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Comment by larusso | Hacker News Reader

First Wii was able to play Game Cube Games. WiiU was backwards compatible to Wii. All theses consoles used nearly the same chipset anyways.

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I was always amazed the Wii with its full size discs could play the GameCube mini discs.

Ability to play smaller discs was normal in most CD-ROM and DVD players for many years before the Wii. A few people (probably half of whom have HN accounts) used to give out mini-CD business cards...sometimes even with truncated edges so the disc was not entirely round: https://www.duplication.com/cd-business-card-duplication.htm

Yeah but most of the optical drives that support this have trays or are top loading. It’s a little more counterintuitive to have a postbox-style drive (I don’t know what they’re actually called) that supports different sized discs.

> postbox-style drive (I don’t know what they’re actually called)

Slot-loading.

WiiU also had the back compat hardware of the Wii, just couldn't take a gamecube disc in it's drive.

Similarly, a lot of the SNES internally looks like it was at least initially designed for back compat with the NES.

GC emulation wasn't emulation; it was done with a separate chip. It was more like native support. Eventually Nintendo removed that chip and backward-compatibility support from the console.

(so, even if you could put a GC disk in, it didn't have capability to natively play the game)

It sounds like you're confusing the Wii's backwards compatibility with the PS3's. The Wii didn't have a separate "GameCube chip", its core was effectively an overclocked GC.

https://youtu.be/meZA9KHkFuY?si=5xrsSjNxKLxLnd6J

He explains it quite well. Sorry it’s German but I guess the information about the chips and reasons Nintendo choose them should be all over the net.

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