[HN Gopher] A close look at the round-edged Wii U proprietary di...
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A close look at the round-edged Wii U proprietary discs (2012)
Author : networked
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-10-29 10:48 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Ok?
| jrace wrote:
| Exactly my thought!
|
| But why? There must be a reason to use something different than
| what is normal made.
| hulitu wrote:
| Vendor locking. Maybe with the inner edge rounded they will
| be difficult to read in normal dvd or blu ray players.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Feels nicer to handle. No sharp edges. It doesn't affect
| reading at all.
|
| I have a spool of blank blu-ray-r discs somewhere that are
| similarly rounded off, and caused me confusion about how
| proprietary nintendo's discs actually are.
| brundolf wrote:
| I remember the way it felt, it was distinct and pleasant.
| It was a nice little addition to the overall UX of the
| console
| nerdjon wrote:
| I loved my Wii U. I remember thinking that something felt
| different but never really processing exactly what it
| was. Maybe it was just because on other platforms I have
| barely used disks for a long time.
|
| I am surprised to find this out and it does explain a
| lot. It really was a nicer disk.
| DizzyDoo wrote:
| Exactly, and it's not just about reading but also (perhaps
| even more so) about writing. If Nintendo control the
| manufacture of their proprietary disk, well, it's unlikely
| that a pirate outfit will be able to build a disk
| manufacturing factory that produces something compatible
| with retail Wii U's they can then sell their own non-
| Nintendo licensed games on. Or burn Nintendo's own games
| onto. The cartridge era of games were much easier to
| reproduce the physical medium onto, and this was super-
| widespread.
|
| This did break down for Sony later on in a way it hasn't
| for the Nintendo Switch, a widely shared opinion on why the
| PS Vita flopped was because it was incompatible with
| standard SD cards _and_ that their own flash game cart and
| memory card offerings were so incredibly expensive. (And
| there were cheap SD-to-PSVita adapters that were released
| anyway. [0])
|
| [0] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Vita#Hardware
| omoikane wrote:
| It's an attention to detail to make the discs more kid-
| friendly, probably. Just like how Nintendo made their carts
| taste bad[1] so that kids don't try to eat them, while other
| vendors just left the plastic as is.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30076389 - Nintendo
| Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)
| whoopdedo wrote:
| I don't have a magnifier good enough to see for sure but it feels
| like all my blu-ray discs have a chamfered outer edge. I've
| always been able to tell the difference from a DVD by touch. I
| don't know if the Wii U made the smoothing more significant and
| it doesn't seem that any discs I have changed the inner edge.
|
| As long as the overall dimensions are the same as a typical disc
| I can't see this being a form of DRM. Maybe a subtle way to mark
| discs as authentic. Nintendo pioneered the "golden seal" after
| all. I can also see how there might be a mechanical advantage. A
| rounded edge may have fewer problems while being inserted into
| the drive.
| good8675309 wrote:
| I always wondered about the round edge discs, that stood out and
| made them feel more premium quality. Didn't realize it was
| specific to Nintendo. I still hold that the Wii U is one of the
| most underrated consoles in history, I still have mine and love
| it. The homebrew available takes it to a whole new level and
| provides probably the best emulation platform for playing retro
| games from Wii all the way back.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Compared to their previous hardware flop the Virtual Boy, which
| had a lackluster line-up of games, the Wii U should have
| absolutely succeeded. It had a great line up of games, whose
| ports propelled the Switch in its early life. Breath of the
| Wild should have came out a year or two before with excellent
| Game Pad integration. The Switch should have come out in 2019
| with better specs, followed closely by Tears of the Kingdom
| running at a rock solid 60 fps.
| belthesar wrote:
| There's plenty of theories out there as to why the WiiU
| didn't do as well as other consoles. I have my own, which
| centers around the Switch's eventual release, and what
| Nintendo wanted to make vs. what they could achieve at the
| time. My guess is that the dream of making the Switch was
| very alive at the time, but the hardware was not quite ready.
| A pivot to still incorporate the design DNA, but also save on
| iteration costs was likely made to keep development cheaper,
| hence the second revision of the CPU and GPU platform that we
| saw from the Wii and the GameCube before it. Because this
| stopgap console wouldn't be the new design they wanted, and
| they were iterating on the Wii platform, there was a decision
| to call the new console the "WiiU". This smells of "makes
| sense in the engineering department, but not to marketing".
|
| As a result, die hards (admittedly, like myself) were happy
| to purchase the console, and were willing to get read up on
| the differences, but capturing the casual, and probably more
| importantly, the parent audience, who remarkably during the
| NES -> SNES transition were adamant about not purchasing a
| new console because "they already have one" didn't understand
| that, while there was backwards compatibility, the console
| was certainly capable of standing on its own. It would have
| offered neat experiences with games like Breath of the Wild
| taking advantage of the WiiU gamepad with screen, and
| otherwise been easy to write software for as an existing
| developer on the previous platforms. It would have been a
| quite fine stopgap release if it had been marketed
| appropriately.
| hbn wrote:
| The Wii U had a handful of good exclusive games (now mostly
| ported to Switch) but I think people lately have felt obligated
| to look back on it with rose-tinted shades because it flopped
| so hard.
|
| The reality is the gimmick of the console wasn't very
| intuitive/practical (jumping focus between controller tablet
| and screen isn't fun once the novelty has worn off) and also
| the OS absolutely crippled the console. It was SO SLOW to do
| anything. It was also pretty lacking in a lot of hardware
| areas. The build quality was lacklustre (the Pro controller was
| so cheap compared to the Switch's), and the memory was so
| limited that if you hit the home button in Breath of the Wild,
| when you closed it out the game would have to spin for a few
| seconds to load the game back into memory.
| sillywalk wrote:
| " Cafe OS consumes 1 GB to run, that's half of MEM2 that was
| supposed to be available for games. This means that the Wii
| U, having featured the immense amount of 2 GB of DDR3, only
| grants 1 GB to the most important application that users care
| about."
|
| https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/wiiu/
| brundolf wrote:
| I clicked on this and then found myself clicking around the 2012
| snapshot of Engadget. Very nostalgic :)
| RulerOf wrote:
| Never had the console so this was interesting, but the photos
| left something to be desired.
|
| Maybe cutting the disks to show a cross section or photographing
| through a microscope would have helped. Perhaps both.
| smegsicle wrote:
| for some reason they couldn't focus on the profile?
|
| anyway the edge is round, as in semicircle
|
| picking one up feels like using windows xp after 98
| da_chicken wrote:
| > for some reason they couldn't focus on the profile?
|
| The edge _is_ in focus, but in this case it 's only at the
| one bright spot where the light is hitting it.
|
| It's the depth of field. It's a limitation of the lens.
| Taking high detail close-up photos that keep everything in
| focus is quite a lot more complicated than you might expect.
| You often can't have high detail and have everything in focus
| at the same time. The closer something is to the lens, the
| smaller your depth of field. The larger your aperture, the
| smaller your depth of field. But those affect other things
| like the amount of light passing through the aperture and so
| on.
| smokel wrote:
| Rumour had it that the Nintendo GameCube, which had small discs,
| used a highly specific reader which would make copying the discs
| with regular hardware near impossible. This was done by making
| the discs spin in the other direction than in regular drives.
|
| Fun fact is that most of the times that you opened the lid, the
| small disc would still be spinning. In perfectly normal clockwise
| direction (as observed from above).
| bri3d wrote:
| This rumor was completely false, of course.
|
| The reality of GameCube discs is that they were standard mini
| DVDs, but they used a slightly different physical frame layout
| and a different scrambling seed from standard DVDs, so consumer
| DVD drivers would instantly reject them because the data frame
| checksums would fail. By patching out the frame checksum
| verification in firmware, GameCube discs could be read by some
| consumer hardware, and once the scrambling seed scheme was
| reverse engineered, they could be freely descrambled and
| imaged.
|
| The second protection was a unique identifier burned into the
| Burst Cutting Area (BCA) at the center of the disc.
|
| Another popular myth is that GameCube discs were protected by
| being Constant Angular Velocity (versus Constant Linear
| Velocity) discs - while this is true, and the GameCube drive is
| a CAV drive, it's irrelevant to protecting or copying the discs
| as the data is the same either way.
| hbn wrote:
| I liked when Sony claimed the black coating on the PS1 disks'
| data side was some magic copy protection.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| I've only ever heard this rumour about the Xbox.
| plussed_reader wrote:
| Only bit that has soft edges is a zero. Ones are sharp.
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(page generated 2023-10-31 23:02 UTC)