Wii

From RGDWiki

The Wii is a home console released by Nintendo on November 19, 2006 (North America). It was mainly developed by BroadOn, ATi, NEC, IBM, IRD and NCL.

Hardware

  • IBM "Broadway" CPU (PowerPC 750-based) running at 729Mhz (in Wii mode) or 486Mhz (in GameCube compatibility mode)
  • Nintendo/ATI/BroadOn/NEC "Hollywood" ASIC running at 243Mhz (in Wii mode) or 162Mhz (in GameCube compatibility mode)
  • 512MB NAND
  • 64MB (128MB on NDEV/RVT-H) GDDR3 RAM

Broadway

Revisions

Prototype

Production

Hollywood

Revisions (ASIC)

Prototype

  • ES1.0
  • ES1.1
  • ES1.2
  • ES2.0

Production

  • ES2.1

Software

The Wii runs IOP-OS, a custom microkernel OS developed by BroadOn. This OS runs on the IOP (an ARM9 core inside the Hollywood package) while game software runs on the Broadway. The Broadway does not run an OS, but an RVL_SDK "Revolution OS" library is used to provide some basic services to applications.

The Wii was also shipped with some user-facing Broadway applications providing additional functionality to the system, including the Wii System Menu and the Wii Channels.

Since each piece of software (including individual Channels, IOS and the Wii System Menu) is packaged as a discrete WAD file, an OS update includes a WAD for each updated component.

The official OS update versioning system correlates to System Menu updates; some updates of individual components were distributed which do not update the version number.

OS Update Revisions

Prototype

Production

On development units, a development menu is installed in place of the Wii System Menu by default. Some early units also used a Wii Startup Disc launcher program in place of the Wii System Menu.

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