Here's something arguably old, but interesting enough that I shall leave it with you for the night. What does the inside of a Wii Remote look like? If you're CNet, you've got the tools and expertise required to take the controller apart, so you just disassemble it and see for yourself.
The entire piece is interesting (and brief) enough to merit a quick read, but here are some points that really stood out to me as being surprising.
- Individual Wii Remotes appear to be assembled by hand. There's a little quality assurance mark on the inside of each remote. To my knowledge, that's insanely unusual as consumer electronics go.
- The case is the only thing holding the various Remote buttons in place. I kind of wonder if this could cause a loss of sensitivity if your Wii Remote casing gets loose somehow.
- You can't open up a Wii Remote without a special screwdriver. Clearly Nintendo doesn't want things happening to loosen controller casings, like people idly deciding to dismantle controllers.
Remember what I said about Mario Kart Wii making people a little crazy? I'd like to think of this as more proof.
Force Dynamics is one of the world's leading manufacturers of sophisticated driving simulators that use tilting body cages to make the virtual drivers feel acceleration and impact instantly. Units aren't priced on the website, but given that they're custom-built for individual clients, it's safe to say they're ridiculously expensive.
So what do the Force Dynamics guys do with their hyper-realistic, super-expensive simulation units when they're hanging around the shop floor? The answer should be obvious. Like real manly men, they play the world's most immersive game of SNES Mario Kart.
The Wii's so small, all it would take is a screen to make it portable. So, Chinese electronics wholesaler Chinavasion has manufactured one.
Simply called the Nintendo Wii LCD Monitor 7 Inch, this 7" folding screen snugly attached to your Wii over the various connection ports in the back. Taking up only the AV port, the other ports and even a cooling vent for the fan are duplicated on the back of the Monitor's chassis. The Monitor even includes an extra set of AV ports so you can hook up a DVD player or, hell, even another system to the Monitor if you like.
Of course, the necessity of a sensor bar and somewhere to plug the Wii's hefty power supply into means that the Monitor won't be letting your Wii replace your DS any time soon. As Chinavasion's site states, this is meant more to make your Wii into something you can easily mount on the roof of a car (or just play on a spacious back seat). Now, whether this sort of limited portability is worth the $101.45 cost of a single screen is up to you and your personal travel schedule.
Datel's Freeloader swap disc initially opened the way for import gaming on the Wii, but rumors are already swirling that Nintendo next major firmware update is going to break it, leaving your Freeloader DVD as little more than a coaster.
With the Twilight Hack giving every homebrew coder in the world access to the Wii's internal architecture, the emergence of a program like Gecko Region Free was inevitable. Load the software up on whatever you use to implement the Twilight Hack and enjoy yourself some region-free gaming. If you happen to use a USB Gecko as your chainloader, you also get a screenshot and debugging tools.
Right now the program is very new and hasn't been tested for all games yet, but it's already believed to be resistant to breakage since it uses hardware to decrypt. With the Twilight Hack getting easier and easier to run, a beautiful Wii import community may be about to blossom - although Nintendo can't be happy about this. Can you imagine what the Brawl scene would've been like if this release two months ago?
Did you ever play The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures in full co-op? Seriously, leave a comment or something if you did. I'm not convinced there's many of you out there. Playing with four GBAs was a real pain, a lot of people didn't bother.
Retro guru Racketboy and buddy fastbilly1 have worked out a devious scheme that takes the GBAs entirely out of the equation. Sure, it involves getting together five TVs and five GameCubes, but it also means that every player gets a nice big screen to look at and a controller of his/her own. Spectators get to view one of the utterly awesome LAN-like game parties ever hosted. Video follows, and full instructions for setting it up yourself are at the link. I am so doing this soon.
The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures
Dropped at 50mph, thown from a story high onto tile, destroyed on a second story drop, split in half when thrown against a wall then ripped to pieces on camera. The DS Lite is sadly no longer with us. The extreme testing got the better of it just before we threw it into a sink of water.
The Korg MS-20 is a retro sound synthesizer with quite a cult following among musicians. It's a favorite of Aphex Twin, and produces very distinct sounds. The MS-20 had two oscillators, and a single-oscillator counterpart called the Korg MS-10.
AQ Interactive is a company that ordinarily spends its time publishing terrible Xbox 360 titles. It turns out AQ Interactive is also working on an awesome Nintendo DS project: the Korg DS-10, an attempt to use the Nintendo DS to completely duplicate the sounds and functions of the old Korg MS-10. The sample up on the project's English homepage is pretty convincing.
What's 100 MB to you? Maybe an episode of a favorite television series, encoded to .mp4 format (to .avi, probably one-third to one-half of an episode). It's about an album's worth of MP3s, or perhaps a single data library in a PC or Xbox 360 title. It's roughly 1/40th of the size of a Blu-Ray disc.
It's also the total size of the operating data on a copy of Wii Sports. Yes, that's right, Wii Sports could fit comfortably on the average audio CD... seven times.
It was discussed in a comments thread a long time ago on this blog, but all Wii games discs carry at least 4 GB of data, regardless of how complex the games themselves are. Turns out retail Wiis won't boot anything less than 4GBs in size.
Hackers, of course, can modify Wiis to get around that, and someone finally built a utility to scrub the junk data out of Wii .isos. It's called WiiScrubb 1.0, and is pretty old news by now.
WiiScrubb was probably developed for nefarious purposes, but it's interesting in its own right. it seems like a lot of Wii titles (the massive Brawl excepted) are clocking in with disc sizes less than half that of the average PS2 game... despite costing about $20 more.
Wii Sports
If you're one of those types who likes to use a memory card to pimp your DS out into a sort of ghetto PDA, then this may be something you'd like to mess with. DSVideo is a homebrew app designed to get the DS to run video encodes that have been specially transcoded to the otherwise weird 256 x 192 screen size. The site proudly proclaims that a DS transcode of a movie can be squeezed down to 400 MB.
This isn't going to please anyone super-serious about watching video on the go, to be honest, but I bet it could be something fun to play around with in terms of "can I make my DS do that?" You can download everything you need here, but be sure to read the install and transcode directions very carefully. Instructions for use and downloads are all on the site. Have fun with it! If you're not curious enough to try DSVideo, at least check out this demo of the program in action.
At this point the loader is primitive and, frankly, it may not do anything you want it to... but it's significant progress over the previous state of the 'Twilight Princess' hack. If you want to try and run it yourself, it's here, but remember you take your Wii's firmware into your own hands when you mess with it like this. If you'd just like to see a video of the hack in action... well, here you go!
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