardware dictates now is fps and polys. There is very little people do with the games that they design that they have to say "well that aspect of our game can't work because the hardware isn't fast enough". Again, I am likely bad at explaining this, but really do not even try to compare it because it doesn't compare.
Anyway, as I said before it could have, and should have, been an option weather to have the MM games run authentic or not. I know for a fact it is possible to have the option at least. It might take a bit of work is all.
Oh really? That's surprising. I think it retails for more.
amiibo tax
Switch (JeffConser): SW-3353-5433-5137 Wii U: Skeldare - 3DS: 1848-1663-9345
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I mean the version without the amiibo. But maybe I'm wrong.
Edit: Nope, $30:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZMCFX2G?keywords=mega man legacy&qid=1456327273&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1
Maybe they really want people to go digital? Or maybe the tweet was a typo? And typical Capcom doesn't want people to save money?
Switch (JeffConser): SW-3353-5433-5137 Wii U: Skeldare - 3DS: 1848-1663-9345
PM Me if you add me!
Now, having a "Retro" mode for when you feel nostalgic, with all of the original glitches and problems is perfectly fine. But not cleaning the games up proper is just being lazy.
Should the clone fight use new unique AI instead of repurposing elec man's because they didn't have the memory
Should they add more enemies where they would have before but didn't due to sprite restrictions
Now you're just being silly. No one complains when PS1-2 era games are re-released running at higher resolutions and smoother framerates.
As I said before, I think the nes era games are unique when it comes to those sorts of fixes because so much the the design was tied to the restrictions
I agree. $15 brings it close enough to "impulse buy" range for me.
I mean, it makes the VC releases literally obsolete since you get 6 for the price of 3, plus a ton of extra shit like the challenge modes and museum.
Indeed, it's not as if they can go 'assemble my assembly code for WiiU or 3DS' in their project settings, they're probably lucky if they have the code at all anymore.
If I had to guess on the design, they have what is basically a Virtual Machine. The Virtual Machine sets up the hardware and emulates the calls between the ROM and the hardware it's running on. They probably package the original ROM dump of the cartridge with this virtual machine in a neat little executable package for their console stores, since this would be the easiest way.
They probably could write bugfixes for various games, but you'd be fixing 30 year old hardware in code, and that would not be feasible because you'd need code-bases for every game in existence for that hardware, since each took advantage of these limitations in different ways.
Remastering is a different beast, they'd just be rewriting the game, and that is not an easy task at all. That's expensive, and you're probably looking at something far more expensive than a $5 NES game on the store. Are you willing to drop $40-60 on Mega-Man from the NES? Maybe. Probably not worth it economically.
Like kind of try to read what many people have pointed out in pretty significant detail.
Those things are like, not even remotely comparable. One is a visual change and nothing more. One has a direct impact on HOW the game is played. It is not the same.
If you need the tl;dr version - after the 16 bit era, how games were made drastically changed. Comparing any aspects of one to the other is silly.
What many people are just kind of glazing over here is you are mostly asking for a remake. These were rereleases in a compilation. Remakes require redoing them from the ground up (at least when it comes to this era of games) in which case, usually MUCH more is done to update it. Or when it isn't, it is likely because they were half assing it and likely the redoing it from the ground up was done EXTREMELY half assed.
A lot of the code really depends on known things about the CPU, and how the memory is mapped. This lets you do things like address a sprite, then do some color changes and shift it from a cloud to a bush (mario bros). But a lot of game internals rely on this stuff too, not just the visual stuff.
Those games, mostly (DirectX kind of FUBARed their earlier compatibility at some point in the past), function even better today. Just look at Wacraft 3 vs Warcraft 2 (non battle.net edition). Getting it installed is relatively painless for WC3, WC2 requires you to perform summoning rituals, assuming your card is soundblaster compatible, or, you have dosbox doing most of the work.
PC Internal Speaker!
The biggest thing that affects your understanding of this is how much you know and understand how assembly worked. Also the difference between assembly and modern programming languages.
This video has a lot of interesting stuff on its own, but around 6:59 it gives a straightforward example of the difference between how system back then (the gameboy in this example, but the NES was pretty much the same thing) and how current games are programmed.
There's no way I could ever make a usable game in assembly. That language is incredibly hard to use.
Also it helps that some of my earliest understanding of programming was descriptions of how glitches and exploits worked in 8bit and 16bit era games. IF you ever read a good explanation about things like Pokemon's missingno or FF6's sketch glitch, you likely know at least something about assembly.