For background on some of the cool stuff here:
This isn’t a new PCB with Wii components transplanted, it’s something even weirder - OMEGA refers to a strategy for physically cutting the original Wii PCB in a way that allows it to still work. Then, relocated features are applied using flex PCBs soldered in just the right places. And, it’s all a big community thing - each board is designed by a few different people and it all comes together into a ridiculously small Wii. The “Thundervolt” flex overlay provides all of the necessary VReg tasks for battery power. The AVEflex relocates the factory video encoder. NANDflex provides storage. And finally a custom dock/riser board provides I/O and charging. The use of flex boards over the OEM motherboard is a really wild and interesting approach that seems to work really well - while there are custom Wii motherboards like Vegas, it’s easier to build the flex-enhanced style setups and since they stack so well, they end up smaller anyway.
I didn’t think that plain-old flex cable rerouting was even possible, given potential issues with timing with high-speed signals. Yet somehow, this still works.
There are 243Mhz signals from the PowerPC to the SoC and 486Mhz signals to the RAM. OMEGA leaves these unchanged (basically dictating its final size). The remaining signals are slow enough by modern standards that flex cable works.
I look at stuff like this, and I just imagine the amazing things console manufacturers could do, miniaturizing and making mobile their past generation game consoles.
There's prior precedent for this FWIW - GameGear was (basically) a mobile 8-bit Sega Master System, and PSP was basically a mobile PSOne. I guess modern game companies don't see revenue potential there, which is too bad. The soft modded PSP's which load PS1 ISO's off a memory card are suuuuper cool.
An Xbox One in a Steam Deck form factor with decent battery life is probably doable. I imagine what's missing is either A. the ability to manufacture it cheaply enough to be profitable or B. The inability to sell new games for it, because everyone would just use their existing library, or C. Both.
> PSP was basically a mobile PSOne
No? PSOne was a semi-mobile PlayStation 1, but PSP was its own architecture, which was much closer to PS2 than PS1 if anything. It was good at running PS1 games because it used the same vague CPU architecture so Sony's in-house high-level emulator, POPS, worked really well, but the PSP was absolutely not a shrunken-down PlayStation, and definitely not a PS1.
> An Xbox One in a Steam Deck form factor with decent battery life is probably doable.
In my mind the Steam Deck is already a portable Xbox One/PS4. Most of the hit titles of that generation were eventually released on PC (with a few exceptions) and the Steam Deck plays them flawlessly.
Well, imagine slidable gamepad parts of the switch, standardized for modern phones together with wasm, webgl and the browser gamepad API. Haptical feedback in any phone without wasting space, how cool would that be :-)
> the soft modded PSP's which load PS1 ISO's off a memory card are suuuuper cool.
Which is what killed it. Why buy anything if modded version had "free" games, faster storage, better load times, capacity, battery life... Piracy went of the roof with PSP.
What killed it is all the games were watered down versions of console games. PSP games were really unsatisfying on average, for no obvious reason. I own one with a bunch of games, and tried (hard) to really scratch the gaming itch when I was traveling for work all the time with it. I gave up and started lugging an Xbox 360 with me sometimes... The game to date I've played most on PSP is the PS1 version of FF7 (which I bought from the Playstation store, fwiw).
The DS had way more piracy and was a runaway success by all accounts.
Consider this: Nintendo has a history of understanding what gamers really enjoy; Sony has a very inconsistent history of this.
Read these two articles from the perspective of Sony selling ~83 million PSP's, and Nintendo selling ~154 million DS's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PlayStati... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_...
Getting back to my argument...
If Microsoft could figure out how to make a profitable Xbox One portable at a 300-400 dollar price point, make it digital-only (maybe with some option to import a game off a disc from your console), they'd sell a gajillion units.
My dream of a portable game console is playing Left4Dead for hours on end stuck in an airport. Still not doable - thanks to limited battery life of the Steamdeck-like portables.
I'm shocked that Sony even sold more than half the number of PSPs as the number of DSes.
What killed it was the UMD drive. Years after the PSP was discontinued, I read about a TIFF exploit and jailbroke my PSP. I ripped my copy of The Sims 2 from UMD to ISO and loading it from a normal Memory Stick made every loading screen 2 seconds instead of 2 minutes. (not exaggerating)
Flash memory was still rather expensive at the time of the PSP's development and launch.
A mass-produced UMD probably cost a dollar or three to produce and package and held up to ~1.8GB, whereas consumer flash was more than an order of magnitude more expensive[1] at that time.
I mean: Sure, flash eventually became cheap-enough that it became a no-brainer for people like you and I to do whatever we felt like, but the PSP launched in March of 2005 when flash was still precious.
(That said, I don't think I even know if the UMD drive on my PSP-2000 ever even worked. I bought it new along with a Memory Stick of a few GBs, immediately rooted it with a special battery[2], and ran old-school console emulators on it. I don't believe that I've ever used it with with a UMD.)
[1]: https://www.jcmit.net/flashprice.htm
[2]: "Special" battery as in, IIRC, it had a magic serial number that enabled some debugging tools that let the cat out of the bag.
[dead]
Check out the Sega Nomad
It's amazing as a technical achievement to get the board so small and still functioning... Literally cutting the mainboard, rewiring some of the features on flex-dughterboards etc to come up with something so small, shows a deep understanding of what's going on on the mainboard from the mod commununity.
It seems a bit of an odd contender for the title of smallest, without the dock it can't do anything and the dock doubles the size, plus this has no wiimote capability. Shortstack seems much more complete.
As someone who isn't part of that community though, I guess it's not up to me :)
The dock is up to you, though, no? If you really wanted a super super tiny thing you could remove most of the GameCube ports and cut down the size a ton. It wouldn’t be much bigger than the dockless variant.
There isn't a dockless variant, that's sorta what I'm saying. I suppose you could design a new dock with fewer ports, and it would be even less functional... ?
You'd still need at least one gamecube controller to control the unit because it doesn't have bluetooth for wiimotes. I think I'd be more impressed with the form factor if it was useable as-is, with (micro?) HDMI, usb-c power and wireless, even if it was a bit bigger.
(don't get me wrong I'm massively impressed with the technical achievements!)
Yeah i agree on the dock thing. this is like showing a SoC and being like "yeah its the smallest computer ever. to use it you have to put it on a motherboard, but that doesn't count."
But how do i then insert my games?
its half the size of a disc, and there's no disc player on the dock
so digital only? gotta rip all my games!