Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Nintendo’s Lawyers are Ready This Time – Nintendo Wii Dev Kit”.
Hey Nintendo, we have exposed your Dev kits before and we are about to do it again. This is the Nintendo ndev, an early development kit for the Nintendo Revolution. Excuse me: we, when it was first announced, Nintendo’s Revolution console, was purely theoretical. In fact, the physical demo unit at E3 2005 was a fugazi fairy dust didn’t exist. It was simply an empty plastic shell with nothing in it, but promises to make good on those promises. Then, by the start of the 2006 Christmas season, Nintendo needed a way for developers to work on Wii software without having a ready for Market console available. Their solution was a GameCube dev kit, with some modifications. Now that might have been fine for internal developers, but you don’t want third-party developers working with what is clearly last gen Hardware. That’S embarrassing, even if it was basically what the Wii would end up being. So over the next 12 of months, Nintendo went from a barely modded GameCube t-death to a mysterious blurry Black Box to a more polished black box, with no wireless controllers to this. The final pre-release dev kit, with all the bells and whistles of the retail console well sort of how do you play games without a disk drive and what sets this, apart from the final retail unit and who’s, going to tell you about our sponsor eugreen.
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I was also told to be extremely careful about keeping these screws organized because some of them are really long. Some of them are really not long, and if you put the wrong ones in, you can totally Fubar the whole thing wait. Why are we opening it up? First, we’re going to talk about some of this stuff at the front, we’ve got our GameCube memory card slots as well as four ports for GameCube controllers, because early versions of the Wii were fully backwards compatible, including four player multiplayer later ones removed the ports. Even though the hardware technically still existed inside, so you can actually actually hack the support back in and then later ones cut the feature out entirely, but hey we’re Nintendo you’re gon na buy it anyway.
We’Ve also got the SD card slot that was ostensibly for expanding the storage, so you could buy things in the Nintendo eShop, but more realistically was just used for hacking. The console, though I actually used mine to transfer all my data to a Wii. U so that’s a legit use for it. Sync button for pairing controllers moving around to this side, a Bluetooth module – and this is fun you might think.
Oh well, that’s an external antenna for Bluetooth. No, this is for a wired, remote neat huh during development. They were not wireless, yet over here we’ve got a Wi-Fi module, apparently why your Wi-Fi was not needed. I mean why, wouldn’t they just put an ethernet port on it? You know what it doesn’t matter.
The point is at the back, the sensor bar AV multi out for compositor component, the regular USB ports you’d, find on the Wii, and these three USB type B’s that apparently all need to be plugged in in order for this thing to operate now, that’s interesting eject Button eject what it does not have a lot of cooling hey I mean, I guess, neither did the retail unit. You’Ve just got a single. What appears to be a 60 millimeter fan back here, slim too, and then a passive heatsink that I guess by Merit of this being the only other hole in the chassis is gon na get some kind of airflow over it. But like that’s it hey, that’s wild right here. Next, to what I assume is the GPU. We’Ve got 64 megabytes of gddr3 and then over here is what looks like 512 Megs of storage. That’S double! What shipped on the finished console now there’s supposed to be twice as much RAM as the finished console as well, but I only see the one chip it’s so cool. The way that this engineering level Hardware will have flexibility built into it.
That not only will never make its way into the finished product, but might not even be needed for the development product. Like look at this wi-fi attenuator. So there’s an antenna module here. But while it’s got these two little connectors so that you could add additional antennas to it, they never even do that.
They just take a wire and like coil it up in here. As far as I can tell it’s wild, this doesn’t do anything, but it could well. That was easy. That’S some crusty thermal did you take this off.
Is that why this looks like poop? I am not the first person to take that apart and if you want proof of that check the underside of the top that you took off. Oh okay, deadly foes was here I’m guessing that’s who sent us this unit nope it came from the person who lent it to deadly foes. Really I mean do I need to take it now too. I think that’s appropriate.
Maybe I’ll just put a dent in it. That would be pretty classic. Just just drop the screwdriver. No, I I can’t I can’t I can’t a laser engraver on the other side of this wall. I can’t no, I can’t do it. There’S our ATI Graphics chip and our IBM today is an IP ad power.
Wasn’T it the Broadway was IBM and the Hollywood was AMD. Super cool goes to show you Nintendo knows gaming little CPU, big GPU. Neither of them are powerful, but boy were they ever little and big. Now we need to pry it up. We can glean a lot just from the way the traces are run on the board. Here’S our CPU, so the CPU bones connected predominantly to the GPU bone, which is connected to the video memory bone.
Ah, so I said there was supposed to be twice as much vram on this thing. That’S because half of it is on the underside of this top board. This appears to be pretty much the entire Wii component of this development kit.
So what is everything else then, on this board on your right? We find a couple of xilinx Spartan fpgas, because these are field programmable. They could be doing quite literally anything but based on the fact that there are the three USB ports and a Serial port on here. I’D say this is probably running whatever operating system.
That Nintendo is using to interface with the development kit. As for this boy right here – oh it’s conveniently labeled. This is ndav dash power, Dash X2, so power, that’s power! Supply! Oh hilarious! A lot of these big connectors that I was trying to figure out what the heck they do is just carrying power through this board and into this board. Nothing really that interesting down here, just the AC to DC converter for our power supply. Oh, I lied. This does give us a better look at how all of those diagnostic LEDs and buttons and dip switches on the front are in fact wired up to what I said I suspected was the development OS board this one right here, so hypothesis confirmed: should we fire it Up yeah, all right: let’s do it hooked up our LED is working.
Is that a zero? Is that it? I don’t know it’s working anyway, we have to run Windows XP, we have to run Windows of some version. I felt XP was the best to go with because 2006. What’S your choice, it’s XP or Vista! I’M gon na I’m gon na take XP, I’m a Vista boy. Okay, so we open a dilf yep.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get our hands on any first party. Nintendo games because they control their leaks, a lot better than third-party developers, but we do have. What are our early builds? Yes of a handful of games? Well, let’s go Simpsons right, yeah! Oh that’s a GameCube game! Is it nope? Oh, okay. Gcm! A lot of the architecture for the Wii is backwards compatible with the GameCube.
So, as a result, a lot of the file names are similar. Hey there we go now. It should tell you that you’ve got the wrong firmware, because we don’t have the right firmware on here. That is hey wrong, firmware version.
If you want to continue, if you like to take these there, we go so enter proper menu flow. Okay, then, no way, that’s how you know it’s internal shut up. I love it legal text here and placeholder, one hey! That’S my favorite placeholder right up there with placeholder a oh yeah.
You want to try going to the Wii menu uh! Sure! Oh that doesn’t do anything. It does not do anything. It’S just a picture.
It’S not even a button. Oh, oh, hey and now you’ve got the developer menu. Well, this is wild.
I mean yeah. I got all the cheats, then it’s okay! Well, let’s have unlimited calories in Homer ball and helium. This is normally not how the game goes.
I do have kind of a way of breaking things. Dancing. Crusty is always a good sign uh.
Did it just restart? Oh, oh, we got sound so hey there. We go, oh, my God. These loading times, though well at least you’re getting some sort of idea as to what’s happening.
Your memory there is getting used up, it was getting used up. Did I break it? Oh nope, hey here we go so you have to take the less nutritious thing. Yeah got him, oh shoot! Oh, what that took off that many points.
This might be a good time to cheat. No, I got this. I got this.
No I’m gon na beat him. Oh, what no, I didn’t shake this one. I have negative, oh, oh! No, can I just punch him and can I just fight him? I could take him. This is hard.
How is this in the first couple minutes of the game? Okay, I think we could try another game. All right. Oh it occurs to me without the chassis cover on this heatsink is probably not getting a lot of airflow. Oh, it seems okay, it’s barely even warm.
I mean how much did the Wii consume, like 30 Watts or 45 Watts, or something it was yeah, so it was 12 volt, 4.8 amps, but most of that energy was used for the disk drive right. Okay, so people were building portable Wiis that were using. I don’t know maybe like two amps at 12: volts wow yeah. Those portable Wii projects are so cool.
Oh yeah, where are these? Where are these games installed to? How is it connected to that laptop? Is it just via USB yeah? There’S three USB ports all go into it and do we know which USBS do what I think the one labeled di is for disk input. Com is for communication. How that’s used, I’m not sure, then there’s debug, which I want to say, would normally go to the IDE.
So the like text editor for the code which in this case think it’s called codemasters wait. You said this was golden eye. That’S what it was labeled as I have not actually opened it up.
This would be 2009 Daniel, Craig GoldenEye. They did a remake without Pierce Brosnan. Well, what just happened is any of this in the real game yeah. I don’t think we can actually play this at all uh look at like what was that hey look at our 3D models and how they look like Daniel Craig other playable deliverables. Someone seems like they’re like yeah. No I’m doing stuff.
Oh whoa cause! That’S how that works? Uh! Oh okay, oh hi! Okay, oh boy, that she’s she’s sensitive, what’s gon na happen when you get into the world, I don’t know foreign okay well, that was cool yeah. Clearly, some proof of concept level, stuff. Okay! Now, now that I see how interesting these games are, I kind of want to try another one. Wait David, you had said there was something you wanted to try.
What was it is. This is this. It am I looking at what this is. What’S a block out, oh okay, you know what I think we might be looking at here is just the the building blocks block out of what these experiences might look like and then maybe these are slightly better yeah first pass artwork in progress. Okay, what level do we want to have a look at? I want to see the non-deliverable. They never wanted us to see this Tanner. It was non-deliverable, oh wow. This is amazing.
I kind of want to play this game. I got ta, say it’ll, be a lot. Scarier seeing a tank coming at you if it is fluorescent White, this is so cool.
I have no interest whatsoever in playing this game, but boy do I ever want to play this early development thing? I always want to see what I’m not supposed to see yeah. This is a little bit reminiscent of oh hey. Here we go. Oh, don’t fall down the pit number one rule of GoldenEye. Okay. I will try not to fall down a hole this time.
Can I go this way? Oh nope, no, okay, next game, I think yep, oh, oh, that’s! Some frame rate wow, no further optimization necessary! Well, this one is not done. Are we are we overheating at all? Is that what’s happening? I don’t think so, because this isn’t even 3D. This is just a cut scene. Naruto goes hard, they do their hand, gestures and ninja magic. Does it have any secret menus? I wonder no, I think this one’s pretty done. We’Ve got you beaten now, let’s see who we’re dealing with here, and I would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you, meddling kids. I think we’re done here done telling you about our sponsor delete me in a time when companies are constantly sharing your personal info online.
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