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Acer Cloud Technology (view source)

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[[File:Logo-RouteFree.png|200px|thumb|Logo used from RouteFree.]]
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__NOTOC__
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[[File:Logo-BroadOn.png|200px|thumb|Logo used for BroadOn.]]
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<gallery perrow="1" mode="nolines" style="float: right">
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[[File:Logo-iGware.png|200px|thumb|Logo used for iGware.]]
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File:Logo-Acer.png
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[[File:Logo-Acer.png|200px|thumb|Logo used for Acer.]]
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File:Logo-iGware.png
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File:Logo-BroadOn.png
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File:Logo-RouteFree.png
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</gallery>'''Acer Cloud Technology''' (formerly known as '''iGware''', '''BroadOn''' (stylized as '''𝐁𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐝𝑶𝒏'''), and '''RouteFree''') is a software engineering company which contributed to hardware, software, and online platform development for several of Nintendo's consoles. It was launched in April 2000 as RouteFree, and was subsequently renamed to BroadOn in 2003 and iGware in 2009. The company merged with Acer in 2011 with a $320 million deal and became Acer Cloud Computing. Prior to the merger with Acer, RouteFree/BroadOn/iGware contributed to a number of Nintendo's software and hardware projects, assisting with the design and development of the [[iQue Player]], Wii, Wii U, 3DS, as well as other unreleased projects such as the [[iQue Box]] and [[iQue NetCard]].
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'''BroadOn''' (formerly known as '''RouteFree''' and later known as '''iGware''') was a company that helped Nintendo with network services, the Wii's [[IOS]], device management, and more. It was launched in April 2000 (probably April 13, 2000, the day that [[AiLive]] was launched). The company merged with Acer Cloud Computing in 2011 with a $320 million deal. It was founded by a Chinese-American person named Wei Yen. BroadOn was a privately held startup company, with 50 employees at its peak.
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RouteFree was founded by Chinese-American entrepreneur Dr. Wei Yen, who previously worked at [[Silicon Graphics]] on the Nintendo 64 development team. He then started [[ArtX]] to assist with the development of the GameCube; after ArtX was bought out by [[ATI]], he formed RouteFree to assist with Nintendo's future projects.
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Not much is known about the company, but it's where a lot of development for Nintendo's console features took place. The company didn't have a quality assurance team. We have gathered data from their employees' LinkedIn profiles. Their office was originally in Palo Alto, California (which is now used as the offices for Nest, a company that makes thermostats, smoke detectors, etc.) and then moved to Mountain View, California (which is now used for a school owned by Khan Academy called [https://khanlabschool.org/ Khan Lab School]). At some point, it seems BroadOn shared an office with a company called PostPath which merged into Cisco.
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==Contributions to Nintendo products==
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BroadOn originally worked on the iQue Player (Chinese version of the Nintendo 64). The console has finally been hacked and the ROMs and the SDK for it have been released in 2018.
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RouteFree's first known contribution to Nintendo's products was assisting in the development of the [[iQue Player]], a Nintendo 64-based console intended for the Chinese market. The iQue Player featured rewritable storage and a basic online/e-commerce infrastructure, leading RouteFree to engineer an infrastructure design which would later be reused (to some extent) for all of Nintendo's future consoles up to the present day. In 2003, shortly before the release of the iQue Player, RouteFree changed their name to BroadOn. BroadOn then began working on 2 additional projects for [[iQue]], both of which were unannounced and never released; the [[iQue NetCard]], a Game Boy Advance cartridge with network support and rewritable storage, and the [[iQue Box]], a successor to the iQue Player based on GameCube hardware. Ultimately, both of these projects were cancelled and the work done on them (particularly the NetCard) was shifted over to the Wii project (then known as [[NNGC]]).
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The logos for the company were heavily subpar. The RouteFree and BroadOn logos are basic logos with Times New Roman as the font, and iGware using Arial as the font.
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BroadOn then assisted in the design of the software and hardware for the Wii console, in collaboration with Nintendo and [[ATI]]; their contributions to the Wii include [[IOS]], the [[Hollywood]] chip, and the [[Wii Shop Channel]].
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The name of the company was changed to iGware probably because, after some deep Google searching, we found a court case between BroadOn and Broadcom (a company that makes chips, not the kind you snack on), so they might have been forced to change their name because it was similar. The court case could also be a patent infringement because BroadOn also made chips, maybe?
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BroadOn also contributed to the development of the 3DS and Wii U, changing their name to [[iGware]] during this; less is known about their contributions to the 3DS and Wii U, and as the company merged with Acer and stopped working with Nintendo during the Wii U's development and shortly after the release of the 3DS, their overall contribution to the 3DS and Wii U was less than that of the Wii.
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When BroadOn merged with Acer Cloud Computing, the NUS service they made was reused for deploying cloud apps. By the way, the domain they use on SOAP requests is "nus.wsapi.broadon.com", and continued to be used even after they were called iGware.
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While Acer Cloud Technology now works on projects exclusively for Acer and is no longer involved with Nintendo, the infrastructure which they designed for Nintendo products reaching back as far as the [[iQue Player]] in 2003 is still being updated and improved on by Nintendo and is currently used for the Nintendo Switch.
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==Zammis Clark Leaks==
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During the [[Zammis Clark Breach]], a number of files from BroadOn's development repositories which were archived by Nintendo were leaked to the public, including development files for the Wii, NetCard, and iQue Player.
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Prior to this, some of BroadOn's source code was (possibly unintentionally) released on GitHub during the open sourcing of an Acer Cloud project; this exposed details about internal projects which were later expanded upon by the leaks.<ref>https://github.com/iversonjimmy/acer_cloud_wifi_copy/tree/master/sw_x/gvm_core/internal/es_types/include</ref>
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[[Category:Wii]]
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{{Template:WiiNavbox}}
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[[Category:Companies]]
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