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Can you remember back when we interviewed WeskMods about his involvement with the Nintendo Kawaii, a miniature-sized Wii console on a keychain that's the size of a Game Boy Cartridge? Well,
Instant disappointment.
Thought this was a homebrewed Wii system made with modern components.
No.
It’s original Wii system cut-up and repackaged. An actual Wii system gets destroyed each time one of these get created.
So much for preservation…
There’s a long history of wii modding that is seeing how much you can cut the board up with it working still
I mean…so? over 101 million wiis were sold. I think we can wreck a few million before it becomes a problem.
a stripped down WII basically.
Repurposing old shit is a lot cooler than hoarding junk and generating new e-waste. The disc reader goes out. Hard drives corrupt saves. It’s an appliance.
There are tons and tons of wiis out there. Chopping a few for a fun project hardly affects preservation.
The Wii board is fantastic for trimming. It sips power and can be trimmed to a specific shape that is tiny and still work. Pretty much any Wii portable or GameCube mod you see nowadays is a Wii board trimmed up, which is fantastic, because the Wii sold over a hundred million units whilst the GameCube did not.
If you want a “homebrewed Wii system made with modern components” you’re describing Dolphin running on any compute board. Those exist too.
Not really, as that’s emulation. I mean hardware that is smaller than was on the Wii (because it’s newer and we’ve had many years of miniaturisation) and natively runs the Wii system with all its functions.
Yes, the Wii sold millions, but millions is still a finite number.
Doing some sort of equivalent would be very expensive. I imagine getting the chips and redesigning the PCB and its traces could be a lot of money.
Doing an FPGA version would also be the same. People can barely do FPGA accesible for the N64 and PSX, and even then I think there’s limitations with those implementations.
Boards trims of the Wii seem very plausible as the hardware wasn’t as complex as other consoles from the era. I have no idea about sizes, but there’s a chance the Wii has a smaller processor thanks to die shrinks.