Wii developer kit pics, Link wants his green tunic back

by Christopher Grant { Sep 15th 2006 at 7:05PM }

A friendly anonymous tipster dropped a manila envelope containing five snapshots of what we imagine is the final Wii developer kit into Engadget's welcoming tips box today. It looks just like a Wii, but the bright white has been replaced by a sharp-looking green faceplate. We'd even go so far as to say that it's a particularly Hylian shade of green ... but one thing it most definitely is not is black. It's also not the enormous Wii alpha devkit we've seen before, although enormous is a relative term here. After all, the PS3 devkit is ginormous, and Microsoft was using the towering PowerMac G5 towers for their early devkits.

Head on over to Engadget to catch some more shots of the little guy in various stages of undress.

Tags: Development kit, DevelopmentKit, Devkit, Wii

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Sidd @ Sep 15th 2006 7:15PM

i like the green

GameAddict @ Sep 15th 2006 7:16PM

I wonder how come most developers never talk about the Wii controller? Is it because of NDA? Only Nintendo seems to be bragging about. I can't wait till Nov to find out myself. Some interesting comments in

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.games.video.xbox/browse_thread/thread/b6df56e66725ba83

Blink @ Sep 15th 2006 7:26PM

I still can't believe this "one color, one price" bull...ogna. Can't Nintendo pull another Electroplankton on us, and offer the Black Wii off their website or something?

Walt's Ghost @ Sep 15th 2006 7:27PM

This looks more like a debug kit to me.

bye buy @ Sep 15th 2006 7:40PM

Quick get this over to the Sam & Max team!

Masamune @ Sep 15th 2006 7:43PM

GUYS! The Wii is NOT region free! I just read this off of ign. This is the link.

I'm so sorry I went off topic, but I thought you should know.

http://wii.ign.com/articles/732/732728p1.html

Evan @ Sep 15th 2006 8:01PM

The best looking dev kit was the translucent green XBox1!

But, at least the Wii dev kit looks better than Nintendo's DS dev kit - that's a blue metal box with a DS hanging off an 18" cable.

Um, do you think my employer would get upset if I swapped my charcoal grey 360 dev kit's plastic panels with my home unit's standard white panels?

Jeff @ Sep 15th 2006 8:58PM

"The best looking dev kit was the translucent green XBox1!"

Those were debug systems. As this Wii system likely is also.

There is a major difference between the two; they are not the same thing. Dev kits are what games are actually created on. Debugs are only for QA.

Dev kits are typically some sort of PC. The Xbox dev kits were literally white boxes like you'd get from any no-name PC maker. They had a PCI card with all of the necessary custom Xbox hardware on it. The PS2 dev kits were large, black, PS2-styled Linux boxes that actually looked pretty cool (here's one, though there's no size reference point so you can see how big it is: http://www.playright.dk/screens/playstation22dtlt10000tool_ps2_01.jpg). The GameCube dev kit was just a big, square white-ish box IIRC.

Dev kits usually cannot actually play the games created on them. They're either just plain not powerful enough to do the real-time graphics rendering required, or they have incompatible hardware. That's where debut kits come in. Debugs can play unlocked, non-retail copies of games (but they often can't play retail copies), either through a burned CD/DVD or in the case of the Xbox, by loading it over the network onto the hard drive. So games are created on dev kits and tested on debugs.

Debugs are also what's given out to the major media outlets (so they can play preview copies) and also what publishers will use to take screenshots or whatever before a game's release. So while there may only ever be 10,000 dev kits out there, there could end up being 50,000 debugs over the lifetime of a system. You can usually figure every developer has at least five debugs for every dev kit, plus all the standalone debugs out in "the wild".

I would almost guarantee that this Wii system is a debug. Pretty cool, though. I'd almost always much rather have a debug than a dev kit, for any given system. (The exception is probably those PS2 TOOL systems, just because they look so badass.)