Friday, November 21, 2008

Wii on PS3

Someone should implement a Wii virtual machine for PS3.

This should include a hardware receiver (and drivers) for the Wii controllers. GameCube compatibility could be accomplished by translating the inputs from the PS3 controllers into what appear to be GameCube controller signals.

The Cell B.E. processor includes a 64-bit "Power Processing Unit." The Wii's CPU is also a POWER implementation. They both use GPUs developed from the same technology that goes into PC GPUs, so I would expect the PS3 to implement whatever primitive shader model is offered in the Wii. Moreover, I would expect the performance advantage of the PS3 to be sufficient to emulate any hardware-provided functionality in the Wii (use the idle SPUs for dynamic translation!).

Nintendo could continue to sell Wii games, and they'd penetrate formerly PS3-only households. I'd wager the technical obstacles to this idea aren't insurmountable.