Gaming Consoles

Gaming Consoles

Another device that computes is our gaming consoles. Here's a Nintendo Wii, which is actually one of my favorite gaming consoles ever. Even though this is outdated and old, I love playing Mario Kart on it — it's just such a fun game. So this is one of my favorite consoles. And then this would be a Switch.

Gaming consoles are obviously built for gaming, but they are mini computers. They're still processing, and they're still the same components that a computer would have, except it's just in these little different packages built for a little different purpose.

Gaming consoles are electronic devices used to play video games. Some examples might be an Xbox, or PlayStation, or a Switch. The purpose of it is really just for gaming, although we do see some other things with it, like we could browse the internet on them.

The OS usually is some sort of system software, some sort of firmware, or possibly an OS depending on which device that you're using. And the apps that you use on them are just a bunch of games, for the most part. There are some other apps on there — like maybe this Wii had Netflix on it, so that way you could watch some movies on it — so there are some other apps, but it's mainly used for gaming.

The benefits of it: the ease of use, the affordability, performance, and portability of these devices, especially if you're talking about the ones that you can just take with you, this gaming console, because it's all just in one little unit here. The drawbacks are that there are some limited capabilities. You're only limited on what you can do according to how many apps are built for these systems.

Inside a Nintendo Wii

Here I have a Nintendo Wii. What we're going to do is break this down and take a look at the inside and see what some of the components are. So what I have to do is first of all find all of the screws — there's a lot of little screws on this — so I'm going to take it apart.

Here's the CD-ROM right here. This is what reads the discs. Over here looks like a couple of antennas that we have. We've got the cooling system, so this is a fan that blows by here, so I'm going to assume that the processor is probably under here. Let's continue to tear it down and see if the processor is right there.

Here on the other side of the CD-ROM we do see some chips. I'm assuming that these chips are to control the CD-ROM and not the actual gaming system, so we're going to continue to break this down and look a little further. Now I have to be a little careful, because I ended up with so many screws and little parts that I need to be careful when I put this back together, to make sure I can get it all put back together correctly.

What it's looking like to me is that we have the main central processing underneath this heat sink. This is what brings the heat away from the actual chip and cools it down, and the fan blows by this. Under there I assume is the CPU. Now, I'm not going to open it up, because there's a heat sink compound on there and I don't want to damage that, so I'm going to keep that on there.

Where you see some other circuit boards in here, I assume that one of these is probably the memory and one of them is probably just the chipset on the board here. This is probably the wireless controller, maybe the Bluetooth for the different controllers there. And then it looks like we have maybe some memory slots over here — I'm not sure exactly, I'll have to look at that a little closer. This looks like a memory slot right here that we can add to; I think there's one over here too, for an expansion over here.

So there's inside of a motherboard. We also have this, which is probably the power over here. This is for — oh yeah, power's right here. And then this is going out to the TV over here. We've got our controller inputs over here. So there's the inside of this board here.