Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]

Re:Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video] by larusso on Thursday January 16, 2025 @01:06PM (#42728661)

First Wii was able to play Game Cube Games. WiiU was backwards compatible to Wii. All theses consoles used nearly the same chipset anyways.

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Re:Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video] by lotsoweiners on Thursday January 16, 2025 @01:32PM (#42729023)

I was always amazed the Wii with its full size discs could play the GameCube mini discs.

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Re:Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video] by jzwinck on Thursday January 16, 2025 @03:40PM (#42730598)

Ability to play smaller discs was normal in most CD-ROM and DVD players for many years before the Wii. A few people (probably half of whom have HN accounts) used to give out mini-CD business cards...sometimes even with truncated edges so the disc was not entirely round: https://www.duplication.com/cd-business-card-duplication.htm

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Re:Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video] by hnlmorg on Thursday January 16, 2025 @04:13PM (#42730985)

Yeah but most of the optical drives that support this have trays or are top loading. It’s a little more counterintuitive to have a postbox-style drive (I don’t know what they’re actually called) that supports different sized discs.

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Re:Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video] by jacobgkau on Thursday January 16, 2025 @06:22PM (#42732221)

> postbox-style drive (I don’t know what they’re actually called)

Slot-loading.

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Re:Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video] by monocasa on Thursday January 16, 2025 @06:01PM (#42732019)

WiiU also had the back compat hardware of the Wii, just couldn't take a gamecube disc in it's drive.

Similarly, a lot of the SNES internally looks like it was at least initially designed for back compat with the NES.

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Re:Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video] by jpalawaga on Thursday January 16, 2025 @07:52PM (#42732847)

GC emulation wasn't emulation; it was done with a separate chip. It was more like native support. Eventually Nintendo removed that chip and backward-compatibility support from the console.

(so, even if you could put a GC disk in, it didn't have capability to natively play the game)

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Re:Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video] by Nullabillity on Thursday January 16, 2025 @08:52PM (#42733218)

It sounds like you're confusing the Wii's backwards compatibility with the PS3's. The Wii didn't have a separate "GameCube chip", its core was effectively an overclocked GC.

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Re:Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video] by larusso on Friday January 17, 2025 @02:40AM (#42735019)

https://youtu.be/meZA9KHkFuY?si=5xrsSjNxKLxLnd6J

He explains it quite well. Sorry it’s German but I guess the information about the chips and reasons Nintendo choose them should be all over the net.

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