Wii Won't Forget You

[Neon Ignition]

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/434632/nintendo-japan-officially-ceases-wii-production/

Having passed the fabled 100m units sold marker Nintendo has confirmed that they have ceased production of the popular yet sometimes derided Wii.

[kryss]

And 3 of those units are mine!

[sj33]

And thus, also ceases production of the last (out of the box) GameCube-compatible hardware.

[Brad]

They did that a while ago I thought? Recent Wiis haven't been able to play cube games have they?

[charlesr]

The minis coudn't. I thought the normal wiis have always been able to.

[Dogg Thang]

There are still a ton of quality Wii games I don't have. Really basic stuff like Galaxy 2 and the Metroid Prime Trilogy set. I really need to rectify that. And so will be setting up a Buy Dogg Games Kickstarter.

[Brad]

Nope. At some point last year (possibly earlier) they started shipping normal Wiis but without the cube memory or controller ports.

[Dogg Thang]

Woah, I did not realise that at all and I'm glad you posted that because at some point it's likely I would have picked up a UK Wii (got a US one but it doesn't usually like UK gamecube games). Would have been a kick in the pants if I had found out it didn't play GC games.

[MoFo2]

Dogg Thang: softmod your Wii to become regionfree

[speedlolita]

The minis coudn't. I thought the normal wiis have always been able to.

They released a revision that didn't have the hardware. As I recall they display a Wii logo horizontally.

Link.

Also later black regular Wii and the red Wii aren't able to read DVD-R as I recall.

[sj33]

Removing GameCube compatibility is even more strange when you consider that even the WiiU hardware itself is compatible. There are a couple of WIP hack projects that re-add GameCube compatibility to both the WiiU and the later Wiis, and most of the hard work seems to be the additional coding to make games work with Bluetooth controllers.

[Dogg Thang]

Dogg Thang: softmod your Wii to become regionfree

I did! It seems hit and miss with what works. Some things work a treat. Some others (GC games in particular) don't seem to display at all and I did a serious amount of searching to figure out why and never really found the answer.

[Nu-Eclipse]

I did! It seems hit and miss with what works. Some things work a treat. Some others (GC games in particular) don't seem to display at all and I did a serious amount of searching to figure out why and never really found the answer.

Gotta be honest, I've yet to find a JPN/US GC or Wii game that won't work at all on my soft-modded PAL Wii.

That said, the official lists of what works/doesn't work hasn't been updated in forever, iirc (I'm still using GeckoOS and GCBoot, btw).

Not that it matters too much - I STILL remain the proud owner of a Panasonic Q that can play both JPN and US GC games!

[Dogg Thang]

Gotta be honest, I've yet to find a JPN/US GC or Wii game that won't work at all on my soft-modded PAL Wii.

I'm going the other way and our region is much more likely to support NTSC signals than NTSC consoles are likely to support PAL. Even forcing PAL GC games to 60Hz doesn't seem to always do the trick. Also seems people running PAL GC games on NTSC Wiis is a much rarer event than people trying to run NTSC games so it's hard to find the research. I did ask in the console thread but never found a solution unfortunately.

[Nu-Eclipse]

I'm going the other way and our region is much more likely to support NTSC signals than NTSC consoles are likely to support PAL. Even forcing PAL GC games to 60Hz doesn't seem to always do the trick. Also seems people running PAL GC games on NTSC Wiis is a much rarer event than people trying to run NTSC games so it's hard to find the research. I did ask in the console thread but never found a solution unfortunately.

Fair points, though I tend to think that the advent of affordable quality HDTVs in general and better game software optimisation across the board have made the whole NTSC/PAL/SECAM/etc. signal concept pretty irrelevant so I find the predicament of you and others in the same boat to be very peculiar.

That said, GCBoot and GeckoOS clearly aren't 100% spot-on every time.