IGN got their filthy mitts hands on developer documentation for the Wii a day or two ago, and there’s some pretty interesting stuff in there. The most important bits are:
- The controller runs off two AA batteries, but it’ll run for an impressive 30 hours, or 60 if only the accelerometer function is used. Personally, I was hoping for a rechargable lithium, but at least the battery life is high. Guess I’ll be investing in some rechargable AAs.
- All buttons on the controller, and the nunchuk, are digital. I’d hardly say this is a tragedy - anyone ever use the buttons on the PS2 controller to their full analogue capacity?
- There’s 6KB of “non-volatile” memory in there, and while it’s not clear what the exact purpose of it is, 4 color rebellion has been suggesting since E3 that there will be some way to store player or character details, much like the characatures of Reggie Fils-Aime, Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto at the Nintendo press conference. I’m guessing not. 6KB is hardly enough for that, so it’s probably just a small buffer for the internal speaker, or memory to save which “number” controller it is when the Wii is turned off.
- Also, the controller is capable of reading “coordinates between 0-1023 on the X axis and 0-767 on the Y axis”. IGN think this means the controller can function as a megapixel camera, or some such. Me - I think that’s unlikely, but I don’t tend to have many nice things to say about IGN, so maybe I should keep quiet.
Anyway, I’m not much for speculating. I’m happy to hear what other think, though, so let me know. Oh, and rumours are still circulating about an early October release, which would be rather nice, but there won’t be any word for sure until September.