How the Wii Was Born 97
saintory writes "Ars Technica has an article up looking at how the Wii was born. It's a nice overview of how Nintendo's culture came up with the 'new-gen' system." More from the article: "'Diverging from the road map takes a fair amount of courage,' [Engineer Shiota] said, 'especially when we didn't have a clear image of what we were going to do with this hardware.' However, once he saw the power level reduction (from one-third to as little as one-fourth that of current hardware) he was very excited. Instead of competing on 'how many more times the CPU is going to be faster, how much more memory is going to be on the machine, and how many more polygons can be rendered' he saw Nintendo as being able to do something different and unique."
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Re:Space constraints (Score:5, Informative)
Which makes me wonder, why they still came up with something that's clearly designed to live vertically. Something with the form factor of the typical DVD player or set-top box would fit in amongst many people's setups even easier than the Wii in its standard orientation.
Spoken like the truly uninformed. I guess this is
Watch this [nintendowiifanboy.com], and watch how Matt takes the Wii out of the vertical stand, and lays it flat. Hmmm
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Out of its stand though it looks far less cool to me. In fact it looks like a pretty average external CD-ROM drive.
Re:truly uninformed (Score:2)
Anyway, since you seem to know so much about the console that you can refer to others as "truly uninformed", maybe you can answer this question for me.
Will the Wii be able to connect up to a WPA encrypted wireless network or is Nintendo still insisting on using WEP like with the DS? I couldn't find mention of that anywhere.
I can't even find out if the nunchuk part of the controller(s) will be included wi
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Out of the box the Wii will include a Wii-mote and a nunchuk attachement. If you buy additional controllers, the Wiimote portion and the nunchuk portion will be sold seperately: the Wiimote for $40, the nunchuk for $20.
Here's hoping someone knows the answer to your other questions...
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Didn't you see the hole in the stand for the vent?
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Hmm (Score:1)
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I'm not from long island (not even in the same hemisphere) so I can only assume that LIPA is Long island power authority or something similar. If a game console is going to make a hit on your power bill then you really do have problems there on Long Island :)
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This is wandering off-topic, but yes there certainly are problems on Long Island - at least there was 10 years ago when I lived there. At the time, Long Island had the distinction of the most expensive electric rates in the country. The reason for this is that they built a nuclear power plant in Shoreham that they were never allowed to turn on. (The reason being they decided there was no pr
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Looks Good (Score:1)
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Re:Looks Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus, it does have an internal Flash drive, although I think that's mostly for downloaded stuff.
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Wii has a 512 million byte internal flash drive and a slot for SD cards.
DVD read speeds [osta.org] have increased since the PS2 came out.
Nintendo's GameCube games didn't need to spend too much time loading. Neither should games on an overclocked GameCube with a remote
1,000,000 != 1,048,576 (Score:2)
That, or there's a difference between 1,000,000 bytes and 1,048,576 bytes. Most flash drives have about 5 percent of their capacity dedicated to wear leveling [wikipedia.org]. For instance, a "256 MB" CF card will have 256 million bytes for files, folders, and FATs, and about 12.4 million bytes for spare sectors.
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I wonder if there might be room for some imaginative use of the USB ports one day. Not for an external hard drive, I mean, and not specifically with regard to the Wii -- but flash drives are getting cheaper and cheaper. I wonder if someday it might become economically possible for them to, if not supplant, then at least complement, the DVD as the
Power to the Wii (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, does next-gen necessarily have to mean next-gen graphics? Or does good-enough-graphics with a fresh look on gameplay suffice?
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Nintendo's 'next gen' consoles and handhelds do indeed seem to lack when compared to their competition, but they really -are- fun. And that's what gaming was supposed to be about. These
Re:Power to the Wii (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, the Wii is able to display 480p graphics, so it's as good as a DVD and appropriate for non-HD TV sets (which is still the biggest installed marketshare). You have to see Metroid Prime 2 in 480p (via the component cables and a progressive-capable TV) to appreciate the graphics of the Gamecube.
I'm ok with the Wii having 2-3 times better graphics than the Gamecube. In fact, I really like the idea: don't increase the re
Initially, graphics gameplay (Score:2)
After about 2 or 3 years though, you see a big drop in trust. Any video game fan knows what I'm talking about. After the "it'll get better when the second and third gen games come out" and the "those defects are just a fluke, the next batches will be perfect" the market just gets fed up. (And no, I'm not just picking on Sony. The Gamecube was criticized for its lack of good/notable second gen games (remember Mario Sunshine
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Power Consumption (Score:2, Interesting)
I always wondered... If this thing is going to be plugged in always, and running always, doesn't it consume enormous amounts of power? I've often hear people say that it's better to unplug your tv, stereo, ... when not in use for 'longer periods' (say, the night) because even the smallest of control lights still uses power for
Re:Power Consumption (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Power Consumption (Score:5, Funny)
Not true! How else will I know that it's eternally twelve o'clock in my apartment?
Re: Power Devoted to Standby... (Score:1)
For the minimal amount of power that pulls per year you are far better off leaving it go rather than wasting time constantly plugging/ unplugging your devices, or wire up a master kill switch so you aren't trading off minimal power savings for produc
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Exactly (Score:2)
Exactly. About 10% (or more, depending on who you ask) of all "household energy" is used by devices in standby mode. It's not a lot of money for every single household, but it is a lot of energy if you add it up.
As an example, if you use your Xbox for two hours a week and keep it in standby for the rest of the week, it uses more energy in standby than during the two hours you use it - and the only thing you gain from it is that you can turn it on using the remote.
So if you do have devices which keep their
Set top devices are notorious for power drain (Score:1)
This is actually a big issue in Europe (Score:2)
They certainly don't look on it as a minor issue. And they're right. Even a little electricity adds up fast when you start talking millions of users, each using dozens of pieces of electronic equipment in "standby" mode.
-Eric
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But the power plants are making that electricity anyway, and selling it on the cheap because the demand for electricity overnight is much less than the demand during waking hours.
In fact, if a device uses more power to cold-boot than to wake up from standby, it could actually be MORE wasteful to unplug the device when not in use.
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I challenge you to present a device that you turn on and off so often that it saves a significant amount of energy.
Now on the other hand, many people leave computers/electronics/lights on because the mechanical stresses of turning them on and off frequently can cause physical damage to the device. If you factor in the cost of replacing/repairing the device due to physical damage, then you may have an argument for a very small s
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I think you mean the express purpose.
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The article states the power consumption is "from one-third to as little as one-fourth that of current hardware". Since the Gamecube drew only about 20W, that comes to 5-7W. That would make a full days consumption about the same as having an XBox 360 on for an hour. A years worth of power, assuming 0.14/kWh comes to a whopping $8.58. And that's assuming it draws full power the entire time. T
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In all seriousness though, I've read somewhere that on stand by mode it uses less than 10 Watts, for comparison that nightlight you and/or your kids (may have) used as a child would use somewhere between 20 and 60. Hell, I bet running your digital alarm clock all night would be about the same as the Wii, and how often do you disable that at night?
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Standby (power off): 0w, no draw
Idle (power on, no disc): 21-22w
Game (3" disc): 22-23w
Game (5" disc): 23-24w
The various gadgetry on my desk (PC, LCD, IP phone, wireless router, Xbox 360, various chargers, and alarm clock) pull more power as a whole in standby mode than the Gamecube does when playing a game off discs too large to even fit in a stock console.
Deja Vu (Score:1, Troll)
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Oh, I see. The added value is *brevity*.
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I came into this duscussion to say the same thing. Ars pretty much just summed up the first three pages of the round-table with Iwata.
URL bears repeating: http://wii.nintendo.com/iwata_asks_vol1_p1.html [nintendo.com]
Interesting decisions... (Score:3, Interesting)
Always on, could be good too, but could backfire in our green world.
But a weak CPU, I am pretty sure that developers will always push for a better CPU. One of the ways of measuring a console is to compare those games that run on all three - and this could make the Nintendo look bad, very bad. Risky.
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Not suffer, so much as have something gently pointed out :)
Standard Definition has a resolution of 320x200 pixels (through an RCA cable), or 64,000 dots. S-Video can carry up to 800x600 pixel, or 480,000 dots. 1080p carries a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, or 2,073,600 p
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720x480 is the standard res for DV or DVD. They lost the 6 pixels for compression reasons - but you'll only notice the difference if you load it into an editing system - you'll never see it on a TV.
Trivia: The N64 (and PS) only outputted 320x240 and it was upscalled to full NTSC.
Re:Interesting decisions... (Score:5, Interesting)
But they're spending that money anyways to get the game to also run on the 360 and PS3. Honestly, the best thing I can see about the Wii is that the new controller will force 3rd party developers to actually think about the port to Wii instead of it just being an afterthought. For example, EA is already talking about what features they can put into the Wii Madden 07. They're not just dumping what they have to console X like they do for every other console. They're actually thinking about how to make the game better using the Wiimote.
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Could be that there will be a lot of games made exclusively for the Wii. Especially by smaller, creative studios that don't have a gazillian dollars to spend.
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Interestingly, this doesn't seem to be the case so far. A lot of the Wii games are Wii exclusive, and even most of the franchises that are ported to the Wii seem to be totally different games from their 360/PS3 counterparts.
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Also, +1 to chrismcdirty; cost really is an important factor -- both for developers and consumers. I'll probably buy a PS3, but not before the price drops to something near US$200. (And I was planning on
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You may be waiting a long, long time then.
There are a rare few examples I can think of where a game console eventually sells new for less than half of its launch price. The GameCube is one: launched at $200, now on sale at around $100. Sega's Nomad portable went from $180 to $80 during its brief lifetime, and the Atari 2600, originally $200, eventually went for $50 (but it took a full decade to get there).
I don't expect the P
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I'm not too sure about this
First off, Developers and Publishers are like any type of buisness and produce games where they believe that the reward from producing the game is greater than the risk involved. The main factors which affect risk are Game Complexity, Game Cost, the
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My understanding was that the processor configurations used for the ps3 or 360 (or both) were also pretty bad for doing AI. I don't remember the details, but it
Interview translations (Score:2, Informative)
Old News (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, as I posted on that story back then [slashdot.org], among other things, the interview mentions some things that I've seen people here talking about, like the possibility of distributing independent games via the Virtual Console system. They seem to be considering it and possibly in favor of it as high up as Iwata. It goes into a whole lot more detail than the Ars Technica summary does, and the more recent segments talk about some of the software design elements, not just the hardware side of things. Interesting reading.
No more Excuses... (Score:2, Insightful)
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It doesn't have to be but historically, that's where the extra oomph is being used. Games still have generally simplistic AIs and I haven't seen a major physics upgrade to a game in a while. The biggest non-graphics jump I've seen recently is the sheer number of simultaneous objects Call of Duty 2 keeps track of on the 360. I imagine if you cut HD out of the e
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But it is a good thing. I own a 360, and for all it's extra power, it's hardly a huge improvement over the original XBox. On top of that it is more expensive, noisier, and has heat issues. The article mentions the law of diminishing returns, and they're completely right. Nintendo saw this and took a step in a different direction, refusing to play the spec game.
Yes more Excuses! (Score:2)
Slower hardware isn't a good thing. It's also not a bad thing. It has positive and negative effects. The main negative effect is, of course, that the games won't look as good as on other consoles. Positive effects include cheaper games and more room for smaller games and smaller publishers/developers.
As with everything in life, it's a trade-off.
Yep, and with the Wii, they're
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Developers do try to find the cheapest ways to make the latest and greatest games they can, and quite often this means that they produce their game on the Gameboy rather than on a PS2. The reality is that most devel
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Mod me "-1 STUPID"... I swear I read PS3, not PS2
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So I'd say your point stands. Though it's still $150 more.
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But you're really complaining about the wrong system. The Xenon & Cell CPUs were made to be incredibly fast with high clock cycles. They were also designed to be monsters at graphics processing. However, to do this, they chose an chip architecture that is particularly bad at Physics and even worse at AI. In an effort to maximize graphics, they sacrificed everything else. L
slashdot.ars (Score:1, Funny)
Just Read the Original (Score:1)
Interesting Article (Score:1)
Where's the PPC asm coders when wii need em? (Score:1)
so... why the heck they did not used it to just scan the entire screen once with a Dot product calc to do normal mapping?
its that hard?