For background on some of the cool stuff here:<p>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 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.<p>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 <i>suuuuper</i> cool.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>As someone who isn't part of that community though, I guess it's not up to me :)
But how do i then insert my games?<p>its half the size of a disc, and there's no disc player on the dock<p>so digital only? gotta rip all my games!