The PS2 has been seeing a lot of love from Gman for the past couple years, driving his many Wiis to sadness by their seemingly second class treatment. With Gman no longer transforming the beat up, second hand consoles into glorious portables, did their existence have any meaning? All hope seemed lost when the PS2 Razor was released in its stunning clamshell glory (article coming soon), but then suddenly Gman pushed out another beautiful Wii portable. The case is based on Gman’s contest winning GS2 and has been revamped to fit a GameCube layout and the internals of a Wii portable. To put it clearly, the G-Wii is an elegant portable that retains the simplicity of portables past.
This portable boasts several features that makes it stand out among other portables. All of the controls on the front face are from an original GameCube controller, including the two joysticks; this feature has become increasingly uncommon in handhelds, as portablizers have moved to using 3DS and Joy-Con joysticks in order to conserve space in their portables. Additionally, as seen in the image above, Gman’s portable also features 480p video output, thanks to the assistance of Aurelio’s Wii VGA patches.
The top of the portable features 3D printed L, R, and Z buttons, alongside an easy to comprehend power switch, a USB port, start and Wiimote sync buttons, and most interestingly, a GameCube memory card port. One of the only (if not the only) trimmed Wii portables to have this particular feature, it allows the user to seamlessly use their old saves from a childhood GameCube without having to mess with various homebrew applications to transfer their saves to a USB drive.
The back of the portable is fairly simple, an elegant fan vent and countersunk screws to keep the portable’s polished look.
And of course, you can’t have a Gman portable without beautiful internals. There are no custom PCBs to speak of, other than one for controlling audio opposite the GC+ in the front half. The simplicity of the build is really awesome; it shows that even in a community where custom PCBs are becoming more and more common (even inside of first and second portables), elegant builds can still be done without specialized circuits. Gman recognized this, and made the decision to open source his CAD files, allowing others to build their own G-Wii. This portable is a very reasonable challenge for beginning portablizers, who can find the files here. There is plenty of space to work with, and the final product is a beautiful, stable portable (assuming it is done correctly).
Once again, another amazing job by Gman. Portablizing is a great hobby in that there is no perfect portable. As Gman continues to push the boundaries of portablizing, stay tuned to see what other masterpieces he cranks out in the near future.