A close look at the round-edged Wii U proprietary discs (2012) | Hacker News Reader

A close look at the round-edged Wii U proprietary discs (2012)

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I always wondered about the round edge discs, that stood out and made them feel more premium quality. Didn't realize it was specific to Nintendo. I still hold that the Wii U is one of the most underrated consoles in history, I still have mine and love it. The homebrew available takes it to a whole new level and provides probably the best emulation platform for playing retro games from Wii all the way back.

Compared to their previous hardware flop the Virtual Boy, which had a lackluster line-up of games, the Wii U should have absolutely succeeded. It had a great line up of games, whose ports propelled the Switch in its early life. Breath of the Wild should have came out a year or two before with excellent Game Pad integration. The Switch should have come out in 2019 with better specs, followed closely by Tears of the Kingdom running at a rock solid 60 fps.

There's plenty of theories out there as to why the WiiU didn't do as well as other consoles. I have my own, which centers around the Switch's eventual release, and what Nintendo wanted to make vs. what they could achieve at the time. My guess is that the dream of making the Switch was very alive at the time, but the hardware was not quite ready. A pivot to still incorporate the design DNA, but also save on iteration costs was likely made to keep development cheaper, hence the second revision of the CPU and GPU platform that we saw from the Wii and the GameCube before it. Because this stopgap console wouldn't be the new design they wanted, and they were iterating on the Wii platform, there was a decision to call the new console the "WiiU". This smells of "makes sense in the engineering department, but not to marketing".

As a result, die hards (admittedly, like myself) were happy to purchase the console, and were willing to get read up on the differences, but capturing the casual, and probably more importantly, the parent audience, who remarkably during the NES -> SNES transition were adamant about not purchasing a new console because "they already have one" didn't understand that, while there was backwards compatibility, the console was certainly capable of standing on its own. It would have offered neat experiences with games like Breath of the Wild taking advantage of the WiiU gamepad with screen, and otherwise been easy to write software for as an existing developer on the previous platforms. It would have been a quite fine stopgap release if it had been marketed appropriately.

The Wii U had a handful of good exclusive games (now mostly ported to Switch) but I think people lately have felt obligated to look back on it with rose-tinted shades because it flopped so hard.

The reality is the gimmick of the console wasn't very intuitive/practical (jumping focus between controller tablet and screen isn't fun once the novelty has worn off) and also the OS absolutely crippled the console. It was SO SLOW to do anything. It was also pretty lacking in a lot of hardware areas. The build quality was lacklustre (the Pro controller was so cheap compared to the Switch's), and the memory was so limited that if you hit the home button in Breath of the Wild, when you closed it out the game would have to spin for a few seconds to load the game back into memory.

" Cafe OS consumes 1 GB to run, that’s half of MEM2 that was supposed to be available for games. This means that the Wii U, having featured the immense amount of 2 GB of DDR3, only grants 1 GB to the most important application that users care about."

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/wiiu/

It was fine for what it was - a Switch prototype & a stopgap to hold space in the market while the Switch was finalized.

The Wii U was a chump blocker, basically.

> I still have mine and love it

Same here. It's got a lot of great games, has backwards compatibility with the Wii, and because of the hardware similarity, with some homebrew (nintendont) you can load gamecube games and play them natively (ie without emulation). And having a hdmi port makes it more convenient than pulling out my Wii for Wii or gamecube games.

That's three generations of Nintendo consoles in one.

My only complaint is the gamepad. The battery life is terrible, even when not on and the console won't boot without it.

Rumour had it that the Nintendo GameCube, which had small discs, used a highly specific reader which would make copying the discs with regular hardware near impossible. This was done by making the discs spin in the other direction than in regular drives.

Fun fact is that most of the times that you opened the lid, the small disc would still be spinning. In perfectly normal clockwise direction (as observed from above).

This rumor was completely false, of course.

The reality of GameCube discs is that they were standard mini DVDs, but they used a slightly different physical frame layout and a different scrambling seed from standard DVDs, so consumer DVD drivers would instantly reject them because the data frame checksums would fail. By patching out the frame checksum verification in firmware, GameCube discs could be read by some consumer hardware, and once the scrambling seed scheme was reverse engineered, they could be freely descrambled and imaged.

The second protection was a unique identifier burned into the Burst Cutting Area (BCA) at the center of the disc.

Another popular myth is that GameCube discs were protected by being Constant Angular Velocity (versus Constant Linear Velocity) discs - while this is true, and the GameCube drive is a CAV drive, it's irrelevant to protecting or copying the discs as the data is the same either way.

I liked when Sony claimed the black coating on the PS1 disks' data side was some magic copy protection.

I've only ever heard this rumour about the Xbox.

Never had the console so this was interesting, but the photos left something to be desired.

Maybe cutting the disks to show a cross section or photographing through a microscope would have helped. Perhaps both.

for some reason they couldn't focus on the profile?

anyway the edge is round, as in semicircle

picking one up feels like using windows xp after 98

> for some reason they couldn't focus on the profile?

The edge is in focus, but in this case it's only at the one bright spot where the light is hitting it.

It's the depth of field. It's a limitation of the lens. Taking high detail close-up photos that keep everything in focus is quite a lot more complicated than you might expect. You often can't have high detail and have everything in focus at the same time. The closer something is to the lens, the smaller your depth of field. The larger your aperture, the smaller your depth of field. But those affect other things like the amount of light passing through the aperture and so on.

I don't have a magnifier good enough to see for sure but it feels like all my blu-ray discs have a chamfered outer edge. I've always been able to tell the difference from a DVD by touch. I don't know if the Wii U made the smoothing more significant and it doesn't seem that any discs I have changed the inner edge.

As long as the overall dimensions are the same as a typical disc I can't see this being a form of DRM. Maybe a subtle way to mark discs as authentic. Nintendo pioneered the "golden seal" after all. I can also see how there might be a mechanical advantage. A rounded edge may have fewer problems while being inserted into the drive.

I clicked on this and then found myself clicking around the 2012 snapshot of Engadget. Very nostalgic :)

Only bit that has soft edges is a zero. Ones are sharp.

Ok?

Exactly my thought!

But why? There must be a reason to use something different than what is normal made.

Vendor locking. Maybe with the inner edge rounded they will be difficult to read in normal dvd or blu ray players.

Feels nicer to handle. No sharp edges. It doesn't affect reading at all.

I have a spool of blank blu-ray-r discs somewhere that are similarly rounded off, and caused me confusion about how proprietary nintendo's discs actually are.

I remember the way it felt, it was distinct and pleasant. It was a nice little addition to the overall UX of the console

I loved my Wii U. I remember thinking that something felt different but never really processing exactly what it was. Maybe it was just because on other platforms I have barely used disks for a long time.

I am surprised to find this out and it does explain a lot. It really was a nicer disk.

Exactly, and it's not just about reading but also (perhaps even more so) about writing. If Nintendo control the manufacture of their proprietary disk, well, it's unlikely that a pirate outfit will be able to build a disk manufacturing factory that produces something compatible with retail Wii U's they can then sell their own non-Nintendo licensed games on. Or burn Nintendo's own games onto. The cartridge era of games were much easier to reproduce the physical medium onto, and this was super-widespread.

This did break down for Sony later on in a way it hasn't for the Nintendo Switch, a widely shared opinion on why the PS Vita flopped was because it was incompatible with standard SD cards _and_ that their own flash game cart and memory card offerings were so incredibly expensive. (And there were cheap SD-to-PSVita adapters that were released anyway. [0])

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Vita#Hardware

It's an attention to detail to make the discs more kid-friendly, probably. Just like how Nintendo made their carts taste bad[1] so that kids don't try to eat them, while other vendors just left the plastic as is.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30076389 - Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)

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