Revolution Report, a neat little site, has discovered a patent that appears to have something to do with the Nintendo Revolution's Virtual Console capabilities -- it's ability to play NES, SNES, and N64 games via downloading.

What follows is basically taken straight from RR. To read the full story and see a few fun pictures, go here. To view the patent in full, take a look here.

  • The patent refers to a series of emulator programs, meaning that should this patent refer to Virtual Console, the "first game machine" (which we assume refers to Revolution) has no dedicated hardware for Virtual Console titles.

  • According to the images and descriptions provided within the patent, when deciding to play and/or download a title, the player will select the game by platform or franchise. Also, for games existing without a definite franchise, the patent indicates an "other" tab to select from that may accommodate those particular titles.

  • When choosing a game, the player will apparently click once to bring up a screen displaying an outline of the game which uses animations, still pictures, a sentence description and/or sounds, and then click again to confirm the selection.

  • Particular downloaded games will prompt the player to choose a number of displayed characters before engaging in gameplay, perhaps even characters that might not be normally attributed to that particular game. This notion coincides with what Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said back in June, stating that Nintendo is "doing several experiments, including working with the original Super Mario Bros.," and that "the game itself and the gameplay shall be identical, but the look will be different; it's possible that with Revolution, we may be able to see the old games with new looks."

  • According to the patent, this technology will allow for older game programs to be supplied to the player at a low cost without the added burden of program-implanting costs for the game program maker. However, the patent in question does not further specify the exact meaning of "low cost."

  • For the NES and SNES consoles, those "extremely low in capability," the Revolution's CPU has the capacity to handle the processing of the downloaded game without the involvement of the GPU.

  • No unnecessary re-coding is required to get downloadable games to work with this technology, according to the patent.