Prototype Wii Remote

[Luingus221]

Apparently, on October 28th, 2018, a prototype Wii remote and Nunchuk was sold at an auction in Japan. This is what the Wii Remote and Nunchuk look like in comparison to the final:

As you can see, there are several major differences, including:

• The Wii Remote is wired to the Gamecube controller port, and the Nunchuk is wired by an ethernet cable.
• The sensor bar (not pictured) plugs into the Memory card port.
• The Wii Remote prototype is considerably smaller.
• 1 and 2 are labeled as a lowercase "b" and "a," and the labels are not on the buttons, rather on the side.
• The analog stick on the Nunchuk is like a Gamecube analog stick.
• There is no power button.
• There are no speakers.
• There is, however, a home button, for some odd reason.
• There are no player indicator lights (pretty obvious why, as they are wired.)
• There is no wrist strap.
• The sensor bar (not pictured) is much bigger and bulkier than the final.

Surprisingly, this matches up with a patent made by Nintendo for a sort of Wii Remote for the Gamecube. However, the patent has a wireless reciever (most likely similar to the Wavebird's) for the remote instead of a wired connection. Personally, I think this is a really nice find! It was confirmed to be legit, so that's great!

 

[cheese]

Due to the similarities of the gamecube and wii, they did much of the testing for the wii on the gamecube. They most likely used these to test the idea of motion controls to see if users enjoyed swinging the controller around, and they didn't want testers to steal their ideas

 

[Luingus221]

Due to the similarities of the gamecube and wii, they did much of the testing for the wii on the gamecube. They most likely used these to test the idea of motion controls to see if users enjoyed swinging the controller around, and they didn't want testers to steal their ideas

Yeah that's what I think too. There's more evidence for that, too. One of the images of it has it pictured with a teal Gamecube. That means it probably only worked on Gamecubes that were made for testing purposes and not retail consoles, as all teal Gamecubes are testing units (even coming with a switch to change the region between US and JP!) Also, I believe they reused parts from other hardware, as the Dpad looks a lot like a GBA SP Dpad.

 

[Doom]

I wonder if there is a Wii Star button remote thing in existence

 

[Trimesh]

Yeah that's what I think too. There's more evidence for that, too. One of the images of it has it pictured with a teal Gamecube. That means it probably only worked on Gamecubes that were made for testing purposes and not retail consoles, as all teal Gamecubes are testing units (even coming with a switch to change the region between US and JP!) Also, I believe they reused parts from other hardware, as the Dpad looks a lot like a GBA SP Dpad.

They were normally originally used with a GDEV/GBOX - which is basically a Gamecube in a bigger box with debug ports, the reason for the two different models is that the GDEV was shipped with an optical drive emulator and the GBOX wasn't and could only boot from those HDD based NPDP carts (same ones as were used in the red NPDP-Reader). There was another version that had a very limited release (mostly internal, but also a few trusted external developers) which looked exactly the same as the GDEV but had a new PCB with an upgraded CPU and GPU that were closer (but apparently not identical) to the specs of the Wii one.

Later, the modded GDEVs were replaced with another box called the NDEV - which was built around production spec Wii hardware and used regular Wii controls modded for hardwired operation. There were also two testing consoles - RVT-H (used an internal HDD based ODE with 4 virtual discs slots, red bezel) and RVT-L (used recordable optical discs, green bezel). The latter two used a main board that was identical to the retail Wii with different firmware.

Once the NDEVs were released, all the previous generation stuff was supposed to be sent back to Nintendo (and presumably destroyed, since they are incredibly anal about this stuff getting out).

The teal GC is called an "NR-Reader" - it's normally used for testing and has the same main board in it as the retail cube, with the only change being that the NTSC version has a JPN/USA switch and the optical drive is designed to read optical discs written in a specific format that's only generated by Nintendo's "NR Writer". As is common with Nintendo dev stuff, the NR Reader can't boot retail discs unless you swap the drive with a retail one.

There was also a red GC that took the same HDD based carts as the GDEV/GBOX (NPDP-Reader) and a brown GC that was basically an NR-Reader with some extra RAM and a special USB download cable (TDEV). Finally, there was another development unit called DDH ("Dolphin Development Hardware") which was functionally equivalent to the GDEV except for not supporting NPDP-carts.