The Wiimote’s audio translation chip
Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 9:11am by Jack
My associate and literal stateside neighbor Mr. Invisible pointed me to an incredible find in the Wiimote today. Well, it’s incredible to me because I somehow hadn’t heard about it until today. The incredible find? An audio translation chip buried deep within the innards of the Wiimote.
You can see it here in Fortune’s interactive Wiimote graphic that’s currently running alongside their lengthy expose on why Nintendo is kicking the competition’s ass with the Wii. Click around the graphic for a while, you’ll find it. It’s on the right side Wiimote near the bottom.
From the graphic: “Audio Translator: Converts analogue data such as human speech into a digital data stream. ”
To me, this is what a microphone would synch up with so we can have some DS-like Mario Kart balloon blowing and Metroid Prime Hunters voice chat. Regardless, it’s little hidden gems like these that lead me to believe there’s a lot of hidden potential left to discover in this little white box.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:41 am
I said it in the forum and I will say it here. This is bound to be a misinterpretation. It is simply a DAC(digital Analog Converter) chip that converts ones and zeros to an analog stream. Why do they need this? To convert the signal coming from the Wii to the Wiimote for the speaker. Thats it. Nothing secret, nothing fancy. Someone misinterpreted it.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:56 am
Wow that is a lot of ‘big words’ for something simple like “converts sound into data”.
A mic? I doubt it.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:00 am
The mic would be a separate attachment, natch. There’s none in the Wiimote itself. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, wouldn’t be the first time.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:10 am
It’s already used in Red Steel in multiplayer mode to give secret commands to each player
June 1st, 2007 at 10:11 am
Yeah and a dozen other games like Wii Sports.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:16 am
Excellent find! Not IGN, but Fortune magazine of all places to learn about a hidden feature on the Wii remote.
My opinion: not a mic, but part of a mic, so that it lowers the cost of a mic attachment. We’re already seeing Boogie and High School Musical.
How would a mic hook up? Boogie uses the nunchuk so . . .
could that mean there will be a wireless bluetooth mic? Or will the mic replace the nunchuk? Only time will tell. Or Infendo with a link to an article in the New York Post
June 1st, 2007 at 10:19 am
Or will the mic have another port for the nunchuk?
June 1st, 2007 at 10:20 am
Oh that reminds me, I don’t think you can get the best result out of a mic if you shake it around a lot (ie attached to the Wiimote). That leads me to believe it would be a headset. Sorry for the double post.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:51 am
Credit for this find should really go to FnbyDstryr over in the Forums! I was just the messenger.
http://www.infendo.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=1144
June 1st, 2007 at 12:17 pm
I was just wondering in a comment on a Rumor Reporter article whether they might be able to use the Wiimote speaker as a microphone as well, and that’s why its audio quality is so bad. (Try plugging a cheap set of headphones into your computer’s mic jack, setting it up to record from the mic, and then yelling into the headphones. Turn the gain up enough and it’d be more than suitable for things like “blow into the microphone”.)
You would still need an external mic for anything quality dependent, like voice chat or EA’s Boogie, but for Wario Ware type stuff it wouldn’t surprise me if they could flip the speaker into “mic mode”.
Anyway, I’m sure they bought someone’s Bluetooth chipset and it just included converters for both digital to analog (for the speaker) and analog to digital (for a mic.) Maybe that was even what inspired them to put the speaker on there in the first place.