If you’re going to miniaturize and portabilize a Wii, it only makes sense to draw inspiration from Nintendo’s own handheld consoles for the finished. So YouTube’s ‘StonedEdge’ created their Wii SPii with a folding screen design reminiscent of the Game Boy Advance SP, but with considerably more horsepower under the hood.
Unlike GmanModz’ world’s smallest portable N64 which still accepts original cartridges, StonedEdge wisely decided to replace the Nintendo Wii’s optical drive with a tiny microSD card full of ROMs and ISO files to improve portability. But believe it or not, there’s an actual sacrificial Wii console inside the Wii SPii, or at least a Wii’s mainboard which has been strategically trimmed down to its most important components (processor, etc.) and paired with a custom compact PCB that takes over audio and power management duties.
What’s most remarkable about StonedEdge’s creation is that it legitimately looks like something Nintendo would release, with a frosted see-through plastic housing revealing their handiwork inside, a 3.5-inch 640x480 LCD display, a pair of hefty batteries that manage to muster about two-and-a-half hours of playtime, and even a standard headphone jack—a feature the original GBA SP skipped in favor of an easily lost adapter cable.
It doesn’t look like motion controls have been carried over to the portable, which was the original Wii’s hallmark feature, but opening the case reveals a pair of sunken analog joysticks harvested from a couple of Switch Joy-Cons and a traditional D-pad because the Wii SPii can emulate older Nintendo consoles as well, including the GameCube. It took StonedEdge nearly a year to design and finish the portable and you can find a detailed log of their progress—both the successes and failure they encountered along the way—on the BitBuilt forums if you’re interested in building your own and want to get rid of all that pesky free time you’ve got on your hands.