Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

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A repeater might be feasible, but it would introduce additional lag. Maybe not what you want to see in a gaming video display, but it might be the additional lag is so tiny it doesn't matter. Say an additional 10ms for example - just to pull a number out of thin air - would never be noticed by any human being who's ever existed.

As for much greater range, high-bandwidth wireless tech has a propensity to not penetrate very far through solid objects such as floors and walls (higher bandwidths usually occupying higher frequency radio spectrum, which has inherently shorter range inside a house at least), so I don't think we'll see an "anywhere in the house" repeater.

Also, if you live in an apartment such a device could certainly cause interference with your neighbors' wuu gaming by the way, so I doubt it'll ever see the light of day even if any/all technical difficulties could be solved.

3rd party pad? Never, unless Nintendo officially sanctions it. They're liable to send packs of vicious attack lawyers at anyone trying to copy their wireless tech, device design and whatnot.
 
Grall said:
3rd party pad? Never, unless Nintendo officially sanctions it. They're liable to send packs of vicious attack lawyers at anyone trying to copy their wireless tech, device design and whatnot.
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More prosaïcly it's expensive, there would be a insgnifcant investment and costs and also there's a CPU and stuff in it, you would need the same hardware.
More interesting would be to use a Wii U pad on a PC, opening all sorts of uses including using it seemingly standalone, controlling your house or flying a RC plane.

But there may be lockdown, signal encryption and need to reverse engineer the protocol.
 
Man, things sure died down as far as this thread is concerned. Seems to me there's a general sense of disappointment with the Wii U specs, because we've seen what it's producing in 1st gen games.
 
Megadrive1988 said:
Man, things sure died down as far as this thread is concerned. Seems to me there's a general sense of disappointment with the Wii U specs, because we've seen what it's producing in 1st gen games.
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That disappointment is well deserved. I believe we may see Nintendo being unable to compete and thrive based on their own merits. There's no reason for me to buy a small step up from PS360 when Nintendo hasn't shown any content worth buying to me. I'm not going to purchase the console on the premise of new and updated experiences when I'll be able to get those experiences on far more powerful machines just around the corner. It's absolutely pointless to me to get a Wii U. If they showed some actual franchises worth buying the system for it might make me want one, but as of now they haven't shown a thing that makes me want to buy the system. If it had decent specs for a new system then sure I might buy one because the graphics are substantially better from the get go. Their focus on the tablet controller gives me the impression they don't care much for the core market, which is a huge mistake. If the company were smart they could have the hardcore and casual market in one fell swoop and come out with a true winner. I don't care if the Wii U sells 30 million units in its first two years if the machine is going to fizzle out and die a year or two after that. By the time they do show a new Mario game (3d) or Zelda game it might be too late. I want a proper next gen machine, not Wii60.


Meh, just trying to express my disappointment and know it's entirely negative. I can't help it.
 
The main problem with a lot of ''core'' gamers is that it seems that if it doesn't have the best gfx it sucks. Which I always find funny given how pc's are so much better in that department.

Nintendo said they are aiming for core gamers as well. I'm a core gamer and I don't neceseraly mind a lower end system. I even bought the Wii on launch day and I don't regret it at all.

The mistake Nintendo is making, I think, is pricing. I bought a Wii because at 250 euro's it was cheap (took until like last year for ps3 to be around that price) and it being a nintendo console you know you are going to get atleast a dozen or so awsome games.

But I'm not gonna pay 350 euro's for a system that in some departments is even slower than ps360. It's ridiculous. It can never ever be that expensive to produce. A ps360 costs less than 250, and thats including profit on the hardware, toss in a 80 euro tablet which has far more hardware than the wuupad, and you still end up with a system cheaper than the wiiu.

it should have been 200 ~ 250 euro's. Besides, I wonder how nintendo managed to have a system designed that is, at best 1.5x xbox360. A modern amd apu would have been faster than what they got now...
 
tongue_of_colicab said:
The main problem with a lot of ''core'' gamers is that it seems that if it doesn't have the best gfx it sucks. Which I always find funny given how pc's are so much better in that department.
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It's not just that. If the experience is compelling, like Wii (ish - it wasn't good enough for much more than casual games a lot of the time), graphics can be overlooked. Nintendo just aren't showing of the value of the Wuublet controller, and they're not communicating a clear enough message so we know what it'll be used for. I'd be somewhat peeved if I bought a Wii U on launch day expecting loads of unique games only to find the Wuublet ended up being used more for services around the home or something.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Nintendo just aren't showing of the value of the Wuublet controller, and they're not communicating a clear enough message so we know what it'll be used for.
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Hurm, I think Nintendo themselves are doing a clear enough job of that - they have their Nintendoland or whatever app that they've demonstrated multiple times now where they show off "asymmetrical gaming" or whatever the term was that they've coined. Nintendo original titles also try to push the "wuublet" as you put it as best they can. Pikmin and so on did that pretty effectively IMO during E3.

Where the weak link in the chain exist is with third parties, whom do not have nintendo-like resources to just brainstorm and/or iterate forever with tons of people until viable concepts distill themselves out of the brew. So they use the wuublet for obvious, and largely redundant things. Inventory management. Map display. Shit like that. Zombiu and Aliens: Colonial Marines are the most effective showoff implements I've seen so far - not that I've really looked - with Zombi's IR scanner functionality and ACM's motion tracker stuff. But even Z-U falls over the tripwire of inventory management. That Lego detective title did some stuff too from what I recall.

So 3rd party is a weak link with the Wuu, as has been the case with Nintendo hardware ever since the N64. Funny, since they had the strongest 3rd party support of them all in their first two consoles... Guess we have that old doddering idiot Yamauchi to thank for that... Is he dead yet by the way? Nintendo kind of dug a hole for themselves with the wuu, they needed another gimmick now that the wii wand isn't a novelty anymore and I suppose they wanted to ride the tablet wave too since ipads are starting to eat their lunch, but if games fail to put the wuublet to practical use Nintendo risks obsoleting itself. And 3rd party games will have trouble finding good use for the pad, because as a fundamental concept it's not nearly as immediately approachable as the wii wand was. With the wand, you wave it around...everybody gets it. The pad? You wave that around too - except it's huge, and you need two hands to hold it, and there's sticks and buttons all over, and the touchscreen, and... The message just doesn't carry across as easily.

I'm wary regarding the wuu, Nintendo could sink itself with this device if it bombs. If it does, they've got nothing to fall back on, they can't hurry out another piece of hardware to replace this experiment considering all the development effort and games software support needed for a modern console launch. I don't think it'll fail spectacularly though, if anything wuu might be another meh "me-too" system like the gamecube that didn't do that great saleswise but still made Nintendo money. We'll see. I'm getting a wuu myself, I'm a Nintendo man forever. :p

And the thread went dead because there wasn't anything more to discuss. You can only regurgitate the same rumors and vague official statements so many times before it all grows too stale. Shit, we're now relegated to discussing software, due to lack of concrete hardware information... :rolleyes:
 
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Developer interview about WiiU and NAN.
http://www.ntower.de/index.php?page=Report&reportID=190

"HW: Before the console is released, there are several rumors and discussions going on about the hardware of the console. Now, that you have some experience with it, what's your personal impression of what the console is capable of? Do you think, it can make a stand against the next generation of Microsoft and Sony consoles.

ML: Well, right now, the Wii U is the strongest console with a lot of potential for the future. You should not forget, that the Wii U GPU is from a different generation than the ones from the current competitors. Because of that, there are many new ways of approaching things. Which, on the one side, are easier to implement than special hybrid solutions that are currently used on the other consoles, and on the other hand, which brings with it a much better performance. In cooperation with the generous working storage you have unbelievable possibilities. You should not forget that you need developers who can actually max out the potential of a console. And with teams like Retro Studios and EAD, Nintendo has an unbeatable advantage."

Not sure what al the bolded parts refer to.
 
ninzel said:
Developer interview about WiiU and NAN.
http://www.ntower.de/index.php?page=Report&reportID=190

"HW: Before the console is released, there are several rumors and discussions going on about the hardware of the console. Now, that you have some experience with it, what's your personal impression of what the console is capable of? Do you think, it can make a stand against the next generation of Microsoft and Sony consoles.

ML: Well, right now, the Wii U is the strongest console with a lot of potential for the future. You should not forget, that the Wii U GPU is from a different generation than the ones from the current competitors. Because of that, there are many new ways of approaching things. Which, on the one side, are easier to implement than special hybrid solutions that are currently used on the other consoles, and on the other hand, which brings with it a much better performance. In cooperation with the generous working storage you have unbelievable possibilities. You should not forget that you need developers who can actually max out the potential of a console. And with teams like Retro Studios and EAD, Nintendo has an unbeatable advantage."

Not sure what al the bolded parts refer to.
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He's referring to the newer GPU compared to RSX and Xenos. I would also imagine the working storage is the blu-ray disc the system uses compared to the DVD found in the Wii or 360.
 
The hybrid solutions comment was the most confusing. I've never heard PS360 referred to as hybrid systems, unless he is talking about the split memory pools in PS3?
Does him to referring to the others systems as hybrid vs WiiU offer any new insight into
WiiU?
 
The "hybrid solutions" is imo reference to methods of doing different graphical effects with those old GPUs instead of using the new solutions allowed by the new DX11 tech in WiiU. Generous working storage is probably about RAM.
 
^ I thought there wasn't any DX11 hardware in the Wii-U.

ninzel said:
The hybrid solutions comment was the most confusing. I've never heard PS360 referred to as hybrid systems, unless he is talking about the split memory pools in PS3?
Does him to referring to the others systems as hybrid vs WiiU offer any new insight into
WiiU?
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I guess the hybrid comment could be referring to the Xenos with some DX10 features or maybe the PS3 with the use of both Cell and RSX for rendering.

Doesn't really reveal anything new about the Wii-U hardware though. They are probably just referring to how the new GPU is more efficient than the GPUs in the current gen systems.
 
Oh yeah I forgot that it's probably DX10, in any case I'm pretty sure that the "hybrid solutions" are basically software tricks that mimic effects that have native support in newer tech.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...-graphics-running-on-crysis-3-on-ps3-xbox-360

Something akin to this

"We want to make sure as much as is humanly possible can translate from a DX11 variant into a DX9 variant, that will work almost as good on an Xbox console to whatever extent we can, because we don't want the experience to be different between the platforms," Rasmus Højengaard, director of creative development at Crytek, told Eurogamer.

"It is very, very difficult, but it is possible. It just requires a lot of effort. Some of the stuff these guys are making work on consoles now is absolutely amazing. It's render features that shouldn't theoretically work on consoles, but they've managed to construct code that can emulate a similar thing from a… hack and slash sounds wrong, but they don't have the same streamlined pipeline you would have with a DX11 structure, but they can get to a similar result just by experimenting and using tips and tricks."
Click to expand...
 
ninzel said:
Developer interview about WiiU and NAN.
http://www.ntower.de/index.php?page=Report&reportID=190

"HW: Before the console is released, there are several rumors and discussions going on about the hardware of the console. Now, that you have some experience with it, what's your personal impression of what the console is capable of? Do you think, it can make a stand against the next generation of Microsoft and Sony consoles.

ML: Well, right now, the Wii U is the strongest console with a lot of potential for the future. You should not forget, that the Wii U GPU is from a different generation than the ones from the current competitors. Because of that, there are many new ways of approaching things. Which, on the one side, are easier to implement than special hybrid solutions that are currently used on the other consoles, and on the other hand, which brings with it a much better performance. In cooperation with the generous working storage you have unbelievable possibilities. You should not forget that you need developers who can actually max out the potential of a console. And with teams like Retro Studios and EAD, Nintendo has an unbeatable advantage."

Not sure what al the bolded parts refer to.
Click to expand...

Based on those comments I don't believe the guy is a programmer and thus has nothing really useful to add.

No one with any clue ever talks about "maxing out the power of the console" unless they're specifically lying for the purposes of marketing.
 
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