After managing to salvage a pretty badly broken down Sony Vaio laptop for use as a desktop, I discovered that the DeSmuME developers have made great strides in speeding up emulation, allowing me to run games such as Pokémon Platinum Version at a full 60 FPS with only a dual core at 2.3 GHz. Dolphin is still very, very slow, but then the idea hit me: if we could justify spending the money on the update for the plugin by confirming that a good amount of the vizzed user base and people searching for online emulators have at least low end to mid range hardware instead of the bottom of the barrel Wal-Mart netbooks, we could add, at a minimum, DS emulation, maybe even GC and ps2 emulation with the estimated system requirements of the average game for the platform posted to let people know in advance whether they can handle it. Of course, this is an idea for the long run since it would likely take a long while to build up a budget and it's also dependant upon Tom's willingness to do the work, but it's something to keep in mind for later development.

Anyone have any thoughts, additions, counter arguments or comments otherwise?

m0ssb3rg935 : the biggest DS game out there is usually around 200 MB, so file hosting shouldn't be an issue for that. With that, I can see making DS possible. However, as far as GC and PS2 goes there's still the problem of filesize as those sort of ISO's hang around the 1.5 GB mark for each game, or sometimes each disc even. So, no. I doubt that we can get very modern emulations on vizzed, but DS seems plausible.

Except for the area of Nintendo shutting us down again. That might happen again... So it's better to tread lightly.

I'm not sure about that... DS is still pretty new. If nintendo is willing to chase after vizzed for its games from older consoles, how much more if we offer DS games which still generate a good chunk of income for them?

yoshirulez! : True, file hosting would be an issue for the home consoles, but like I said, this would be an idea for a lot farther down the road.

Juliet : That's the great thing, though. As we're already doing with all prior Nintendo material, we no longer host the files, but the open source emulators to run them, which they have no legal recourse for. If we were to only host DeSmuME and NO$GBA, it would be totally above board.

Here's the page explaining Nintendo's stand on emulators and roms: https://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#expired

(Look under "Can Websites and/or Internet Content Providers be Held Liable for Violation of Intellectual Property Rights if they are Only Providing Links to Illegal Software and/or Other Illegal Devices?" )

Vizzed isn't on the clear yet regarding the copyright issues with nintendo, specially since, as what was mentioned, we're hosting/distributing the emulators through the plugin. I'd stay away from adding DS games for at least 5 years to not catch any unwanted attention though, that doesn't mean I'm completely neglecting the idea but I don't think it's the right time for that... having the partner site is already risky enough, let alone allowing online play for games that still earn nintendo some money(they can be pretty aggressive with that as shown in their moves against other rom related sites).