Creating Tiny Accessories for the Wii Mini

You know the Nintendo Wii — you probably owned one just like everyone else in the world. But did you know that Nintendo released a Wii Mini? It was on the market from 2013 until 2017, so sales overlapped with the Wii’s successor, the Wii U. Nintendo didn’t sell many Wii Mini units because it was only slightly smaller than the normal Wii and lacked many of its features. The price difference wasn’t substantial enough to entice many customers. But the Wii Mini is somewhat useful to modders today and Evan developed a few tiny accessories to return some of the missing features.

In order to keep the size and cost down, Nintendo removed a handful of features from the normal Wii to make the Wii Mini. For example, everything related to internet connectivity was omitted — the Wii Mini was a purely offline console. Nintendo also took out the component video port, leaving only composite video. And as a slap in the face to Smash Bros. fans everyone, Nintendo even removed the GameCube controller ports (and the memory card slots).

Evan wanted to reintegrate some of those features, both for their intended purposes and for hacks that require them. In his research, Evan found that Nintendo took the sensible approach and simply removed the parts of the original Wii circuits that served the omitted features. This gave him a solid starting point, as he could use the original Wii motherboard design as a reference for new boards and get some level of assurance that they would work.

Evan targeted three missing features: the second USB port, the GameCube controller ports, and the GameCube memory card slot. Using the original circuits as references, he designed a new PCB for each of those features. They aren’t exact copies of the Nintendo circuits, because Evan used different components that were easier to acquire and implement. But they should work with the Wii Mini’s motherboard.

We say “should” because it appears that Evan has only performed limited testing. It seems like Evan designed these boards for use by modders who build their own custom consoles with real hardware, rather than for Wii Mini owners that want the complete Wii feature set. That is a noble endeavor and we’re excited to see how modders will take advantage of Evan’s boards.