So, the new touchscreen for 3DS will be 320x240. What are the consequences ?
If 3DS is hacked and homebrew is possible, then all the DOS-era games could be ran without downsampling. For instance, ScummVM 3DS could run Sierra/Lucasarts games at their native resolution (320x200), with the touchscreen interface being a clear advantage over PSP. If 3DS' CPU is powerful enough, DosBox (x86 emulator) could be ported to 3DS and allow almost every DOS game to be run. This is seriously super cool.
Amiga, however, had 320x256 resolution. But I guess one can live with 8 horizontal lines cropped from the top and from the bottom... WinUAE (Amiga emulator) has been ported to many platforms, including PSP; not all the games run at full speed, but some of them seem to be really playable.
Backwards compatibility with NDS is quite a different animal. DS has 256x192 resolution, so Nintendo can offer two things: either to run at 1:1 (which would mean that a picture as small as 2.6" is displayed), or to upscale. While upscaling can give reasonable results for 3D games (e.g. Metroid Prime Hunters), I am afraid that upscaled hand-drawn games (e.g. Castlevania) might look really ugly... the same for fonts in dialog boxes.
Just my two cents.
If 3DS is hacked and homebrew is possible, then all the DOS-era games could be ran without downsampling. For instance, ScummVM 3DS could run Sierra/Lucasarts games at their native resolution (320x200), with the touchscreen interface being a clear advantage over PSP. If 3DS' CPU is powerful enough, DosBox (x86 emulator) could be ported to 3DS and allow almost every DOS game to be run. This is seriously super cool.
Amiga, however, had 320x256 resolution. But I guess one can live with 8 horizontal lines cropped from the top and from the bottom... WinUAE (Amiga emulator) has been ported to many platforms, including PSP; not all the games run at full speed, but some of them seem to be really playable.
Backwards compatibility with NDS is quite a different animal. DS has 256x192 resolution, so Nintendo can offer two things: either to run at 1:1 (which would mean that a picture as small as 2.6" is displayed), or to upscale. While upscaling can give reasonable results for 3D games (e.g. Metroid Prime Hunters), I am afraid that upscaled hand-drawn games (e.g. Castlevania) might look really ugly... the same for fonts in dialog boxes.
Just my two cents.