Tag Archives: Wii
Someone squeezed a Nintendo Wii into a Game Boy Color-like case
‘Shakedown Hawaii’ is coming to Wii and Wii U
Nintendo will stop repairing Wii consoles in March
Nintendo's Wii has had a phenomenal run since its 2006 launch, selling more than 101 million consoles across its seven-year lifespan. Now, years after it was supplanted by the Wii U and then the Switch, Nintendo is announcing that it'll no longer ser...
Court overturns patent ruling that would’ve cost Nintendo $10 million
After almost seven years, Nintendo has won a patent case that involved the original Wii. On Tuesday, the company announced that a federal court in Dallas ruled in its favor against iLife Technologies, overturning an earlier 2017 decision that would h...
The 10-year challenge: Video game edition
The 10-year challenge swept social media in January, with people posting images of themselves from 2009 and 2019, usually accompanied by a cute remark about things being the same yet totally different. It's a fun, heartwarming way to train machine le...
Nintendo’s Wii Shop Channel shuts down today
It's a sad day for loyal fans of the original Wii. As promised back in 2017, Nintendo is closing down the Wii Shop Channel as of January 30th. It lost much of its usefulness after March 26th of last year, when you could no longer add Wii Points and...
Netflix for Wii will stop working after January 31st, 2019
Do you have an old Wii hooked up in the bedroom solely to watch Netflix? You might want to look for an alternative in the near future. Netflix has emailed customers and posted a notice warning that Nintendo will "suspend" Netflix and other streamin...
Prototype Nintendo Wii remote turns up at auction
Nintendo's hidden device history isn't just limited to an unreleased PlayStation. Yahoo Japan user Kuriaisu1122 recently sold a prototype Wii remote that bears only superficial similarity to the one that shipped in 2006. The button layout is the sa...
World’s Smallest Nintendo Wii Fits in an Altoids Tin
The Nintendo Wii has been modded countless times, but this particular build is an especially wee Wii. This isn’t some kind of Raspberry Pi emulator. What you’re looking at is a fully functional Wii gaming system crammed into an Altoids tin, dubbed the “Kill Mii.” I doubt if anyone can go much smaller than this.
So how exactly did Shank Mods manage this? Well, much like the Atari 2600, you can cut off the majority of the Wii’s motherboard and still have a functioning system. Sure you are ditching things like the GameCube controller ports and SD card slot, but who needs those anyway? After that, you just need to install a new firmware that tells it to ignore things like a lack of disc drive and load games as ISOs from an attached USB flash drive.
The system has a battery that can run the device for about 10 minutes per charge, which is longer than you would want to play on this thing given its wonky controller setup. Still, it’s an impressive build and wasn’t designed to provide a great user experience. Like many other mods, it was simply done because it could be done. So what’s next? Who wants to build an even wee-er Wii? No doubt someone will eventually take up the challenge.