this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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The Wii board is fantastic for trimming. It sips power and can be trimmed to a specific shape that is tiny and still work. Pretty much any Wii portable or GameCube mod you see nowadays is a Wii board trimmed up, which is fantastic, because the Wii sold over a hundred million units whilst the GameCube did not.
If you want a "homebrewed Wii system made with modern components" you're describing Dolphin running on any compute board. Those exist too.
Not really, as that's emulation. I mean hardware that is smaller than was on the Wii (because it's newer and we've had many years of miniaturisation) and natively runs the Wii system with all its functions.
Yes, the Wii sold millions, but millions is still a finite number.
Doing some sort of equivalent would be very expensive. I imagine getting the chips and redesigning the PCB and its traces could be a lot of money.
Doing an FPGA version would also be the same. People can barely do FPGA accesible for the N64 and PSX, and even then I think there's limitations with those implementations.
Boards trims of the Wii seem very plausible as the hardware wasn't as complex as other consoles from the era. I have no idea about sizes, but there's a chance the Wii has a smaller processor thanks to die shrinks.