Has anyone here seen the new Metroid Prime for gamecube? Well if you have, than you probably know that one of the secrets to the game involves linking up a game boy advance (with Metroid Fusion) to unlock the original NES Metroid game for play on the gamecube.

At first, I thought it was just simply going to be a reworked version of Metroid, similar to what they did for Super Mario All Stars (souped-up graphics & sound).

I went through the game, and I must say that the emulation was impeccable. Everything was emulated, even the (annoying) slowdowns, and the sprite breakup. In fact, the only noticable differences (from playing on the grey box) were the debris in the sound you'd hear in the chozo rooms. It also seems like they strcetched the playfield vertically a bit, because I could barely see the lava on the bottom of the screen in some areas (although I could be wrong about this- I was playing the game on a tv which may not be displaying all 240 scanlines (if the new counsoles even use all of them anymore. I know that the SNES only used 224...)).

Anyways, the reason I bring it up is because I want to know how Nintendo came to putting this emulator in one of their games. After all, it always seemed to me that Nintendo was morally against emulation (or at least any public-domain form of it, anyway). But my questions are:

1. Who developed the emulator? Was it Nintendo themselves? Or did they just do somthing like take a public-domain emulator, and port it to the gamecube?

2. Why has Nintendo only recently decided to incorporate an NES emulator in their gaming platforms? (I know that the GBA has the e-reader thingy, which runs first generation NES games. I assume that these ones are also being emulated, seeing that the GBA is a compitent system).

Furthermore, is Prime the only game they're ever going to use this emulator in (concerning gamecube)? Or are they planning on maybe bunching up a collection of classic NES games to play on the gamecube with this emulator they've developed. They decided to do it for the e-reader device, so why not put 10 or 20 classic NES games on a gamecube disk, and sell it for $40? For casual gamers who trade in their system & games every little while to stay on the cutting edge of video gaming (and know about emulation but don't use it), they would see that it contains NES classics they grew up playing (like the Zelda series), an grab it just to play games they haven't play in 10 years again.

Either way though, that Metroid emualtor seems to emulate the NES down to a tee. It would be interesting to see how (if Nintendo wrote the thing, as I don't see any reason why they couldn't) they wrote the emulator, and handled some of the NES's more ambigious features and complexities.

- BT