Nintendo isn't exactly known for "backwards compatibility" by any means. NES games don't play in a SNES. SNES games don't play in an N64. Their gameboy's were different in that they were compatible for the most part- but how long did the PC have ISA? over 20 years. More to the point, other technologies have gone through numerous revisions and still remained backwards compatible to those expecting the previous revisions namely, Windows. Not to of course get into an open debate about it here, but the main reason older programs don't work with a newer Windows OS was simply because the programmers of the older program took shortcuts. This can be seen fairly easily when you run some windows 9x designed games on XP, thus moving it from the relatively lax security of the 9x environment to the stricter virtualized NT based OS. The same effect is seen from XP to Vista, again, due to the fact that Vista has a different security model.
