Say you’re a Nintendo fan who picked up a Switch game console this year. Time to trade in your old Wii U? Maybe. Or you could rip open the GamePad controller and replace its guts with everything you need to turn the GamePad into a fully functional Windows PC.

That’s what sudomod forum member banjokazooie did, anyway.

The modified device looks like a GamePad with a custom paint job. But under the hood it features an Intel Core M-6Y57 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, (plus a 128GB SD card), and a 4,000 mAh battery. It also sports a 2560 x 1440 pixel touchscreen display, a USB DAC sound card and stereo amplifier.

The secret sauce is actually an Intel Compute Stick, which provides the Windows-capable hardware. But in addition to cramming the hardware from the Compute Stick inside the GamePad case, banjokazooie added a bit of bling, including RGB lights around the joysticks.

Thanks to emulation software, the modified Wii U GamePad not only runs Windows applications, but you can even use it to play Nintendo games (including Wii U titles), although it should also be able to handle games for other classic consoles.

via Geeky Gadgets and Hackaday

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11 replies on “Hacker turns a Wii U GamePad into a Windows PC”

  1. Nice. I wish GPD had taken this path with the GPD WIN. Despite it being good enough for most older consoles, it just doesn’t emulate PSX properly. And it is lacking when used as a regular computer. Of course, the price would go much higher but it would be worth it.

    1. That would have doubled the price easily, if not more. I doubt many people would want to pay $800+ for was essentially advertised as an emulation machine.

      1. Agreed, Cherry Trail was the right call.

        Though, I wonder if GPD will do a Win revision in the future where they replace it with a Core M, either a cheap 6th/7th-gen….or maybe a 8th-gen Coffee Lake if the power draw decreases further.

        I’m also curious to see if GPD will do a XD revision and swap out the SoC for a QSD 660 or faster.

        1. As far as we know the GPD Win 2 currently planned for 2018 will have a Core M CPU. Also it’s confirmed to have an M.2 slot instead of an eMMC, and seeing how Atom chips don’t support M.2 it could only mean a Core M.

    1. I’m doubtful of the latter, he might just be emulating it remotely or somehow managed to emulate an actual Wii U gamepad and is playing those games through a Wii U. Maybe he just rewired the hardware to also support a PC. It’s still really funny though.

      1. I doubt it as well.
        The Intel Iris iGPU in that is powerful… but not that powerful.

        I think it will do emulators from Atari, Sega, NES, SNES, N64, DSi, PSX, PSP fine.
        But it might have some trouble with PS2, Gamecube, Wii titles.
        It certainly can’t do Wii U, PS3, PS4 etc etc.

        1. I can play PS2 and GC games on my GPD Win and it’s only an Atom Z8700. A Core M 6y57 should be about 3 times the performance in single-thread and the GPU is about as much faster too, so it should handle Wii games without any problem.

      2. No. CEMU can run on devices with these specs, but it requires tweaking and the use of CEMU’s speedhack, which allows games to run at a lower framerate while still performing well.

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