3d ago

Nintendo Wii The Size Of A Game Boy Cartridge Finally Released Open Source

retrododo.com Nintendo Wii The Size Of A Game Boy Cartridge Finally Released Open Source

💌Like retro gaming news? Join our free newsletter to receive a weekly round-up from our team of our nerds. 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,

DRM @lemmy.dbzer0.com

retrododo.com /nintendo-wii-the-size-of-a-game-boy-cartridge-finally-finished/

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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...
- 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.
- I mean...so? over 101 million wiis were sold. I think we can wreck a few million before it becomes a problem.
- It’s original Wii system cut-up and repackaged.
  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.
- There are tons and tons of wiis out there. Chopping a few for a fun project hardly affects preservation.
- There’s a long history of wii modding that is seeing how much you can cut the board up with it working still
- a stripped down WII basically.

Nintendo lawsuit can smell this thing from far far away

Printing “Nintendo” on the device has got to be a bad idea, right?
- If you plan to sell it, yes. This is a DYI project.
  
  "Do Yourself It"?
  
  Per their project page in 2024 they were taking orders to create the shells. Maybe there’s a loophole that exists where the housing is exempt because the internals are DIY.
  In any case, money was involved.
- 100% a trademark violation, and there's nothing like an interoperability carveout for trademarks that could be used to defend it.
  
  Here something I always thought was interesting about Nintendo and copyrights.
  The Nintendo logo for the original Game Boy (the one that scrolls down) was a way to prevent unlicensed developers from releasing games on the Game Boy.
  Games would not boot up if the Nintendo logo is not read on the cartridge and the ROM.
  So for a developer to release a game on the Game Boy without Nintendo knowing, they would have to commit copyright infringement.
  Source: Reverse Engineering the Gameboy Boot Screen (catskull.net)
  The Game Boy was released in 1989, over 36 years ago. They used this same tactic on the Switch. They claim the prod keys, which are needed for Switch emulators, are copyrighted.
  
  I just can’t believe that the retro community has not latched onto some trademark moniker at this point to avoid any kind of legal trouble. Tendo? NTDO? I dunno, anything! lol
  
  I believe saying something like "compatible with Nintendo Wii games" would be acceptable (as a normative use), but IANAL.

Next task: put in into an actual cartridge so you can play them on a real Gameboy Color.

Cool, now I can lose a whole gaming system

Now make one that can upgrade the Gameboy to play Wii games.
- Are you going to help code or fund it?
  
  No, it was a suggestion.

How is this intended to fit in with existing Wii emulators ^[1]? Is it essentially just trying to offer a more convenient mobile option?
- It's a novelty. Hardware hackers have been making smaller and more portable Wiis for years, finding more parts of the motherboard they can cut off, ways to rearrange mobo parts and reconnect them without impacting functionality, discrete parts they can replace with more modern smaller equivalents, etc.
  This represents the smallest they've been able to cut down Wii hardware, still have it be functional, and still have the core be the original hardware, not a general use CPU with an emulation solution running over top. It's not a commercial product meant to compete with emulators on existing portable devices like phones and SBCs.

I was waiting for this to release! Does it have the wii main menu?
- Most of these trimmed down portable Wiis boot into a homebrew menu as they don't have the IR lights attached by default (the Wii "sensor" bar which is just two IR lightbulbs), needed to navigate the menu using a Wiimote.
- Plugging in for a nice Wii menu background vibe

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