A patent purportedly relating to the Revolution's game download feature has been found. Read how the service could work inside...

These days patents about Revolution features are popping up all the time - and not always turning out to be legitimate. This one (which you can see in full here was found by Revolution Report, and could detail how the Virtual Console feature would operate:

"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."