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by tantalor 42 days ago
Not to spoil the fun, but is it really still a "Nintendo Wii" if you replace the stock OS?

The identity of a "Nintendo Wii" is the combination of its enclosure, hardware, and software. To take only the enclosure and hardware and keep calling it the same thing is absurd. Where does it end? What if I keep the enclosure, but replace guts with an Xbox? Is it still a "Nintendo Wii"?
5 comments
s_dev 42 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

You can draw the line wherever you like but for me it is still a Wii even with a different OS. I would draw the line at replacing the hardware inside with XBOX hardware. Others may draw the line at the chassis.

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john_strinlai 42 days ago
i personally consider "running on X" to be accurate if it is still X's hardware
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sjmulder 42 days ago
It would be a fun project to do a homebrew HTTP server (and I wouldn't be surprised if it had been done already) but in this case I actually mean to replace my Pi 'home server' with this Wii, and for that I want SSH, git, web, mail, and all that, so practically, NetBSD was a good option.

There's also the fact that there's a modern, up-to-date Unix distribution for this in the first place, how cool is that.

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zen928 42 days ago
Absolutely not. Ruins the rest of the charade when you say "okay, now let's just step around the hard part and instead replace it with a different OS to make it cookie cutter". Wow, you can run a server on hardware constrained stock BSD ...? ... cool ....
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sjmulder 42 days ago
A 'charade'? Just having some fun running NetBSD on unusual hardware and learning something along the way. There's no cheating some imaginary game you seem to think I'm participating in.
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malicka 42 days ago
I think it’s still cool enough to get the OS running in the first place; and there’s still novelty in using something for a purpose completely unexpected, even if the last few steps are cookie-cutter.
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mghackerlady 42 days ago
no, then it's an xbox in a wii shell. I'd say having two out of three makes it a wii. Plus, there really isn't anything stopping someone from writing a web server for the wii, it's just that running a different os makes this silly task much easier
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tantalor 42 days ago
> two out of three makes it a wii

So if I stick a modern hardware PC running a Wii emulator inside a Wii shell, then it's still a Wii?

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bombcar 42 days ago
This strikes at the root of the Biggest Controversy™ - if you beat a video game arcade cabinet on an emulator, did you beat it?

Things can be named analogously - if I have a machine that plays Wii games for me, and nothing else, I'll call it "the Wii".

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ssl-3 42 days ago
I have an old PSP that has only ever been used to play emulated NES games.

Shall I call it an NES?

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mghackerlady 42 days ago
Does it boot straight into NES games? Does it have an NES cartridge slot? Or controllers? What about the never used expansion port on the bottom? Is it in a NES shell?
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ssl-3 42 days ago
> Does it boot straight into NES games?

No.

> Does it have an NES cartridge slot?

No.

> Or controllers?

No.

> What about the never used expansion port on the bottom?

It does have an expansion port that I've never used.

> Is it in a NES shell?

No.

> [so it's not an NES, then]

It's mine, and I can call it whatever I want. :P

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mikepurvis 42 days ago
> if you beat a video game arcade cabinet on an emulator, did you beat it?

Yes for the purposes of your own personal sense of achievement, no for the purposes of speedrun records.

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mghackerlady 42 days ago
It depends on how fully it emulates a wii and what restrictions it would have, but I'd say if the thing quacks and functions like a wii (you have support for the controllers, the disk drive, network things, etc.) it could be called a wii
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