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Nintendo Confirms Wii on GC Housing at E3
kukyfrope writes "Nintendo's PR Manager, Matt Atwood, has confirmed accusations that Wii demo stations at E3 were not running inside the Wii case and instead were running inside Gamecube housing using Wii-spec hardware. 'The Wii hardware we exhibited at E3 2006 was made specifically for the E3 show and is not the final mass-production version. Some of this hardware was cased in Nintendo GameCube housing.'" Update: 05/19 21:08 GMT by Z : Changed 'hardware' to 'housing' in title.
And was the controller just a mars bar wrapped in tin foil?
I guess I'm not going to buy a Wii now, because they housed the hardware for the demo inside a GameCube.
Come on Sony, you can poison the well better than that.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Do I not get it? Why would anyone care what case they were in?
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
...but not unexpected for a 5-to-6-months-before release demo.
:)
It showcased what they wanted it to do - they could have cased in hardened dog shit for all I personally would have cared
They weren't running ON Gamecube hardware. They were running IN Gamecube shells. The summary is more true to fact than the subject.
From TFA:
Nintendo confirmed that they did indeed use GameCube housing, but that the "guts" or internal architecture was certainly from the Wii. "The Wii hardware we exhibited at E3 2006 was made specifically for the E3 show and is not the final mass-production version. Some of this hardware was cased in Nintendo GameCube housing," the company explained.
That makes it sound like they were doing something wrong. Who cares what case it was in if the hardware was the real deal?
If the GBA SP and DS lite are any indication, I predict that 18 months after Wii hits the market, Nintendo will announce the WiiCube, a Wii console shaped like a GameCube with a larger disc well and more built-in memory for more Virtual Console products.
Had this not been the case, then either the GCN is forward compatible or that there'd be Wii controller kits for the GCN.
I mean, it's not like someone was playing it for a while, then looked down and saw a GCN and said "Eeewww, I've been playing on a previous-gen console."
I mean, to think that they used plastic housing cases that weren't exactly the same as the final production models, even if all the important metal and fiber bits inside were!
I am just appalled.
Oh, wait. No, it's Friday.
Never mind: I forgot I actually have a life.
As you were.
They can put them in brown paper sacks for all I care.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Can a GC be overclocked and still work?
Well, maybe it can, but I want to know if we can make a Beowulf cluster out of Wii hardware.
Then we can have a Wii Beowulf cluster.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm not sure why this is a big deal, or even a surprise -- at last year's E3, the 360 was emulated on heavily modded PowerPCs. When I saw a stack of them at EA, I couldn't help but giggle at the huge Apple logos emblazoned on the side and the small, unassuming "Property of Microsoft" labels affixed to the top of each machine.
There seems to be accusations of "faking it" at every E3. I guess the industry has brought it on itself, showing stuff like the supposed Madden for Xbox 360 screen shots that were much better than the actual game when it shipped. This stuff has been going on for years and it's no wonder that audiences are wary of being duped by faked demos.
But 6 months before the console hits the shelves, the only hardware that exists is in prototype versions. It is not suprising that the floor models were put together with duct tape, GameCube cases and whatever else they had on-hand. I would be suprised if the actual Wii games don't look better than what Nintendo had on display at this years E3, as developers have more time to work on games and get them polished.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
I don't care if the hardware was housed inside a shoebox. It came, it saw, it kicked some ass. Whatever case it came in doesn't mean shit.
On a related note, a shoebox Wii would be pretty cool.
That's a really odd choice for nintendo, given the fact that the gamecube is a fairly 'customized' piece of hardware (3 boards, funky controller ports, etc) crammed into a REALLY tight space.
I would have found it much more likely for them to have been put in some generic grey box or something like that for E3........
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
yep, but the games will run faster and be harder as result ;)
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Not having the production plastic case ready is not a bad thing.
But, being able to stuff the prototype electronics in the gamecube case is a Good Thing:
The Wii will most likely not be Hot, Loud (fans), or obnoxiously large and obtrusive like other consoles.
It looks like everybody is missing the point.
Accusation: Nintendo doesn't have their Wii hardware ready and is just running the demos on GameCube hardware with a new controller plugged in.
Fact: Nintendo doesn't have their Wii hardware ready and is just running the demos on GameCube hardware that has been upgraded to Wii specs with a new controller plugged in.
Difference: Accusation is correct: Nintendo doesn't have final hardware ready yet (no biggie). Accusation is incorrect: Nintendo is just using GameCube hardware for demos and dev kits and hasn't gotten the updated hardware story figured out yet (this would be scary).
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Probably not; I really doubt that in this day and age game speed is tied to clock speed. Pretty much all games have their own timing routines.
Magic Carpet was... playing it on a modern PC results in "Start! YOU ARE DEAD."
I seem to remember making this kind of comment before, but....
The Gamecube is sixth-generation. The prior generations are:
1. Up to and including Atari 2600.
2. Intellivision, Colecovision, Atari 5200.
3. NES, Sega Master System, Atari 7800.
4. Genesis, SNES, Turbografx 16.
5. Saturn, Playstation, N64
6. Dreamcast, PS2, X-box, Gamecube.
-- and next --
7. X-Box 360, Playstation 3, Wii.
I guess it *should* be "in" instead of "on". However, "housing" is certainly a common technical term and I don't get that part of your rant.
I know more than you drink.
Accusation: Nintendo is still running games off of modified Gamecube hardware.
:-)
Fact: While this was true for most of last year, and some of this year, E3 2006 saw Wii technology housed in black Gamecube casing.
---space.is.the.place---
Sony BluRay laptop demo was using a DVD-ROM!
Karl Rove has been indicted!
Everything you read on the intrawebs is the absolute truth!
My dual opteron system sucks becuase it's in a cheap Antec case without a fancy smansy platic window with colored florescent neon green lighting! Damn... without the case my system is nothing!
They were the devices in racks between the monitors.
They're not PCs in there. They're not "representative hardware". They're PS3s, devkits.
No, they weren't in final plastics yet either.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
...if this is the best dirt to be dug up on Nintendo's new console, if the worst we can say of Nintendo is "Their console is named funny and was in strange boxes!", then we should retire from the business. You might as well complain that Mother Theresa hurt the image of Theresas everywhere by looking old.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
All the games companies show games on unfinished hardware, why is this even news? Remember last year the X360 demos were on dual CPU Macs with Radeon X800s until the hardware was finished. And at this year's E3 Sony demoed Gran Turismo HD on a PC! That's not even vaguely similar architecturally to the PS3!
I saw an auction on eBay a while back for an early GameCube dev kit. The CPU clockspeed was listed as only half that of the final GameCube and the graphics hardware was missing a few pipelines. It was also bigger than the final hardware so it couldn't fit in the GC's case. Was demoing GameCube games on that at E3 also misleading?
And what have we got this year? Wii hardware that's too big to fit in Wii cases, so they stuck it in a GC case. Even if Nintendo were just using GCs and there wasn't any Wii hardware in them, I don't think it's particularly important because a) the Wii isn't about graphical power and b) the GC is essentially a subset of the Wii's final spec. So it's the equivalent of working on a cut down Wii anyway, like the early GC dev kit I mentioned above was a cut down version of the final GC hardware.
Back in 2004, there were many rumours that Nintendo was going to announce a new peripheral add-on for the Gamecube that would add new functionality and possibly extend the life of the Gamecube. Let's assume that this peripheral was the "Wii-mote".
So let's put all this logic together about 6 months after this announcement:
1) The Gamecube never really got it's established fanbase.
2) Around the same time, Nintendo launches the DS. The "Wii-mote" would have distracted Nintendo from the DS launch.
3) Let's say that had trouble making the "Wii-mote" work... say... the Gamecube lacked the CPU horsepower, or they needed to "refine" the controller more.
4) Sony and MSFT both announces their next-gen consoles at this same time.
So, you have this potentially revolutionary controller. Why try and compete against Sony and MSFT with the dying Gamecube? Add some horsepower to the Gamecube. Add a new GPU, and voila... you have a new console.
Therefore, it doesn't surpise me that they COULD have a "pushed" Gamecube at E3 to demonstrate Wii's capabilities.
1) It explains the un-exceptional graphics... or at least graphics the Gamecube could do.
2) It explains the huge amount of games demoed at E3.
3) It explains the "Gamecube" housings.
4) It explains how "polished" the demos were, and how refined the Wii-mote works.
5) It explains why the Wii development kits are so cheap... they are probably very much similar to the Gamecube.
So it doesn't surprise me that the Wii was disguised in the Gamecube housing. In the end, does it really matter? I'm still buying one at launch.
The same could be said of the Game Boy Color compared to the original green screen Game Boy.
Yeah, because, you know -- the Gameboy just kind of died off after that. Oh... wait...
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.