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by throwawayfinal 3111 days ago
Gamecube was a success. It wasn't a wild success. It also was the hardware foundation for the Wii (seriously, the wii is a gamecube and an arm chip smashed together).

Wii U was probably profitable. Not a success like a company like Nintendo needs, a strategic misstep that didn't impact their fortunes significantly. Hardware-wise it was a very direct descendant of the Wii (and gamecube). Relatively low development cost. The games developed for it are being ported to the switch to great success.
1 comments
Crisco 3111 days ago
Just a quick correction, the Wii was still PowerPC based like the GameCube. It just took both the GPU and CPU and upped their power a bit, but was not different from the GameCube in any real significant way.
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IntelMiner 3111 days ago
The Wii did have a few distinctions from the GameCube. However they abstracted them in an interesting way

The Wii itself was still a G3 PPC chip, just add a few hundred Mhz

It also had more RAM (which allowed the "Twiizers" attack over a decade ago)

All the Wii-centric functionality (USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, SD card, etc) was abstracted away inside an ARM co-processor inside the GPU. Named "Starlet" by the homebrew community

Wii software was then written that would simply poke at the API's it exposed to add that functionality

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Crisco 3110 days ago
Ah, yeah totally forgot about starlet. It's been a while since I messed around in the Wii homebrew scene, but that was basically got me interested in cybersecurity in the first place when I was in middle school. I should go back and look at it now that I actually know what I'm doing (more or less).
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