The Nintendo Wii international press conferences thread

[Rem]

Despite all the naysaying about the controller that's the thing I really like about the system. I think a lot of people saying the specs don't really matter are overlooking something very important. It doesn't matter how revolutionary the controller is and how awesome a game might play on it if it has to be butchered to be on the system in the first place. Would assasins creed be fun on the wii? I would love to try it with the controller, could the wii handle it? Not a fucking chance. The wii will only shine with wacky shit like trauma center, and I'm pretty sure locoroco would make a kick ass wii game.

Ive seen people compare this to the DS but that isn't really fair since 2-D games still sell very well on handhelds. Which means they don't have to push the DS ugly 3-d tech on people. The wii is in the same boat the DS was the major difference being you will be forced to see the wiis shortcomings 90% of the time unlike the DS.

[Diff-chan]

No, I wasn't trying to be a witty or clever. I was just pointing out a simple way to determine how many bits of information a cpu can process.

No, see, thats nonsense (you said the same nonsense when you tried to tell us how much more powerful the Cube was over Xbox). System performance is not a linear function of megahertz. If it was, the Genesis would be 2x as powerful as the SNES and the Xbox would be 2x as powerful as PS2. Clearly not the case. Hell, megahertz of GPU, that has less to do with it than CPU speed. The X1300 has about 90% of the clock speed of an X850 but about 60% of the performance.

I gotta believe that if Nintendo really had a box that was four times more powerful than Cube they would be showing us the specs. The fact that they are being very very vague tells me this thing probably isn't even close to Cube X 4.

[Changeling]

you can blame me for ECM writing that.

That was pretty bad. I miss the guys reviews, though.

[Yoshi]

Broadway CPU

Broadway is Wii's CPU. Broadway functionality and specifications are as follows.

• Operating speed: 729 MHz
• Bus to main memory: 243 MHz, 64 bits (maximum bandwidth: 1.9 gigabytes/sec)
• 32-kilobyte 8-way set-associative L1 instruction cache
• 32-kilobyte 8-way set-associative L1 data cache (can set up 16-kilobyte data scratch pad)
• Superscalar microprocessor with six execution units (floating-point unit, branching unit, system regis
ter unit, load/store unit, two integer units)
• DMA unit (15-entry DMA request queue) used by 16-kilobyte data scratch pad
• Write-gather buffer for writing graphics command lists to the graphics chip
• Onboard 256-kilobyte 2-way set-associative L2 integrated cache
• Two, 32-bit integer units (IU)
• One floating point unit (FPU) (supports single precision (32-bit) and double precision (64-bit))
• The FPU supports paired single floating point (FP/PS)
• The FPU supports paired single multiply add (ps_madd). Most FP/PS instructions can be issued in
each cycle and completed in three cycles.
• Fixed-point to floating-point conversion can be performed at the same time as FPU register load and
store, with no loss in performance.
• The branch unit supports static branch prediction and dynamic branch prediction.
• When an instruction is stalled on data, the next instruction can be issued and executed. All instructions
maintain program logic and will complete in the correct program order.
• Supports three L2 cache fetch modes: 32-Byte, 64-Byte, and 128-Byte.
• Supports these bus pipeline depth levels: level 2, level 3, and level 4.
Reference Information: Broadway is upward compatible with Nintendo GameCube’s CPU (Gekko).

Hollywood GPU

Hollywood is a system LSI composed of a GPU and internal main memory (MEM1). Hollywood is clocked at 243 MHz. Its internal memory consists of 3 megabytes of embedded graphics memory and 24 megabytes of high speed main memory.

Hollywood includes the following.
• Graphics processing unit (with 3 megabytes of eDRAM)
• Audio DSP
• I/O Bridge
• 24 megabytes of internal main memory
• Internal main memory operates at 486 MHz.
Maximum bandwidth between Hollywood and internal main memory: 3.9 gigabytes per second
• Possible to locate a program here
Reference Information: Hollywood is similar to Nintendo GameCube’s Flipper and Splash components.

Source: http://www.maxconsole.net/?mode=news&newsid=8802

[rezo]

The Gamecube is $100 right now, with $20 controllers. The Wii comes with a $60 controller set. If it were simply a Gamecube then it would be $140. With the sensor for the controller assuming the cost is about the same as the remote(for no reason in particular but I'd be surprised if it were much less?) it would be $170-180. Even if the difference in Gamecube and Wii hardware amounted to only $20 or so, you'd be around $200. The price of the Japanese Wii is about $215 dollars and I don't believe it comes with any games packed in(?). It sounds like instead of giving the US a discount and selling it at $200 with no game they took the $15 off of Wii Sports and included it as pack in(Or Wii Sports would have seen a lower price than the average Wii games in which case they took nothing off of it.) Hell maybe they opted to go for the Wii Sports pack in because they sent some marketing guys around the interweb and saw people saying they wanted it. Who knows.

In anycase, the price doesn't seem all that ridiculous.

[marwan]

I just saw a video of that rayman game and it looks like crap, all along i was under the impression it's a platform but it looks like a buncha mini games.

[Rem]

I just saw a video of that rayman game and it looks like crap, all along i was under the impression it's a platform but it looks like a buncha mini games.

Yeah HUGE bummer for me too, I love those little rabbids too.

[avatar]

ok, 2 X 2 = 4
so 2 X 4 = 8
and 4 X 4 = 16

Stop...Just stop.

I just saw a video of that rayman game and it looks like crap, all along i was under the impression it's a platform but it looks like a buncha mini games.

It has Mario 64 type worlds that lead to minigame stations.

Think Conker 64.

[James]

Has the region compatibility thing been settled yet? Nintendo US said all regions are compatible depending on whether or not the publisher cares, Nintendo Europe says it's region-locked all the way. Any particular reason to believe one over the other?

James

[Yoshi]

Perhaps it's an NTSC vs. PAL difference. Hopefully all NTSC games will play on all American and Japanese systems.