In this post, Espozo wrote:
Strange... You know, what's even the point in console reversions?
One is to cut costs. This happened on Wii, where changes to the power supply required changes to the bootloader. Another is to fix known defects but let games slow down and use a workaround on the older silicon. Uniracers, for example, reportedly slows down more on 1/1/1 because it doesn't DMA as much data every frame on the old hardware.
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If you play to the new version when designing something, you're just going to lose compatibility to the older one.
There were two major versions of the PlayStation GPU that changed certain behaviors. Some features were faster or more stable on one, others on the other. Games had to work both on the revision codenamed "blue" and the revision codenamed "green" before Sony would approve them.
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That'd be like if Nintendo decided to make a reversion of the NES that doubled the amount of overdraw. That would be fine for enhancing the look of older NES games, but if developers had the increased overdraw in mind when designing their new game, you'd have 96 pixel wide bosses and the like that would look fine on the reversion console, but would cause a ton of flicker on anything older.
Like the upgrade from Game Boy to Game Boy Color, Nintendo GameCube to Wii, DS to DSi, or Nintendo 3DS to New Nintendo 3DS?
See also previous topic on console revisions.