- Hey Nintendo, we have exposed your dev kits before
and we are about to do it again.
This is the Nintendo NDEV, an early development kit
for the Nintendo Revolut, excuse me.
Wii, when it was first announced
Nintendo's Revolution console was purely theoretical.
In fact, the physical demo unit
at E3 2005 was a Fugazi, fairy dust didn't exist.
It was simply an empty plastic shell
with nothing in it but promises.
To make good on those promises then,
by the start of the 2006 Christmas season.
Nintendo needed a way for developers to work on Wii software
without having a ready for market console available.
Their solution was a Game Cube dev kit
with some modifications.
Now, that might have been fine for internal developers
but you don't want third party developers working
with what is clearly last gen hardware.
That's embarrassing.
Even if it was basically what the Wii would end up being.
So over the next 12 months,
Nintendo went from a barely modded game cube TDEV
to a mysterious blurry black box
to a more polished black box
with no wireless controllers to this
the final pre-release dev kit
with all the bells and whistles of the retail console.
Well, sort of how do you play games without a disc drive?
And what sets us apart from the final retail unit?
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- This is one of those videos where the writer
actually didn't really tell me a whole lot going
into it other than yes, you are allowed to open it.
So that's the first thing I'm gonna be doing.
That's actually a lie.
I was also told to be extremely careful
about keeping these screws organized because some
of them are really long, some of them are really not long
and if you put the wrong ones
in, you can totally fubar the whole thing.
Wait, why are we opening it up first?
We gotta talk about some of this stuff.
At the front.
We've got our game cube, memory card slots
as well as four ports for game cube controllers
because early versions of the
Wii were fully backwards compatible, including
four player multiplayer.
Later ones removed the ports
even though the hardware technically still existed inside.
So you could actually hack the support back in.
And then later ones cut the feature out entirely.
But hey, we're Nintendo, you're gonna buy it anyway.
We've also got the SD card slot that was ostensibly
for expanding the storage
so you could buy things in the Nintendo eShop,
but more realistically was just used for hacking the console
though I actually used mine to transfer
all my data to a Wii U.
So that's a legit use for it.
Sync button for pairing controllers.
Moving around to this side, a Bluetooth module
and this is fun.
You might think, oh
well that's an external antenna for Bluetooth.
No, this is for a wired wee mote.
Neat. Huh?
During development, they were not wireless yet.
Over here we've got a WiFi module,
apparently wired WiFi was not needed.
I mean, why wouldn't they just put an ethernet port on it?
You know what? It doesn't matter.
The point is, at the back
the sensor bar, AV multi-out for composite component
the regular USB ports you'd find on the Wii
and these three USB type Bs that apparently
all need to be plugged in in order for
this thing to operate.
Now that's interesting.
Eject button.
Eject what?
Ooh.
It does not have a lot of cooling hey.
I mean I guess neither did the retail unit.
You've just got a single what appears
to be a 60 millimeter fan back here.
Slim too.
And then a passive heat sink that I guess by merit
of this being the only other hole in the chassis
is gonna get some kind of airflow over it.
But like that's it hey.
That's wild.
Right here next to what I assume is the GPU.
We've got 64 megabytes of GDDR3 and then over
here is what looks like 512 megs of storage.
That's double what shipped on the finished console.
Now there's supposed to be twice as much RAM
as the finished console as well, but I only
see the one chip.
It's so cool the way that this engineering level hardware
will have flexibility built into it that not only
will never make its way into the finished product
but might not even be needed for the development product.
Like look at this, WiFI attenuators.
So there's an antenna module here, but while
it's got these two little connectors so that you
could add additional antennas to it
they never even do that.
They just take a wire and like coil it up in here.
As far as I can tell, it's wild.
This doesn't do anything, but it could
Woo.
Well, that was easy.
That's some crusty thermal com.
Did you take this off? Is that why this looks like Poop?
- I am not the first person to take that apart.
And if you want proof of that
check the underside of the top that you took off of it.
- Ah.
Oh, okay.
DeadlyFoes was here.
I'm guessing that's who sent us this unit.
- Nope. It came from the person who lent it to DeadlyFoez.
- Really? I mean, do I need to tag it now too?
- [ Tanner] I think that's appropriate.
- Maybe I'll just put a dent in it.
That would be pretty classic.
Just drop the screwdriver.
No I can't.
I can't.
- [Tanner] We've got a Laser engraver
on the other side of this wall.
- I can't.
No, I can't do it.
There's our ATI graphics chip
and our IBM, did they use an IBM CPU?
Yeah. It was power, wasn't it?
- [Tanner] Yup. The Broadway was IBM.
And the Hollywood was AMD.
- Super cool.
Goes to show you Nintendo knows gaming, little CPU, big GPU.
Neither of them are powerful,
but boy were they ever little and big.
Now we need to pry up.
Oh!
We can glean a lot just from the
way the traces are run on the board.
Here's our CPU.
So the CPU bones connected predominantly to the GPU bone
which is connected to the video memory bone.
Ah, so I said there was supposed to be twice
as much VRAM on this thing.
That's because half of it is on the
underside of this top board.
This appears to be pretty much the entire Wii component
of this development kit.
So what is everything else then?
On this board on your right, we find a couple
of Xilinx Spartan FPGAs, because these
are field programmable.
They could be doing quite literally anything.
But based on the fact that there are the
three USB ports and a serial port on here.
I'd say this is probably running whatever
operating system that Nintendo's using to interface
with the development kit.
As for this boy right here.
Oh, it's conveniently labeled.
This is NDEV-POWER-X2
So power.
That's a power supply.
Oh, hilarious.
A lot of these big connectors that
I was trying to figure
out what the heck they do is just
carrying power through this board and into this board.
Nothing really that interesting down here.
Just the AC to DC converter for our power supply.
Oh, I lied.
This does give us a better look
at how all of those diagnostic LEDs and buttons
and dip switches on the front are in fact wired
up to what I said I suspected was the Development OS board.
This one right here.
So hypothesis confirmed.
Should we fire it up?
- [Tanner] Yeah! - All Right, lets do it.
We're hooked up.
Our LED is working.
Is that a zero?
Is that a, I don't know.
It's working.
Anyway. We have to run Windows XP.
- We have to run Windows of some version.
I felt XP was the best to go with because 2006.
What's your choice?
It's XP or Vista.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna take XP
- I'm a Vista boy.
Okay, so we open a dilph.
- [Tanner] Yep. (chime tinkling)
- Unfortunately, we weren't able to get our hands
on any first party Nintendo games
because they control their leaks a lot better
than third party developers.
But we do have what our early builds.
- Yes.
- Of a handful of games.
Well, let's go Simpsons, right?
- Yeah.
- Oh, that's a game Cube game is it?
- Nope. - Does GC oh Okay.
- GCM, A lot of the architecture
for the Wii is backwards compatible with the Game Cube.
So as a result, a lot of the file names are similar.
- Hey, there we go.
- Now it should tell you that you've
got the wrong firmware.
- Okay.
- Because we don't have the right firmware on here.
- Cool. - That is.
- Hey. - Wrong firmware version.
If you want to continue
if you like to take these, there we go so.
- Enter proper menu flow?
OK THEN, NO WAY.
- That's how you know it's internal.
- Shut up.
I love it.
(Linus imitates clown laughing)
Legal text here
- And placeholder one.
- Hey, that's my favorite placeholder right up there
with placeholder a.
- Oh, yeah you wanna try going to the Wii Menu?
- Ah sure, oh that doesn't do anything.
- It does not do anything.
- It's just a picture.
It's not even a button.
- Oh, oh hey.
And now you've got the developer menu.
- Oh this is wild.
I mean yeah I got all the cheats then.
It's okay.
Well let's have unlimited calories
and homer ball and helium.
- This is normally not how the game goes.
- I do have kind of a way of breaking things.
- Dancing Krusty's always a good sign.
- Did it just restart?
Oh.
- Oh, we've got sounds so no.
- Hey there we go.
Oh my God these loading times though.
- Well, at least you're getting some sort
of idea as to what's happening.
Your memory there is getting used up.
It was getting used up.
- Did I break it?
- Oh, nope.
- Hey, here we go.
So you have to take the less nutritious thing.
- Yep.
Got 'em.
Oh, shoot.
Oh, what?
That took off that many points.
- This might be a good time to cheat.
- No, I got this.
I got this.
I'm gonna beat them.
Oh, what?
No, I didn't shake this one.
I have negative po.
Oh. Oh no.
Can I just punch him?
Like, can I just fight him?
I could take him, this is hard.
How is this in the first couple minutes of the game?
Okay. I think we could try another game.
- Alright.
- Ooh it occurs to me without the chassis cover on this
heat sink is probably not getting a lot of airflow.
Oh, it seems okay.
It's barely even warm.
I mean how much did the Wii consume
like 30 watts or 45 watts or something like that.
- It was, yeah so it was 12 volt, 4.8 amps.
But most of that energy was used for the disk drive.
- Right. Okay.
- [Tanner] So people were building portable Wiis
that we're using I don't know,
maybe like two amps at 12 volts.
- Wow. Yeah those portable Wii projects are so cool.
Oh yeah, where are these games installed to?
How is it connected to that laptop?
Is it just via USB?
- Yeah, there's three USB ports all go into it.
- And do we know which USBs do what?
- I think the one labeled DI is for disk input.
COM is for communication.
How that's used, I'm not sure.
Then there's DEBUG
which I want to say would normally go to the IDE.
So the like text editor for the code, which in this case
I think it's called Code Masters.
- Wait, you said this was GoldenEye?
- That's what it was labeled as.
I have not actually opened it up.
This would be 2009.
Daniel Craig "Golden Eye."
- [David] Yeah, they did a remake.
- They did a remake without Pierce Brosnan?
- [David] Well, this was Daniel Craig's era.
- What just happened?
Is any of this in the real game?
- Yeah. I don't think we can actually play this at all.
Which is disappointing
- Look at like, what was that?
- Hey, look at our 3D models
and how they look like Daniel Craig
- Other playable deliverables.
- [David] It almost seems like they're like
showing to investors or something.
Showing the progress.
- Yeah.
- [David] Is it just a video?
- No, I'm doing stuff.
- [David] Oh.
- Whoa.
Cause that's how that works.
Ooh.
Whoa hi.
Okay.
Okay. Ooh.
Oh boy.
That she's, she's sensitive.
- [David] What's gonna happen when you
get to the end of the world?
- I don't know!
(David laughing)
Okay. Well that was cool.
- Yeah.
- Clearly some proof of concept level stuff.
Yeah, okay now that I see how interesting these games are.
I kind of wanna try another one.
Wait, David
you had said there was something you wanted to try.
What was it?
Is this it?
Am I looking at what this is?
- [David] No, I think
Maybe?
- What's a blockout?
Oh.
- [David] Oh. Literally blocks.
- Okay, you know what I think we might be looking
at here is just the building blocks blockout
of what these experiences might look like.
And then maybe these are slightly better.
Yeah. First pass artwork in progress.
Okay, what level do we wanna have a look at?
- I wanna see the non-deliverable.
- They never wanted us to see this Tanner.
It was non-deliverable.
Oh wow.
This is amazing. (David laughs)
I kind of wanna play this game (laughs).
- I gotta say, it'll be a lot scarier
seeing a tank coming at you if it is fluorescent white.
- This is so cool.
I have no interest whatsoever in playing this game,
but boy do I ever wanna play this early development thing.
- I always wanna see what I'm not supposed to see.
- Yeah
- This is a little bit reminiscent of.
- Wait.
Oh, hey here we go.
Oh.
(Daniel laughs)
- Don't fall down the pit.
Number one rule of Golden Eye.
- Okay, I will try not to fall down a hole this time.
Can I go this way?
Oh.
- Nope.
- No (cries).
- Okay. Next game. I think.
- Yep.
(Linus laughs)
- Oh.
- Oh, that's some frame rate.
- Wow. No further optimization necessary.
- (laughs) Okay.
- [David] The audio.
- Well, this one is not done
- Are we?
Are we overheating at all?
Is that what's happening?
- I don't think so because this isn't even 3D.
This is just a cut scene.
- Naruto goes hard.
They do their hand gestures and Ninja Magic.
Does it have any secret menus I wonder?
- No, I think this one's pretty done.
We've got you beaten.
Now let's see who we're dealing with here.
- And I would've gotten away
with it to if it weren't for you meddling kids.
- I think we're done here.
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- If you guys enjoyed this video,
you might enjoy our previous look
at the 3DS dev kit
or I think the PS3 one was really interesting.
- I like the PS3 one.
- Yeah. Check out the PS3 one.