Hey guys, before I begin I would like to say thanks for all of the responses on the last blog post. There were a lot of interested people and it's nice to see enthusiasm for these, as I value comments and feedback over likes - and people were asking more questions last time which was great.
So I'm doing this post because I have a lot of time and a lot of seemingly useless knowledge and trivia about hardware built up, which people seem to enjoy reading about, and because my Discord server voted to do a Wii tech talk by a landslide... anyway, I hope you enjoy it!
The Wii is an interesting system. Despite the claims that it was "two GameCubes" (more on that later) and couldn't do HD graphics like its competitors, the Wii went on to be the best selling system of its generation, selling over 100 million units in total with classic games such as Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword releasing over the system's life. It proved that Nintendo were the best at luring in a wide audience, and after the success of the DS which also featured an innovative gimmick with comparatively weak hardware it also proved that hardware doesn't matter as long as you're strong in other aspects.
Hardware:
In 2005 Nintendo revealed their "Revolution" console, which went on to become the Wii. The idea was that tech specs didn't matter and Revolution put "revolutionary" gameplay and fresh new experiences ahead of photorealism. This was a massive success as it appealed to a very diverse range of players. But did Nintendo nail it? The problem was that while the Wii didn't attempt to deliver photorealism, it was sometimes just not enough to pull its weight. A quick refresher on the specs of the Wii versus its competitor from 2005, the Xbox 360:
[Wii]
CPU: 729MHz PowerPC-based CPU
GPU: Custom ATI "Hollywood" GPU, 243MHz - 24MB embedded memory
RAM: 64MB (88MB total)
(Additional info: 243MHz ARM-based "Starlet" processor (for inputs/outputs and security) inside the GPU)
[Xbox 360]
CPU: 3.2GHz 3-core PowerPC-based CPU
GPU: Custom ATI "Xenos" GPU, 500MHz - 10MB VRAM, unified RAM may be used for textures and assets
RAM: 512MB (unified, shared between GPU and main memory)
Okay, so it's clear by now that the Wii didn't target tech specs. It was a decision made by Nintendo to go for a more power-efficient, cheaper and smaller system as opposed to a powerhouse like the Xbox 360. But did Nintendo compromise too much? In my opinion, they did, and I'll explain why. Here are the GameCube's specs, from 2001:
[GameCube]
CPU: 485MHz PowerPC-based CPU
GPU: Custom ATI "Flipper" GPU, 162MHz - 3MB VRAM, may tap into 24MB main RAM
RAM: 24MB "main" RAM + 16MB additional RAM for audio and other misc. tasks
So when people say "The Wii was just two GameCubes duct-taped together", the reality is even scarier - it's more comparable to an overclocked GameCube, in actuality, or about 1.5x a GameCube on paper. Granted, the hardware had added support in terms of hardware-level instructions, but it is incredible how close the two consoles were. The Wii and GameCube share similar architectures since the Wii was intended to be backwards compatible with the GameCube without the need for emulation, so similar hardware was necessary. However, it became clear that not too long after the Wii's launch, Nintendo had fallen slightly too short.
Take Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare as a prime example, released in 2007 on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC and Modern Warfare: Reflex, a reworked and optimised version of the game for Wii in 2009. Games that were ported over from PS3, Xbox 360 and PC had to have big cutbacks. Games like Modern Warfare Reflex were games that showed clear good intent to recreate the experience from other consoles as well as adding new things to make it a truly Wii experience, but despite the effort it often wasn't enough. Modern Warfare - which ran at 1024x600 at 60FPS on PS3 and Xbox 360, with MSAA (a form of anti-aliasing, a technique to clean up a 3D image) on top. By comparison, MW Reflex ran at about 640x480 - even in 16:9 widescreen mode; Wii games could not run at a full 853x480, so widescreen games on Wii simply had to be squashed into a 640x480 target then stretched back out to a 16:9 ratio - at 30FPS, and despite halving the pixel count and having twice the time to render the scene at 30FPS instead of 60, the Wii game still lacked in many areas. Cutting edge shading techniques were glaringly absent when looked at in comparisons, and the resolution deficit as well as a lack of anti-aliasing gave the game a rougher look which lacked the sharpness, responsiveness and cleanliness of the other consoles.
I mentioned shaders and this is an interesting case; the Wii has shader pipelines, but the Wii does not support traditional shaders. Rather, the Wii - like the GameCube before it - relies on a custom "TEV" unit (Texture Environment Unit). This doesn't do shading in a traditional way, such as pixel or vertex shading on other platforms; the TEV essentially changes the textures directly to give the impression of shading - it's difficult to say exactly how it does it as even Nintendo's official Wii graphics primer isn't very clear about it. The Wii can use up to 8 different lights at once and the TEV can use rasterising to change the appearance of a texture based on a defined colour. It's a bit of a strange system, but it worked in games such as Rogue Squadron for GameCube to produce convincing lighting and shader effects.
The Wii supports textures up to 1024x1024, like the Nintendo DS. To get a bit more technical about video memory usage, the Wii has a hard 1MB cap on framebuffer sizes to limit developers to approximately 640x480 or 640x528 at maximum (eg. for PAL games), similar to the GameCube. The remaining 2MB of VRAM is used as a tight, fast cache, with the rest of the embedded GPU memory used as slightly slower texture memory. The Wii supports fairly standard features on the GPU, such as antialiasing, bilinear texture filtering and mip-maps. However, antialiasing even on a simple scene requires compromise; the highest possible resolution in the Embedded Frame Buffer (EFB, the buffer inside the 3MB VRAM) with antialiasing enabled is half of the vertical resolution, at 640x264. This along with the high performance penalty is the reason why many developers didn't use antialiasing, hence the unclean look of many Wii games.
Nintendo were, without much doubt, the best developers for the Wii. Nintendo designed their Wii games with the only intention being to run at a consistent 60FPS (30FPS, in the case of Zelda games) on specific Wii hardware, unlike most developers. Games such as Mario Kart Wii, Super Mario Galaxy and Wii Sports showed Nintendo's proficiency and creativeness with stylised artwork to create a very nice looking game. Mario Galaxy in particular is often seen as a great demo for the Wii, and it's easy to see why; it's a fluid, 60 frames per second platformer with some great artwork and great use of comparatively limited hardware. Despite the Wii's limited shader capabilities, Galaxy and its world looks alive thanks to clever use of bloom and colour grading to create a convincing atmosphere in space... if that makes sense.
Another issue many games had is disc size. PS3 games used Blu-ray discs, which were 25GB (single-layered) or 50GB (dual-layered). Xbox 360 and Wii both had the same problem - DVD discs. DVDs could only hold 4.7GB (single-layered) or 8.5GB (dual-layered). Xbox 360 suffered even more as 1GB of the ~8GB usable disc space was allocated to Microsoft's anti-piracy checks, meaning that astonishingly a Wii or PlayStation 2 game could hold more data than an Xbox 360 game disc. The Wii's total space was also somewhat restricted because Nintendo forced every disc to ship with IOS software - more on that below - even if the game didn't use it, though this shouldn't have However, the 360 had the advantage of hard drive installs, meaning games could download additional update data. The Wii's support for this was hampered by the fact the Wii had 512MB of built in storage, and though it is expandable with an SD card developers still couldn't make additional content that wouldn't fit in the Wii's storage or take up a large amount of it. Thanks to compression many games were still able to get away with it, as well as the fact that Wii didn't need high resolution assets like Xbox 360 or PS3 games did - but some games may have had to cut content to fit on a DVD disc.
Software:
So on a software level, what did the Wii have running under the hood? Many of us are familiar with the Wii Menu; an elegant piece of system software where you can play your disc games, installed titles and channels by waggling your Wii remote in front of the screen. But what happens underneath the hood of the Wii? Was DVD support for Wii ever going to happen? Why was Virtual Console so interesting? How small were WiiWare games? I'll answer all of these questions below.
Underneath the Wii, the Wii has an IOS system which is a collection of software - such as USB + network drivers, WiiConnect24 and security - which is the backbone of the Wii. IOS runs on the "Starlet" chip of the Wii and operates independently of the main PowerPC CPU. This is shown with the Wii's standby mode; when the Wii is in standby mode (with a yellow LED light on the power button), the main hardware is powered off and only the ARM chip is active, since it controls WiiConnect24. There are about 50 IOS (plural), a few of which are stubs - these stub IOS are used by homebrew programs for backup game loading among other things, such as IOS 249. Strangely, IOS got new versions after every single change. You can also tell from earlier IOS how little they actually understood their own ARM hardware; many debugging routines were left in and parts were compiled on Cygwin, (which is a Linux environment running on Windows) and other parts were compiled on a random developer's Linux setup.
So as you may know, the Wii didn't support CDs or DVDs - only Wii and GameCube discs, with GameCube compatibility dropped in later models as well. But did you know that there are clues left behind that show Nintendo were planning on accepting DVDs at one point? Early IOS have full DVD support built in - the SYSCONF, the configuration file that the Wii reads settings from, had a flag that enabled DVD support for a long time. A homebrew program called DVDX enabled DVD support on certain Wii models and WiiMC, a Wii media centre program, also accepts DVDs - though not all Wii drives will read DVDs.
The Wii Virtual Console is also very interesting. The Virtual Console offered official, Nintendo emulation of decades of gaming history - which was intriguing for a few reasons. Firstly, it was interesting to see Nintendo develop emulators themselves - and it was great to see them provide a gateway to their old titles. However, the drawback is that the Wii wasn't powerful enough to emulate a few Nintendo 64-era games at full speed such as Perfect Dark and Donkey Kong Country, so games that could have potentially made the cut were scrapped. It again makes you think about whether Nintendo could have gone a bit further with their hardware.
But what's really interesting is that Nintendo, who are profoundly against piracy and downloading ROMs off the internet, actually sold Virtual Console users pirated copies of Super Mario Bros. for NES. If you open a decrypted version of Super Mario Bros from the Virtual Console with a hex editor, you will find that there is a ".NES" header in the file. That's not enough to prove anything on its own, but suggests the ROM has existed and been used with an emulator. But the version of Super Mario Bros used for the Virtual Console release was completely identical to an online copy, and since there should be minor variances between copies of the game, this confirms it was downloaded from the internet. The creator of a very early NES emulator called iNES, Marat Fayzullin, explained what the problem was:
"There are minute differences between ROM dumps," explained Fayzullin. "Depending on the cartridge version and how it has been dumped. If you see that your .NES file DOES NOT match any of the ones found online, it is likely to be their own ROM dump. I have cut the ROM content out of the Wii file you sent me and it indeed matches the .NES file found online."
Nintendo commented on this and denied these allegations but Nintendo decided not to give an explanation for these discrepancies, which leaves us with the conclusion that there is no explanation other than that this is an illegally obtained copy. As Nintendo themselves said about piracy, "It's that simple".
On a final note about Wii software, WiiWare was Nintendo's selection of bite sized games released by mostly indie publishers. WiiWare games such as Fast Racing League and World of Goo were enjoyable and didn't break the bank like a big-budget title. But did you know how restrictive they were on developers? A WiiWare game could be no bigger than 40MB, which is really quite tiny. A WiiWare version of the popular indie title Super Meat Boy was cancelled after the developers refused to compromise on quality to fit their game within WiiWare size limits. However, games designed specially for WiiWare were able to achieve surprising results; Shin'en, who proceeded to produce Fast Racing NEO/Fast RMX and Nano Assault Neo on Wii U/Switch, were one team who were able to achieve incredible results. An example of their expertise was with the game Jett Rocket, which features lush environments, slick animation and nice artwork all within the limitations of WiiWare size constraints. It's a great effort which arguably rivals some of the bigger budget Wii titles while being easy on your Wii's storage and your wallet.
Conclusions:
The Wii was a strange beast which ended up becoming the dark horse of its generation. Despite its relatively weak hardware, which did cause issues, many developers produced unique experiences which people of all audiences enjoyed and the Wii was a great example of how "more advanced" may not necessarily mean "better".
Thank you for reading this lengthy post! If you've enjoyed this and/or learned something from this post, tell me what you enjoyed or what could have been improved in the comments and leave a like. Don't forget to leave any suggestions for future posts in the comments as well!
So I'm doing this post because I have a lot of time and a lot of seemingly useless knowledge and trivia about hardware built up, which people seem to enjoy reading about, and because my Discord server voted to do a Wii tech talk by a landslide... anyway, I hope you enjoy it!
The Wii is an interesting system. Despite the claims that it was "two GameCubes" (more on that later) and couldn't do HD graphics like its competitors, the Wii went on to be the best selling system of its generation, selling over 100 million units in total with classic games such as Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword releasing over the system's life. It proved that Nintendo were the best at luring in a wide audience, and after the success of the DS which also featured an innovative gimmick with comparatively weak hardware it also proved that hardware doesn't matter as long as you're strong in other aspects.
Hardware:
In 2005 Nintendo revealed their "Revolution" console, which went on to become the Wii. The idea was that tech specs didn't matter and Revolution put "revolutionary" gameplay and fresh new experiences ahead of photorealism. This was a massive success as it appealed to a very diverse range of players. But did Nintendo nail it? The problem was that while the Wii didn't attempt to deliver photorealism, it was sometimes just not enough to pull its weight. A quick refresher on the specs of the Wii versus its competitor from 2005, the Xbox 360:
[Wii]
CPU: 729MHz PowerPC-based CPU
GPU: Custom ATI "Hollywood" GPU, 243MHz - 24MB embedded memory
RAM: 64MB (88MB total)
(Additional info: 243MHz ARM-based "Starlet" processor (for inputs/outputs and security) inside the GPU)
[Xbox 360]
CPU: 3.2GHz 3-core PowerPC-based CPU
GPU: Custom ATI "Xenos" GPU, 500MHz - 10MB VRAM, unified RAM may be used for textures and assets
RAM: 512MB (unified, shared between GPU and main memory)
Okay, so it's clear by now that the Wii didn't target tech specs. It was a decision made by Nintendo to go for a more power-efficient, cheaper and smaller system as opposed to a powerhouse like the Xbox 360. But did Nintendo compromise too much? In my opinion, they did, and I'll explain why. Here are the GameCube's specs, from 2001:
[GameCube]
CPU: 485MHz PowerPC-based CPU
GPU: Custom ATI "Flipper" GPU, 162MHz - 3MB VRAM, may tap into 24MB main RAM
RAM: 24MB "main" RAM + 16MB additional RAM for audio and other misc. tasks
So when people say "The Wii was just two GameCubes duct-taped together", the reality is even scarier - it's more comparable to an overclocked GameCube, in actuality, or about 1.5x a GameCube on paper. Granted, the hardware had added support in terms of hardware-level instructions, but it is incredible how close the two consoles were. The Wii and GameCube share similar architectures since the Wii was intended to be backwards compatible with the GameCube without the need for emulation, so similar hardware was necessary. However, it became clear that not too long after the Wii's launch, Nintendo had fallen slightly too short.
Take Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare as a prime example, released in 2007 on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC and Modern Warfare: Reflex, a reworked and optimised version of the game for Wii in 2009. Games that were ported over from PS3, Xbox 360 and PC had to have big cutbacks. Games like Modern Warfare Reflex were games that showed clear good intent to recreate the experience from other consoles as well as adding new things to make it a truly Wii experience, but despite the effort it often wasn't enough. Modern Warfare - which ran at 1024x600 at 60FPS on PS3 and Xbox 360, with MSAA (a form of anti-aliasing, a technique to clean up a 3D image) on top. By comparison, MW Reflex ran at about 640x480 - even in 16:9 widescreen mode; Wii games could not run at a full 853x480, so widescreen games on Wii simply had to be squashed into a 640x480 target then stretched back out to a 16:9 ratio - at 30FPS, and despite halving the pixel count and having twice the time to render the scene at 30FPS instead of 60, the Wii game still lacked in many areas. Cutting edge shading techniques were glaringly absent when looked at in comparisons, and the resolution deficit as well as a lack of anti-aliasing gave the game a rougher look which lacked the sharpness, responsiveness and cleanliness of the other consoles.
I mentioned shaders and this is an interesting case; the Wii has shader pipelines, but the Wii does not support traditional shaders. Rather, the Wii - like the GameCube before it - relies on a custom "TEV" unit (Texture Environment Unit). This doesn't do shading in a traditional way, such as pixel or vertex shading on other platforms; the TEV essentially changes the textures directly to give the impression of shading - it's difficult to say exactly how it does it as even Nintendo's official Wii graphics primer isn't very clear about it. The Wii can use up to 8 different lights at once and the TEV can use rasterising to change the appearance of a texture based on a defined colour. It's a bit of a strange system, but it worked in games such as Rogue Squadron for GameCube to produce convincing lighting and shader effects.
The Wii supports textures up to 1024x1024, like the Nintendo DS. To get a bit more technical about video memory usage, the Wii has a hard 1MB cap on framebuffer sizes to limit developers to approximately 640x480 or 640x528 at maximum (eg. for PAL games), similar to the GameCube. The remaining 2MB of VRAM is used as a tight, fast cache, with the rest of the embedded GPU memory used as slightly slower texture memory. The Wii supports fairly standard features on the GPU, such as antialiasing, bilinear texture filtering and mip-maps. However, antialiasing even on a simple scene requires compromise; the highest possible resolution in the Embedded Frame Buffer (EFB, the buffer inside the 3MB VRAM) with antialiasing enabled is half of the vertical resolution, at 640x264. This along with the high performance penalty is the reason why many developers didn't use antialiasing, hence the unclean look of many Wii games.
Nintendo were, without much doubt, the best developers for the Wii. Nintendo designed their Wii games with the only intention being to run at a consistent 60FPS (30FPS, in the case of Zelda games) on specific Wii hardware, unlike most developers. Games such as Mario Kart Wii, Super Mario Galaxy and Wii Sports showed Nintendo's proficiency and creativeness with stylised artwork to create a very nice looking game. Mario Galaxy in particular is often seen as a great demo for the Wii, and it's easy to see why; it's a fluid, 60 frames per second platformer with some great artwork and great use of comparatively limited hardware. Despite the Wii's limited shader capabilities, Galaxy and its world looks alive thanks to clever use of bloom and colour grading to create a convincing atmosphere in space... if that makes sense.
Another issue many games had is disc size. PS3 games used Blu-ray discs, which were 25GB (single-layered) or 50GB (dual-layered). Xbox 360 and Wii both had the same problem - DVD discs. DVDs could only hold 4.7GB (single-layered) or 8.5GB (dual-layered). Xbox 360 suffered even more as 1GB of the ~8GB usable disc space was allocated to Microsoft's anti-piracy checks, meaning that astonishingly a Wii or PlayStation 2 game could hold more data than an Xbox 360 game disc. The Wii's total space was also somewhat restricted because Nintendo forced every disc to ship with IOS software - more on that below - even if the game didn't use it, though this shouldn't have However, the 360 had the advantage of hard drive installs, meaning games could download additional update data. The Wii's support for this was hampered by the fact the Wii had 512MB of built in storage, and though it is expandable with an SD card developers still couldn't make additional content that wouldn't fit in the Wii's storage or take up a large amount of it. Thanks to compression many games were still able to get away with it, as well as the fact that Wii didn't need high resolution assets like Xbox 360 or PS3 games did - but some games may have had to cut content to fit on a DVD disc.
Software:
So on a software level, what did the Wii have running under the hood? Many of us are familiar with the Wii Menu; an elegant piece of system software where you can play your disc games, installed titles and channels by waggling your Wii remote in front of the screen. But what happens underneath the hood of the Wii? Was DVD support for Wii ever going to happen? Why was Virtual Console so interesting? How small were WiiWare games? I'll answer all of these questions below.
Underneath the Wii, the Wii has an IOS system which is a collection of software - such as USB + network drivers, WiiConnect24 and security - which is the backbone of the Wii. IOS runs on the "Starlet" chip of the Wii and operates independently of the main PowerPC CPU. This is shown with the Wii's standby mode; when the Wii is in standby mode (with a yellow LED light on the power button), the main hardware is powered off and only the ARM chip is active, since it controls WiiConnect24. There are about 50 IOS (plural), a few of which are stubs - these stub IOS are used by homebrew programs for backup game loading among other things, such as IOS 249. Strangely, IOS got new versions after every single change. You can also tell from earlier IOS how little they actually understood their own ARM hardware; many debugging routines were left in and parts were compiled on Cygwin, (which is a Linux environment running on Windows) and other parts were compiled on a random developer's Linux setup.
So as you may know, the Wii didn't support CDs or DVDs - only Wii and GameCube discs, with GameCube compatibility dropped in later models as well. But did you know that there are clues left behind that show Nintendo were planning on accepting DVDs at one point? Early IOS have full DVD support built in - the SYSCONF, the configuration file that the Wii reads settings from, had a flag that enabled DVD support for a long time. A homebrew program called DVDX enabled DVD support on certain Wii models and WiiMC, a Wii media centre program, also accepts DVDs - though not all Wii drives will read DVDs.
The Wii Virtual Console is also very interesting. The Virtual Console offered official, Nintendo emulation of decades of gaming history - which was intriguing for a few reasons. Firstly, it was interesting to see Nintendo develop emulators themselves - and it was great to see them provide a gateway to their old titles. However, the drawback is that the Wii wasn't powerful enough to emulate a few Nintendo 64-era games at full speed such as Perfect Dark and Donkey Kong Country, so games that could have potentially made the cut were scrapped. It again makes you think about whether Nintendo could have gone a bit further with their hardware.
But what's really interesting is that Nintendo, who are profoundly against piracy and downloading ROMs off the internet, actually sold Virtual Console users pirated copies of Super Mario Bros. for NES. If you open a decrypted version of Super Mario Bros from the Virtual Console with a hex editor, you will find that there is a ".NES" header in the file. That's not enough to prove anything on its own, but suggests the ROM has existed and been used with an emulator. But the version of Super Mario Bros used for the Virtual Console release was completely identical to an online copy, and since there should be minor variances between copies of the game, this confirms it was downloaded from the internet. The creator of a very early NES emulator called iNES, Marat Fayzullin, explained what the problem was:
"There are minute differences between ROM dumps," explained Fayzullin. "Depending on the cartridge version and how it has been dumped. If you see that your .NES file DOES NOT match any of the ones found online, it is likely to be their own ROM dump. I have cut the ROM content out of the Wii file you sent me and it indeed matches the .NES file found online."
Nintendo commented on this and denied these allegations but Nintendo decided not to give an explanation for these discrepancies, which leaves us with the conclusion that there is no explanation other than that this is an illegally obtained copy. As Nintendo themselves said about piracy, "It's that simple".
On a final note about Wii software, WiiWare was Nintendo's selection of bite sized games released by mostly indie publishers. WiiWare games such as Fast Racing League and World of Goo were enjoyable and didn't break the bank like a big-budget title. But did you know how restrictive they were on developers? A WiiWare game could be no bigger than 40MB, which is really quite tiny. A WiiWare version of the popular indie title Super Meat Boy was cancelled after the developers refused to compromise on quality to fit their game within WiiWare size limits. However, games designed specially for WiiWare were able to achieve surprising results; Shin'en, who proceeded to produce Fast Racing NEO/Fast RMX and Nano Assault Neo on Wii U/Switch, were one team who were able to achieve incredible results. An example of their expertise was with the game Jett Rocket, which features lush environments, slick animation and nice artwork all within the limitations of WiiWare size constraints. It's a great effort which arguably rivals some of the bigger budget Wii titles while being easy on your Wii's storage and your wallet.
Conclusions:
The Wii was a strange beast which ended up becoming the dark horse of its generation. Despite its relatively weak hardware, which did cause issues, many developers produced unique experiences which people of all audiences enjoyed and the Wii was a great example of how "more advanced" may not necessarily mean "better".
Thank you for reading this lengthy post! If you've enjoyed this and/or learned something from this post, tell me what you enjoyed or what could have been improved in the comments and leave a like. Don't forget to leave any suggestions for future posts in the comments as well!
