Elite 1984 - porting the game to Nintendo Switch

[Old Duck]

[...]
I want to buy a cartridge with a nice label, insert this cartridge into the console and enjoy the game.
The target audience of this game (Elite 1984) is 40 year old adults dreaming about space!
I'm sure most of these people will buy this game.
I would even buy a new Nintendo Switch oled if it comes in a limited edition with the logo of the legendary Elite.

You and maybe five other people, and I say this as one of the "target audience".

 

[DrinkyBird]

I don't believe the Nintendo Web Framework supports WebAssembly anyway, so even the "in a browser" version of Elite would not work in a simple browser wrapper on Switch deployed as an app.

NWF was for Wii U only.

Switch development almost exclusively takes place in the Unity framework,

No it doesn't. Unity is just very popular due to its ecosystem and ease of use. By this logic I could just as well say that modern PC game development is exclusively Unity.
The Nintendo Switch SDK is purely C++.

 

[MickyG1982]

Because no one here has a Switch apparently, and internet people have a habit of attempting to correct people even when presented with just an idea. (Even I do it sometimes.) That's probably because a Switch port of Elite is unlikely to happen though to be frank.

Not correcting anyone. The game was written in 1984 in assembly language (think 1 step up from machine code 1's & 0's) for 8 bit (later on 16 bit computers). There is no way to port it as such, especially given that there are few people that actually code in assembly language any more. It also took 2 years to code

Even on PC the game has to be run via an emulator, be that DOSBOX, via a browser or emulating one of the many platforms it used to run on (unless, of course, you .

The best you could really hope for is FD/Nintendo re-release the NES version as part of the game on the switch's online service.

 

[Markov Chaney]

NWF was for Wii U only.


No it doesn't. Unity is just very popular due to its ecosystem and ease of use. By this logic I could just as well say that modern PC game development is exclusively Unity.
The Nintendo Switch SDK is purely C++.

I was going by official doco (which I realise is always a bad idea on the public side of a dev portal, because it goes stale so fast.)

I expect NWF is still called the same thing but now it's on newer WebKit foundations - no? Or if you know the facts, then please spit them - if it IS possible to run WebAssembly in something, that seems like a pretty quick way to get some fairly-average-but-at-least-they-exist ports onto the Switch. Is that a thing?