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Comment by cowboysauce | Hacker News Reader

I would have thought that the GameCube would be the last Nintendo console to use a fixed-function GPU. I was very surprised to see that the Wii used one as well.

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Not only were they both fixed function; they were in some very real ways the same GPU. Like bug for bug compatible. Like in a lot of the official Nintendo docs, they didn't even bother to sed s/Dolphin/Revolution.

Honestly a Wii really is an upclocked GC with a coprocessor stapled on the side handling new (and a lot of old) I/O.

They even included the same GPU again as the GameCube/Wii in the Wii U for backwards compatibility purposes. It's honestly a very nice GPU, and team that made it went to go on to dictate the architecture of the PC GPU for the next six years.

For a chip made in 1999, they certainly got their mileage out of it.

Quick clarification for anyone reading: they included the same GPU in the Wii U in addition to a more modern AMD GPU used for native Wii U games.

In many areas the Wii was just a GameCube with a clockspeed bump and weird controllers.

You could even run GabeCube games on the Wii, and it didn't require Nintendo to ship almost an entire GameCube on the board like Sony did with PS2 emulation on the PS3.

Although reading this article I wonder how Nintendo handled the ARAM situation and the like on the Wii when playing GameCube games?

> Although reading this article I wonder how Nintendo handled the ARAM situation and the like on the Wii when playing GameCube games?

The hardware could choose to use the bottom 16MB of MEM3 as an ARAM equivalent. That was actually the source of one of the first attacks. That is putting tweezers on that RAM chip, shorting the address lines and accessing the high part if that RAM while in GameCube mode.

Aha! Team Twiizers (early homebrew devs) makes even more sense now

For those interested: https://hackmii.com/ is still up and has a lot of interesting notes on the Wii.

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