hey Nintendo we have exposed your Dev
kits before and we are about to do it again this is the Nintendo ndev an early
development kit for the Nintendo Revolution excuse me we when it was
first announced Nintendo's Revolution console was purely theoretical in fact
the physical demo unit at E3 2005 was a
fugazi fairy dust didn't exist it was simply an empty plastic shell with
nothing in it but promises to make good on those promises then by the start of
the 2006 Christmas season Nintendo needed a way for developers to work on
Wii software without having a ready for Market console available their solution
was a GameCube dev kit with some modifications now that might have been
fine for internal developers but you don't want third-party developers
working with what is clearly last gen Hardware that's embarrassing even if it
was basically what the Wii would end up being so over the next 12 of months
Nintendo went from a barely modded GameCube t-death to a mysterious blurry
Black Box to a more polished black box with no wireless controllers to this the
final pre-release dev kit with all the bells and whistles of the retail console
well sort of how do you play games without a disk drive and what sets this
apart from the final retail unit and who's going to tell you about our
sponsor eugreen I know you want to increase your productivity while using
your laptop I know that so you should check out the ugreen USBC docking
station you can connect multiple monitors keyboards and mice all through
a single Hub while charging your laptop check it out at the link below this is
one of those videos where the writer actually didn't really tell me a whole
lot going into it other than yes you are allowed to open it so that's the first
thing I'm going to be doing that's actually a lie I was also told to be
extremely careful about keeping these screws organized because some of them
are really long some of them are really not long and if you put the wrong ones
in you can totally Fubar the whole thing wait why are we opening it up first
we're going to talk about some of this stuff at the front we've got our
GameCube memory card slots as well as four ports for GameCube controllers
because early versions of the Wii were fully backwards compatible including
four player multiplayer later ones removed the ports even though the
hardware technically still existed inside so you can actually actually hack
the support back in and then later ones cut the feature out entirely but hey
we're Nintendo you're gonna buy it anyway we've also got the SD card slot
that was ostensibly for expanding the storage so you could buy things in the
Nintendo eShop but more realistically was just used for hacking the console
though I actually used mine to transfer all my data to a Wii U so that's a legit
use for it sync button for pairing controllers moving around to this side a
Bluetooth module and this is fun you might think oh well that's an external
antenna for Bluetooth no this is for a wired remote neat huh during development
they were not wireless yet over here we've got a Wi-Fi module apparently why
your Wi-Fi was not needed I mean why wouldn't they just put an Ethernet port
on it you know what it doesn't matter the point is at the back the sensor bar
AV multi out for compositor component the regular USB ports you'd find on the
Wii and these three USB type B's that
apparently all need to be plugged in in order for this thing to operate now
that's interesting eject button eject what
it does not have a lot of cooling hey I
mean I guess neither did the retail unit you've just got a single what appears to
be a 60 millimeter fan back here slim
too and then a passive heatsink that I
guess by Merit of this being the only other hole in the chassis is gonna get
some kind of airflow over it but like that's it hey that's wild right here
next to what I assume is the GPU we've got 64 megabytes of gddr3 and then over
here is what looks like 512 Megs of
storage that's double what shipped on the finished console now there's
supposed to be twice as much RAM as the finished console as well but I only see
the one chip it's so cool the way that this engineering level Hardware will
have flexibility built into it that not only will never make its way into the
finished product but might not even be needed for the development product like
look at this wi-fi attenuator so there's an antenna module here but while it's
got these two little connectors so that you could add additional antennas to it
they never even do that they just take a
wire and like coil it up in here as far as I can tell it's wild this doesn't do
anything but it could well that was easy that's some crusty
thermal did you take this off is that why this looks like poop I am not the
first person to take that apart and if you want proof of that check the
underside of the top that you took off oh
okay deadly foes was here I'm guessing
that's who sent us this unit nope it came from the person who lent it to
deadly foes really I mean do I need to take it now
too I think that's appropriate maybe I'll just put a dent in it that would be
pretty classic just just drop the screwdriver no I I can't I can't I can't
a laser engraver on the other side of this wall I can't no I can't do it
there's our ATI Graphics chip and our
IBM today is an IP ad power wasn't it
the Broadway was IBM and the Hollywood was AMD super cool goes to show you
Nintendo knows gaming little CPU big GPU
neither of them are powerful but boy were they ever little and big
now we need to pry it up
we can glean a lot just from the way the traces are run on the board here's our
CPU so the CPU bones connected predominantly to the GPU bone which is
connected to the video memory bone ah so
I said there was supposed to be twice as much vram on this thing that's because
half of it is on the underside of this top board this appears to be pretty much
the entire Wii component of this development kit so what is everything
else then on this board on your right we find a couple of xilinx Spartan fpgas
because these are field programmable they could be doing quite literally
anything but based on the fact that there are the three USB ports and a
Serial port on here I'd say this is probably running whatever operating
system that Nintendo is using to interface with the development kit as
for this boy right here oh it's conveniently labeled this is ndav dash
power Dash X2 so power that's power
supply oh hilarious a lot of these big
connectors that I was trying to figure out what the heck they do is just
carrying power through this board and into this board nothing really that
interesting down here just the AC to DC converter for our power supply oh I lied
this does give us a better look at how all of those diagnostic LEDs and buttons
and dip switches on the front are in fact wired up to what I said I suspected
was the development OS board this one right here so hypothesis confirmed
should we fire it up yeah all right let's do it hooked up
our LED is working is that a zero is
that it I don't know it's working anyway we have to run Windows XP we have to run
Windows of some version I felt XP was the best to go with because 2006 what's
your choice it's XP or Vista I'm gonna I'm gonna take XP I'm a Vista boy okay
so we open a dilf yep unfortunately we weren't able to get our
hands on any first party Nintendo games because they control their leaks a lot
better than third-party developers but we do have what are our early builds yes
of a handful of games well let's go Simpsons right yeah oh that's a GameCube
game is it nope oh okay GCM a lot of the
architecture for the Wii is backwards compatible with the GameCube so as a
result a lot of the file names are similar hey there we go now it should
tell you that you've got the wrong firmware because we don't have the right
firmware on here that is hey wrong
firmware version if you want to continue if you like to take these
there we go so enter proper menu flow okay then no way that's how you know
it's internal shut up I love it
legal text here and placeholder one hey
that's my favorite placeholder right up there with placeholder a oh
yeah you want to try going to the Wii menu uh sure
oh that doesn't do anything it does not do anything it's just a picture it's not
even a button oh oh hey and now you've
got the developer menu well this is wild I mean yeah I got all the cheats then
it's okay well let's have unlimited calories in Homer ball and helium this
is normally not how the game goes I do have kind of a way of breaking things
dancing crusty is always a good sign uh did it just restart
oh oh we got sound so hey there we go oh my
God these loading times though well at least you're getting some sort of idea
as to what's happening your memory there is getting used up it was getting used
up did I break it oh nope hey here we go so you have to
take the less nutritious thing yeah
got him oh shoot oh what that took off that many
points this might be a good time to cheat no I got this i got this no I'm
gonna beat him oh what no I didn't shake
this one I have negative oh oh no can I just punch him and can I
just fight him I could take him this is hard how is this in the first couple
minutes of the game okay I think we could try another game all right oh it
occurs to me without the chassis cover on this heatsink is probably not getting
a lot of airflow oh it seems okay it's barely even warm I mean how much did the
Wii consume like 30 Watts or 45 Watts or something it was yeah so it was 12 volt
4.8 amps but most of that energy was
used for the disk drive right okay so
people were building portable Wiis that were using I don't know maybe like two
amps at 12 volts wow yeah those portable
Wii projects are so cool oh yeah where
are these where are these games installed to how is it connected to that
laptop is it just via USB yeah there's three USB ports all go into it and do we
know which USBS do what I think the one
labeled di is for disk input com is for
communication how that's used I'm not sure then there's debug which I want to
say would normally go to the IDE so the
like text editor for the code which in this case
think it's called codemasters wait you
said this was golden eye that's what it was labeled as I have not
actually opened it up this would be 2009 Daniel Craig GoldenEye
they did a remake without Pierce Brosnan well
what just happened is any of this in the
real game yeah I don't think we can actually play this at all uh
look at like what was that hey look at our 3D models and how they look like
Daniel Craig other playable deliverables
someone seems like they're
like yeah no I'm doing stuff oh whoa cause that's
how that works uh oh okay oh hi okay
oh boy that she's she's sensitive what's
gonna happen when you get into the world I don't know foreign
okay well that was cool yeah clearly
some proof of concept level stuff okay now now that I see how interesting these
games are I kind of want to try another one wait David you had said there was something you wanted to try what was it
is this is this it am I looking at what this is
what's a block out oh
okay you know what I think we might be looking at here is just the the building
blocks block out of what these
experiences might look like and then maybe these are slightly better yeah
first pass artwork in progress okay what
level do we want to have a look at I want to see the non-deliverable they
never wanted us to see this Tanner it was non-deliverable oh wow this is
amazing I kind of want to play this game
I gotta say it'll be a lot scarier seeing a tank coming at you if it is
fluorescent White this is so cool I have no interest
whatsoever in playing this game but boy do I ever want to play this early
development thing I always want to see what I'm not supposed to see yeah this
is a little bit reminiscent of oh hey here we go oh
don't fall down the pit number one rule of GoldenEye okay I will try not to fall
down a hole this time can I go this way oh nope no
okay next game I think yep
oh oh that's some frame rate wow no
further optimization necessary
well this one is not done are we are we
overheating at all is that what's happening I don't think so because this
isn't even 3D this is just a cut scene Naruto goes hard they do their hand
gestures and ninja magic does it have
any secret menus I wonder no I think this one's pretty done we've got you
beaten now let's see who we're dealing with here and I would have gotten away
with it too if it weren't for you meddling kids I think we're done here
done telling you about our sponsor delete me in a time when companies are
constantly sharing your personal info online without your consent it's easy to
get discouraged it feels like there's nothing you can do until you hear about
the sponsor of this video delete me delete me will help you find hundreds of
online profiles sharing your personal info which could be used by scammers to
hit you with a barrage of robocalls and spam emails and in more extreme cases it
could even lead to identity theft or fraud removing all all of this
information by yourself would be a huge task and take many hours but with delete
me it will happen in just minutes with their software and a team of experts on
average delete me finds and removes over 2 000 pieces of data for a customer in
their first two years so if you want to get your personal information removed
from search results on the web go to join deleteme.com Linus Tech tips and
use code LTT for 20 off if you guys enjoyed this video you might enjoy our
previous look at the 3DS dev kit or I
think the PS3 one was really interesting I like the PS3 one yeah check out the
PS3 one