Does Nintendo make their own processors?

no some chinese company does

>>52885104

They make their own OS

Nope: http://wccftech.com/nintendo-confirms-console-powered-amd/

>>52885104
It's PowerPC, so no.
GC, Wii, and WiiU all run on basically the same architecture

The CPU inside of the WiiU is a PPC chip fabbed by IBM. Nintendo doesn't design or fab processors.

>>52885203
Yep, they're all variants of the PPC 750

>>52885195
G L O B A L F O U N D R I E S

>>52885160

really?

>>52885104
Nintendo has always used other people's CPUs.
>NES: 6502
>SNES: 65816
>GB: z80
>N64: NEC VR4300 (64-bit MIPS)
>GC and Wii: PPC CPU, AMD GPU
>GBA and DS lines: ARM chips

>>52885428
Derp, that should have been "PPC CPU, ATI GPU" since it predated the AMD acquisition.

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>>52885387

Yes, dumbass.

>>52885428
>>GBA and DS lines: ARM chips
Would it work to run the DS operating system on any ARM board?

No, but the OS is pretty neat

>>52885473
IO/Memory mapping requirements might pose and issue. GBA/DS OS is desigened to work on like 2-3 hardware configurations at the most. Likely other hardware configurations would cause a panic

>>52885742
Would it work to run the DS or Vita OS if you had the right graphics chips/outputs and sound, or do they have special chips that do encryption shit?

>>52885473

The firmware would run but there's probably peripheral requirements.

>>52885104
Why doesn't Nintendo use modern intel chips?

Hell even a modern arm.

>>52887762
they're terrified of piracy. They go so far out of their way to keep their hardware secure they often hurt performance.

>>52885788
nintendo has been using DRM since the NES

protip, the reason your nintendo wont load games isnt because your connector is broke, the DRM chip fried itself. This is why the jap consoles are $120 compared to $40, they do not have this chip, and are also top loaded to avoid any further issues.

So more than likely yes, there will be serious issues all over the place, if the nes had something, you can bet your fucking ass the GBA does as well.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/CIC_(Nintendo)

>>52887798
That makes no sense.

Also the Wii was stupid easy to mod.

>>52888040
>protip, the reason your nintendo wont load games isnt because your connector is broke, the DRM chip fried itself. This is why the jap consoles are $120 compared to $40, they do not have this chip, and are also top loaded to avoid any further issues.

Only kinda true.

The lockout chip on the NES isn't designed to prevent people from copying digital content, but to prevent people from creating their own digital content and region control. The manufacturing cost of a cartridge was copy-protection enough.

The Japanese NES is also completely incompatible with North American games, perhaps you are referring to the top loading North American NES which can play both European and NA games.

Also the reason most original vhs style NES's don't work is the cartridge connection becoming corroded.

>>52888052
Only after years of hard work. The first hack was insane.

>>52888052
>makes no sense
Nintendo were always ultra autistic with overprotection

NES
>stupid region locking shit
SNES
>even stupider region locking and PHYSICAL cart incompatibility with J/PAL and NTSC consoles
N64
>same shit as SNES, but ALSO going with carts in the first place because despite being 9001 times better, CDs "could be pirated easily"
>N64DD
gay shit
>GameCube
"let's make a proprietary little disc format so no one can pirate anything"
>Wii
let's software-block DVDs just in case

>>52888343
>carts worse than CDs
I'll take next-to-no loadtimes and durability over ease of manufacture and cost/storage any day

Wasn't the Wii software block on DVDs more to do with not wanting to pay license fees than anything else?

>>52888419
700mb > 64mb

That is probably the single biggest reason the PS1 shit all over the n64. Also CD QUALITY SOUND!!!!

>>52888040
>tfw rebent the pins so my NES accepts a game without pressing it down, and disabled the lockout chip

>>52888478
>ability to have your own hardware in the cartridges to complement the system
>more storate!
nah, fuck CDs.

>>52888478
5-50 MB/s > 300 kBps

ENjoy your load times

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>>52888541
>>ability to have your own hardware in the cartridges to complement the system

What possible good would that do?
The storage medium is just designed to store, why would you force your consumer to buy the same bullshit over and over again unless you just want to jew them?

>more storage!
pic related.

Also lemme just say again, CD QUALITY AUDIO.

>>52888052
Wii was hacked too easy because a failure in boot system, not because what hardware it used.

>>52887762
>why doesn't Nintendo switch from PowerPC to ARM
They're not retarded.

>>52888674
I'm sure ARM at this point has outpaced the processor in a fucking g4 mac...

>>52888674
$10 says Nintendo's new system uses an ARM based semi-custom SoC from AMD.

>>52888599
>What possible good would that do?
See all of the various coprocessors on SNES carts that allowed later games to push into 3D on the SNES, the RTC on a lot of different carts, different types of rewritable memory for saves.
Shit, I am pretty sure what Factor 5 did with their N64 games (write their own GPU microcode to squeeze as much preformance as possible out of the thing) just wasn't possible on the PlayStation

>>52888599
And FMVs

>>52888726
maybe if it's a handheld but Nintendo will never ever EVER make an ARM console.

>>52888831
FMVs are pointless. I'm playing a game, not watching a movie.

>>52888836
Yeah because cutscenes aren't a thing

>>52888789
To bad all of those ideas are completely obsolete, also the last point you made doesn't have anything to do with storage.

As far as rewritable memory (which many companies would choose to jew out and not add it period) you now have added cost to every new game you made, when instead, you could have the consumer buy 1 memory card which adds more actual flexibility.

Also if someone wanted to add a co-proccessor, why not just make a console add-on? Hell Nintendo made the Ram upgrade and a fucking disc drive anyway!

>>52888701
It's not the same processor, just based on the same architecture.

>>52888878
>What is the Sega CD

The only advantage modern disc-based storage has over modern cartridges is the ease of manufucture and lower costs because of that. That gap is closing fast.

>>52888959
>what are most modern video games.

>>52885104
They use AMD for graphics

Will they use a low-tier zen/polaris apu for their next console? We already know that they'll use Vulkan.

>>52889020
I meant that the Sega CD is a perfect example of taking FMV to a pointless extreme.

>>52889057
but we weren't talking about fmv's going to a pointless extreme, just whether or not they were worthwhile at all.

>>52888999
By the time cartridges become viable again we will see physical copies in general go extinct.

>>52887762
Nintendo seems to pretty much choose their chips at random.
A custom chip based on ARM would probably be the best choice, but Japanese software developers seem to be hellbent on doing everything in the most convoluted way possible.
Like how they write a complete fucking OS from scratch for every single one of their consoles when they could just use *BSD like Sony does.

>>52889345
At least some of their OS are interesting. Wasn't the Wii running on a micro kernel?

>yfw solid state storage becomes so cheap future console games come on ssd cartridges

I fucking came

>>52890147
Sounds possible, slow SSDs(350MB/s Read, 280MB/s write) are $36 for 120GB and $50 for 240GB.

>>52890169
>>52890169
>slow SSDs(350MB/s Read, 280MB/s write) are $36 for 120GB


were.. i need one for my old Macbook Pro

>>52890226
Sandisk SSD Plus.
Amazon mexico.

i thought wiiu was x86?

>>52888343
Adding to that, Nintendo was fucking bad at analog video. The N64 video encoder seriously sucked and the NES one was only marginally better. And they managed to completely fuck up by omitting SCART RGB from their major consoles (pissing off developed countries), not to mention that cables could differ from one region to another with the potential of frying your TV set.
Bunch of retards really. And let's not even speak of their business practices.

>>52888603
It looks only a couple of days to start flashing PICs that disabled the disc drive "security". My Wii is still chipped even if that's been pretty much useless later on.

>>52889522
The Wii runs a number of microkernels called "IOS" and they are a stupid fucking mess to deal with.

>>52890996
No. PPC.

>>52889025
That would be cool, with possible support for ports from and go the next nintendo

>>52885428
>>52885473
Also note that the chips are somewhat customized. GB, GBA and DS series all store some Nintendo specific boot ROM on the CPU die, and the CPUs are marked with part codes like CPU-CGB for the GB Color one.

Dumping the boot ROM can be difficult and sometimes important to correct emulation or running homebrew or pirated games.

On the original Z80 based GB series, what makes it hard is that the CPU remaps the cartridge's header and start code to the same addresses and there's no way to get the boot ROM back there. So the CPU only has access to it before any code outside the boot ROM is run, making it hard to dump.
>Original GB boot ROM was dumped by someone decapping the CPU and reading out the 256 bytes of ROM by hand with a microscope.
>The GBC one was dumped by manipulating the clock signal. The number of clock pulses from powerup to cartridge code execution was counted. Then they replaced the clock crystal with something that sends normal clock pulses until then, then a few really fast ones that are long enough that the instruction counter is incremented but the actual instruction doesn't get a chance to finish. That let them get cartridge code running while the boot ROM is still in the memory map, making it possible to dump.

GBA has a BIOS that's hard to dump because of some hardware blocking access to it while the instruction counter is outside of it. This allows BIOS calls to be run through interrupts, but prevents dumping it or jumping directly into it. The calls to copy data to and from memory even checked if they were being asked to copy the BIOS. Someone found that one particular interrupt intended for sound could be abused to copy chunks of the BIOS due to a bug, allowing it to be dumped with only software.

Not sure if the DS one is protected, but the 3DS one is -- and is involved in decrypting and verifying the signature on the next bootloader stage.

>>52885387
Yea, that's why it's so fucking garbage
>games don't take up "megabytes", they take up "blocks"
>waiting for a settings menu to load
Coulda outsourced to Fisher-Fucking-Price and I wouldn't be surprised.

>>52892474
"Blocks" are pretty standard on consoles. Way less confusing to normies than KB, MB and GB.

Yeah shit does load slower than it should on 3DS. Probably a good part of it is that extensive DRM that's taken years to crack.

>>52885195
At this point they need to take a cue from Valve and just make their own distribution. Video game consoles are extinct.

>>52892607
Funny that you say that. Valve is traditionally PC games, and SteamOS is part of their move to making a Steam console.

Consoles are still selling very well and are hardly extinct, though you can obviously build a PC that performs better for less money. Most people who prefer consoles do because they don't have to configure shit, deal with viruses and so forth. Also if you turn a kid loose on a console you're a lot less likely to come back to a fucked machine than if it was a PC.

That's actually a funny thing to bring up, with the NX on the horizon.

Nintendo isn't known for moving on from something that works.
>repeated games for the best-selling IP's
>AMD graphics
>ADPCM sound
>gamecube controllers
>NDS-format portables
etc. etc.

and while PPC would give them backwards compatibility with Wii U and Wii, it would be very hard to increase the power of their console using that arch. My bets are on ARM.

>>52892782
Not only with Wii U and Wii, but gamecube too.
But i too wonder if the NX will be 4 gamecubes slapped together like the Wii U is literally 3 gamecubes.

>>52892782
ADPCM was useful.
16 years ago

>>52892532
What? Blocks are a garbage unit of measurement, nothing else uses that shit. At least Microsoft and Sony moved away from it.

>>52888577
>ENjoy your load times
Apparently, people did as Sony has crushed Nintendo every generation since. I'm not personally endorsing ridiculous load times, but that is just what happened.

>>52892782
Nintendo could easily stick with PowerPC and maintain power, they just need to move on from a PowerPC 750 based design

>>52892674
You can call it whatever you want, but Steam Box is just a PC. It's not even a fixed device since anyone can make and sell them.

>>52892830
>What? Blocks are a garbage unit of measurement
I don't think anyone is arguing that, but arbitrary blocks are pretty standard.

>>52892882
>arbitrary blocks are pretty standard.
normies haven't seen blocks used for like a decade already, literally everyone knows how basic storage works these days.

>>52892814
it's kind of amazing actually.

Nintendo has used DPCM or ADPCM heavily on every one of their consoles. It's almost like an invisible part of their design to have that slightly scratchy sound.

The announcer in smash melee is 16khz 6bit ADPCM. It's impressive that he sounds even remotely good.

>>52892882
I meant garbage in terms of confusion. People know how big their photos or MP3s are in terms of kB/MB, not blocks.

>are pretty standard
Were*, excluding Nintendo. Who else still uses them?

>>52885104
Yes/No.

Nintendo goes a step further than most semi-custom chips, and actually starts to change the layout of the chip.

Every CPU/GPU chips used in a Nintendo system since N64 has been based on but vastly different to off the shelf parts.
Almost all the work to re-engineer the components and the actual fab work is all done by Ricoh.

As an example, the WiiU uses a VLIW5 based GPU licensed from AMD, people usually consider that it's somewhere around a Radeon 5550, as they're both 320 VLIW5 shaders, however it's been shown a few times that the VLIW units used for Latte aren't all equal like a regular terascale/vliw GPU.

All this custom work is pretty much moot though, since they apparently aren't selling shit this time around.

I think space being called block is good for kids/tech illiterate people.

>>52892873
That's like saying Android isn't a fixed device because anybody can make them, when they're generally all the same homogenized specs these days

what is this? a good thread?

>>52892968
>they're generally all the same homogenized specs these days
What? You can buy dual core, quad core, hexa core, octo corse and even deca core ARM processors from Mediatek, qualcomm, samsung and so on. They come with anywhere between 512MB to 3GB of RAM. The screens vary from the awful to the unrivalled. Yes, certain parts are standardised but that's far, FAR from being homogenised.

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>>52892467
>Original GB boot ROM was dumped by someone decapping the CPU and reading out the 256 bytes of ROM by hand with a microscope.
What the fuck.

>>52892532
kB, MB, and GB shouldn't be confusing nowadays.

>>52893175
Do you even look at specs for phones being released today? There's clear baselines for budget phones performance and specsheets, and huge similarities for flagship phones.

>Budget
>Snapdragon 4XX series or comparable Mediatek
>720p display at the least
>1gb of RAM is a bare minimum, many budget phones are using 2 as a selling point

IBM POWER8 CPU
up to 12 Cores
up to 5 GHZ

Funny if Nintendo slapped that into the NX, which they wont.

>>52893470
Don't forget POWER8 supports 8 threads per core

>>52893470
>5GHz mobile CPU
Man the new consolefire console since the first PS3.

>>52893426
There being similarities and common ground does not mean that the whole market is homogenous. I suggest you stop being so hyperbolic.

>>52888599
Pic named ff 7, but its ff8, how could nobody notice?

>>52892807
>Wii U is literally 3 gamecubes.
how so?

>>52893538
Because nobody bothers reading filenames, because it's irrelevant to the point the anon was making, because no one cares and because it's such a small detail that no one should care.

>>52893607
I assume he's talking about core count

>>52893614
It matters for me

>>52893607
Wii U is made out 3 different CPUs, i want to explain but i dont remember and the Wiiubrew wiki is blocked because someone died.

Drama at it finest.

>>52893702
>>52893607
The Wii U is made out 3 CPUs called Espresso that work at 1.2GHz.

>>52893138
Interspersed with /v/irgins shitting on nintendo for writing their own OS.

>>52893633
>>52893702
>>52893743
But what relation does it have to the gamecube processor?

>>52893969
Its a joke related to how the Wii was literally 2 Gamecubes slapped together.

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>>52885104

I happened to have a Nintendo PCB in my parts bin

looks like they roll their own ARMs

>>52893972
still don't get how "literally" it is 2 gamecubes. I looked around about Gekko and Broadway CPUs wiki pages and don't get it

>>52894021
When you order parts in those sorts of quantities you can have whatever you want printed on the package. Labeling means very little. From memory nintendo often does this, I think they did it a fair bit in the N64.

Also why the fuck did they glue the edge of those packages? Did they think people were going to solder modchips to BGA packages?

Actually, EA made the Wii U's OS, then quit halfway through when Nintendo said no to Origin being standard on the console

I worked for Nintendo

>>52885442
actually it was art x(former Silicon Graphics guys that helped worked on the n64) got bought out after the work was done and was branded ATI when the GameCube shipped

>>52893522
You're going to see the literal exact same thing with steam machines, they're going to with exceptions like the piece of shit steamboy portable kickstarter ripoff they're going to all have the same baselevel of at least 8gb of RAM and an intel core processor with a high level GPU

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(COMMENT DELETED BY NINTENDO)

>>52894260
What literal exact same thing? Are steam machines going to come with a choice of at least six different SoC manufacturers and two distinct CPU architectures? That would be awesome.

>>52894711
I mean, why do people want more than 2 options in that kind of things?

You will go with either the most powerful one or the one with the most performance/price ratio.

>>52885788
The DS might be possible since someone cloned the hardware with a certain degree of success.
Vita runs some custom bsd fuckery and probably has a bunch of supporting hardware. Getting the hardware to run it would be hard.
The 3DS is similar.

>>52889154
>By the time cartridges become viable again we will see physical copies in general go extinct.
No we fucking won't and this is a meme

>>52892109
You can get RGB from a SNES/N64

The quality of the SNES output depends on the chip/version of the console though and you might need to mod it to get a better output

The N64 RGB is kinda shitty cuz most games use that ugly bilinear filtering/anti-aliasing or whatever it is and they look blurry as shit

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>>52889345
>Japanese software developers seem to be hellbent on doing everything in the most convoluted way possible.
>they could just use *BSD like Sony does.
uhhh

>>52893969
Wii U has a tri-core PPC CPU I think. Wii and GCN also have PPC CPU. Similar CPUs for better backwards compatibility.

>>52893229
Ex-reverser here: true. Especially on really old processes like that, you can read the contents of a ROM right off the metal/poly layer by hand via optical microscope once you get the packaging off with the right chemicals (acetone, fuming nitric acid and hydrofluoric acid are the usual suspects, in roughly ascending order of chemical hazard: but you can depackage some smartcards with just nail varnish remover and a little force, or some older 'cap' chips with a vice). You could have decoded it with graph paper and pencil back in the day.

Newer processes, all it takes is a really good electron microscope (the cost of this might put it a tad outside hobbyist territory). Either way once you have a nice clean set of images, some work in GIMP or Photoshop, careful choice of thresholding, and some Python scripts with a bit of Imagemagick yield magical results.

Then you're in the territory of figuring out the format (inversion, stride width, parity N/O/E/exotic), which is possible to cryptanalyse, but is generally easier to just fiddle with the very few combinations by hand until likely-looking hexdumps with bare strings pop out. Unless you're dealing with scrambled ROM: then you start looking for distinctive descrambling circuits like an LFSR.

>>52888131
>The Japanese NES is also completely incompatible with North American games

False, I use my NES carts with it. You just need a pin adaptor.

How come Nintendo are the only unlucky sons of bitches who have to deal with modders and pirates? They have the least standard hardware but, in my experience, have the largest hacking community by far. I haven't seen cfw for the PS3/PS4 or XB360/XBO. I find it hard to blame Nintendo for having to use gumpy hardware when everyone is out to get free shit on emulators and modding.

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I'll just post this here cause you guys will probably appreciate it.

PS1's GPU and SPU were in-house efforts, while Saturn's two GPU (VDP1 and VDP2) and its control DSP were also in-house.

Most people don't know this but Nintendo actually contracted the design of the N64 hardware out to Silicon Graphics. They literally designed everything inside of the console, developing the GPU in-house, while the CPU and RAM were developed by companies they partly owned (MIPS and RAMBUS).

I think the last time Nintendo developed a processor in-house was the original DS's GPU.

>>52897911
Probably because they seem to be the least adept at blocking the piracy once the crack happens.

>>52892109
We did get RGB natively via SCART on the SNES in yurop though, as was the case with most consoles at the time. Thank fuck for the French and their SECAM TVs + mandatory SCART laws. The only PAL home consoles that didn't offer it (cable bundled with the console or sold separately) as far as I remember were the NES and the N64.

IOSU exploit when?

The NES kind of had it's own processor, but it was just a 6502 clone with sound generation built-in. And less features to make place for that I think.

>>52894080

Re-balling BGAs = The worst fucking thing ever

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The wiiU fakebooths run ubuntu.

Any news on the discs it uses? I hear they're blu-ray but not really.

>>52889522
Heh, just wait till you read how the wii u work, wait.
All you fucking guys saying nintendo wouldn't make an ARM console, they already have.
I'm pretty sure the wii u has a ARM chip off-die dedicated to the OS/home menu that everything pregame runs on.
It switches over to the PPC when you load a game.

>>52897613
>>52892467
That was a great read

>>52898237
>Splatoon build for linux
FUCKING WANT
Kinda like how they shipped a working exe of pikmin on the GC disk.
It's but a pipe dream, but I still have hope, that someday...

>>52898309
The GBA had ARM iirc

>>52899204
All their handhelds GBA and on do

>>52892925
>these days
You do realize, the wii came out literally over 9 years ago

>>52888599
>Filename
FFVIII would have needed like 40 N64 carts ,unless they replaced FMVs with slideshows, and muh CD quality with midis.

>>52899204
>>52899345
Why is /g/ autistic over this? ARM chips are everywhere since the 2000s or so. Is /g/ Sony-fags now?

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>>52893284
>kB, MB, and GB shouldn't be confusing nowadays.
>shouldn't be

>>52900055
What are you implying by this?
The PS4 has an ARM processor on board as well. Two actually.

>>52901264
Source? Im interested

>>52892966
"click-clacks" and "boings" are good for time measurement too and "chicken steps" are good for length measurements

>>52893284
Now you mean kB or kiB?

>>52901334
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+4+Teardown/19493

There is a separate low power processor on the board, and the APU itself uses an ARM A5 core for a TrustZone processor.

>>52897613
So can you actually have a legit job in reverse engineering? I never see it being really talked about

>>52892474
The Wii U uses bytes though.

>>52892532
PS2 and XBox used actual units instead of confusing block nonsense. Children are more confused by 4511221 blocks on their Wii

>>52897613
More info on original GB decapper please

Notable: the DSP chips some SNES games used were de-capped too, by someone under the alias "Dr. Decapper"

Someone tried to decap the 3DS chips lately too but it's a slow work in progress.