There’s an interesting new rumor when it comes to Nintendo and emulation, that’s completely different from the one we reported on yesterday.
As found by Twitter user raregamingdump, Nintendo’s French subsidiary, Nintendo European Research and Development, have a new job opening for an emulation engineer.
We traced the job listing to Nintendo European Research and Development’s own website, and this is what the listing has to say:
“NERD is looking for an Emulation Engineer who will contribute to our internal expertise and push the state of the art in the
following ways:
- Developing and maintaining retro hardware emulators
- Reverse engineering and debugging legacy games, hardware and firmware
- Game binary patching and improvement
- Researching productivity techniques and new features in emulation products
- Implementing a wide spectrum of High Level Emulation (HLE) and Low Level Emulation (LLE) techniques, for CPU,
- rendering or sound emulation
- Researching, implementing and optimizing interpretation, dynamic recompilation and static recompilation
We are looking for programmers who:
- Are passionate about retro gaming and/or legacy hardware
- Are team players
- Are eager to learn, improve their skills and share their knowledge
- Aim for the best but know when to be pragmatic when faced with engineering problems
- Are willing to understand the constraints and tradeoffs of production environments and deploying software to millions of users, then updating it
- Don’t shy away from writing GUI tools, scripts or unit tests when needed
- Understand the value of robust software
design, debuggability, portability and regression testing
- Are perseverant and attentive to detail
- Have a good general computer science culture
- Can multitask when needed
- Have a good knowledge of C++ 03
- Have a good knowledge of debugging techniques”
There is a lot to take in here, but Nintendo European Research and Development is crystal clear that they are looking for emulation developers.
The studio has faced criticism from other developers for the shortcomings of their emulation, particularly for platforms like the Nintendo 64, Gamecube, and Wii. These issues came up in the release of Super Mario 3D All-Stars, and also for various games that appeared on the Nintendo Switch Online and Expansion Pass.
In this case, C++ is the programming language used for Wii and DS games, so this listing raised speculation that this was for those particular consoles.
From what it seems, Nintendo European Research and Development could use all the help they can get in emulation in general, but there is one particular curious element in this.
Last month, Nintendo European Research and Development also put up a job opening looking for programmers with a specialty in cross-platform development.
While Nintendo has not made any official announcements yet, this circumstantial evidence heavily suggests that these upcoming emulators, if they are for the Wii and DS, or more, are in the works for Nintendo’s next platform. Nintendo would be well served to make a new console with tech that would also make emulation easier in general.
At the very least, it could be one of those cross-platform programs that Nintendo European Research and Development is tasked with building as well. We are all definitely looking forward to seeing what Nintendo has planned in the near future.
