Nintendo Wii The Size Of A Game Boy Cartridge Finally Released Open Source
Nintendo Wii The Size Of A Game Boy Cartridge Finally Released Open Source
retrododo.com
Nintendo Wii The Size Of A Game Boy Cartridge Finally Released Open Source
29 comments
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Cool, now I can lose a whole gaming system
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Nintendo lawsuit can smell this thing from far far away
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Next task: put in into an actual cartridge so you can play them on a real Gameboy Color.
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How is this intended to fit in with existing Wii emulators [1]? Is it essentially just trying to offer a more convenient mobile option?
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It's a novelty. Hardware hackers have been making smaller and more portable Wiis for years, finding more parts of the motherboard they can cut off, ways to rearrange mobo parts and reconnect them without impacting functionality, discrete parts they can replace with more modern smaller equivalents, etc.
This represents the smallest they've been able to cut down Wii hardware, still have it be functional, and still have the core be the original hardware, not a general use CPU with an emulation solution running over top. It's not a commercial product meant to compete with emulators on existing portable devices like phones and SBCs.
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Kawaii is 100% open source, but due to the extremely challenging nature of the build, no assembly guide or build tutorial is provided. [1]
🙁
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Now make one that can upgrade the Gameboy to play Wii games.
29 comments
Printing “Nintendo” on the device has got to be a bad idea, right?
If you plan to sell it, yes. This is a DYI project.
Per their project page in 2024 they were taking orders to create the shells. Maybe there’s a loophole that exists where the housing is exempt because the internals are DIY.
In any case, money was involved.
"Do Yourself It"?
100% a trademark violation, and there's nothing like an interoperability carveout for trademarks that could be used to defend it.
Here something I always thought was interesting about Nintendo and copyrights.
The Nintendo logo for the original Game Boy (the one that scrolls down) was a way to prevent unlicensed developers from releasing games on the Game Boy.
Games would not boot up if the Nintendo logo is not read on the cartridge and the ROM.
So for a developer to release a game on the Game Boy without Nintendo knowing, they would have to commit copyright infringement.
Source: Reverse Engineering the Gameboy Boot Screen (catskull.net)
The Game Boy was released in 1989, over 36 years ago. They used this same tactic on the Switch. They claim the prod keys, which are needed for Switch emulators, are copyrighted.
I just can’t believe that the retro community has not latched onto some trademark moniker at this point to avoid any kind of legal trouble. Tendo? NTDO? I dunno, anything! lol
I believe saying something like "compatible with Nintendo Wii games" would be acceptable (as a normative use), but IANAL.