Wii/Development Hardware
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The Wii had one main development kit (NDEV) and two testkits (RVT-R Reader and RVT-H Reader), along with various other development accessories and prototypes.
Consoles
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Broadway Evaluation Board
Main article: Broadway Evaluation Board
The Broadway Evaluation Board (BEB) was a board used for early, internal bringup of the Broadway CPU circa October 2005. It consisted of a Broadway engineering sample combined with GameCube hardware blocks, since Wii components such as Hollywood were not ready yet. The GameCube equivalent of this was Minnow and the Wii U equivalent was Cortado.
NDEV1
Main article:: NDEV1
The NDEV1 was the first full Wii prototype board produced circa January 2006, including a variety of special evaluation hardware which was not included on externally released development kits. It was only used internally at Nintendo and its partners and is not to be confused with the 1.x versions of the NDEV2.
NDEV2
Main article: NDEV
The NDEV2 (more commonly NDEV) was the main development system for the Wii, taking the form of a black box including full Wii hardware with 152MB of RAM as well as debugger, optical disc emulation, and Host I/O hardware. It had several revisions from 1.0 at the beginning of 2006 up to the final 2.1 in August 2006.
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NDEV1 board overview -
NDEV 2.1, the most common version
RVT-R Reader
Main article: RVT-R Reader
The RVT-R Reader was the main testkit for the Wii. It was effectively a retail unit with a dev-keyed SoC and disc drive, with the NDEV Menu preinstalled and a green faceplate (on most units) to distinguish it from a regular Wii.
There was also a prototype version of the RVT-R Reader distributed for E3 2006, at which point it was known as the "RVL-R Reader" - this prototype is notable for having used the black Nintendo Revolution-branded casing shown at E3 2005.
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RVT-R Reader -
Prototype RVT-R Reader -
Prototype RVT-R Reader being serviced
