Nintendo used to be better with backwards compatibility: the original Wii models (2006-2011) could natively play GameCube games and the Wii U could natively play Wii games by rebooting into the Wii Menu. The Switch, however, dropped native backwards compatibility.

To be fair, the Switch changed the storage medium and Wii and Wii U disks are bigger than the console itself. That is not to say that Nintendo has not had multiple storage mediums compatible with the same consoles, for example: Gamecube miniDVDs and Wii DVDs working with the Wii and Gameboy cartridges and Gameboy Advance Cartridges working with the Gameboy Advance. But I think I am willing to cut Nintendo some slack for the Switch given the many compromises they must have made to fit that much power into a hand-held unit.

I am sour however that the Wii Remotes are not working with the Switch though, as I find the Wii Wheel to be a superior experience when playing Mario Kart. There is no technical reason for this as far as I can tell as the Switch still uses Bluetooth for connectivity. Now, there are new wheels, but just like the Joy-Cons, they are far too small to be comfortable given the size of my hands.

I've been pairing the Wii Remotes to my laptop, and playing the old games that way via Dolphin!

I do this as well with a mayflash sensor bar. Dolphin also works for rock band and guitar hero which has been pretty fun.

Very late reply so you might never see this... but I have a full complement of RB and GH hardware, and a long-term project I'm investigating is ensuring those rhythm games can always be played via Dolphin even once all the 'toy' hardware is dead and buried.

Specifically: I want to add direct support for proper e-drums played via MIDI into Dolphin, without the various hacks to get it to emulate a keyboard etc, and compatible even with the Pro Drums mode in RB3.

Guitars are simultaneously an easier and harder question: would require a DIY guitar, but can be fed into Dolphin just by emulating a HID device.

email is in my bio if you want to discuss

Yup, and it was wonderful. The Wii also had the virtual console for older titles that worked great, but some of those didn't make the transition and you have to re-purchase them (if I'm not mistaken, they are always online subscription based titles)

I think you can still play SNES games on the Wii, you just need to modify the console.

You can do pretty much anything on the wii. It was so successful and so easy to crack and mod that it's got everything you'd want, including virtual console injections

Gameboys had backwards compatibility as well, at least for a while. Probably half the games I ever played on my gameboy color were released for the original gameboy. Playstations also had backwards compatibility at around the same time.

Consoles are inherently flawed because they're locked. Linux PC's with Wine makes all old games playable.

I wouldn't go nearly that far. Wine allows for running of most games, and the rest are usually always online multiplayer games. Even with the ones that work usually have hitches and quirks to figure out. Linux can't even do general windows apps that well, the only reason gaming is at the point it is is because most if not everyone who'd run linux wants to play games. Making Linux out like this miracle system is blind support

I'd go a step further and suggest that trying to mimic a closed operating system is always going to be a somewhat unsuccessful uphill battle. Just look at how much the people over at ReactOS have been struggling for years, just to get the basics working: https://reactos.org/

It's certainly admirable, but to me it feels like Windows and all of the closed OSes will eventually die outside of museums and give way to open systems instead, at the same time killing any hopes of running older games and such, outside of cases where they are pretty simple, there have been source code leaks or other things to make running them easier (e.g. huge cult following). For example, you can probably port over something like "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" in a feasible amount of time[1] but something like "Cyberpunk 2077" or "Grand Theft Auto V" would be way more complicated in comparison.

Thus, your choices are probably limited to the following:

  - use open systems and say no to playing games that don't support them, out of principle or otherwise
  - use both open and closed systems, like in a dual boot configuration (or VM with GPU passthrough and relative mouse movement mode which is hard), for when you can't go without those games
  - attempt to use workarounds like Wine or Proton or whatever, but don't expect everything to work out of the box, especially with hostile DRM

In the end, it feels to me that providing opposition to hostile business models is the only way forwards, even if piracy is notoriously bad in the industry and there is ample competition, so not doing DRM and even having parts of your project be open source is probably financial suicide, as evidenced by the occasional thread on /r/gamedev about someone having their game be essentially stolen and it being uploaded elsewhere and someone else getting profits from their hard work.

Linked, because it's actually pretty interesting:

[1] - https://github.com/iortcw/iortcw

No one said miracle. It's just a list of facts that some people aren't aware of. If it felt miraculous to you, well sir, its your lucky day, you get to experience a miracle yourself and instal Linux!

A lot of old games would not play on unsupported windows 7 because MS is using a dll which phones home.