Le secret que dissimulerait la Wii au niveau hardware pourrait être le Shade Tree Blender. C'est un procédé récemment breveté par Nintendo, le plus incroyable c'est qu'il correspondrait à certaine rumeur prétendant que la Wii faciliterait énormément la programmation tout en offrant des possibilités graphiques énormes. Le principe serait basé sur le rendu et la programmation de scènes précalculées (donc des images de synthèse) adapté à la programmation temps réelle!!! tout serait géré en hardware par le Shade Tree Blender (shaders et multi-texturing) et serait disponible à loisir pour le développement de programmes. Ce nouveau procédé permettrait aussi l'émulation de systèmes divers et correspondrait donc à la virtual console de Nintendo. Il faciliterait aussi la connectivité avec d'autres machines (la DS?!!). Le brevet est difficilement compréhensible dans son intégralité et certaines descriptions paraissent obscures mais à vous de juger, voici un petit résumé pour le reste j'ai mis un lien:

* A generalized shade tree blender that can be used for multitexturing as well as a number of other flexible blending effects. (...)

* Recirculating shader hardware within a graphics pipeline can be controlled to provide a number of independently controllable blending stages. (...) Thus, relatively low cost and compact shader hardware can be used to implement arbitrarily complex shade trees. (...)

* The results of a first texture mapping operation is provided to a reconfigurable shader. The shader performs a blending operation in response to the first texture mapping operation. The shader is then reconfigured, and is connected to receive the results of a further texturing operation. The reconfigured shader combines its previous results with the results of the further texturing operation to provide a blended output. (...)

* A shader can be recirculated any desired number of times to implement an arbitrarily complex shading model (...) [in order to] provide great flexibility in implementing a variety of complex shading models. (...)

* A recirculating shade tree pixel blender is implemented in hardware to minimize processing time per stage. In more detail, (...) [this] provides a relatively low chip-footprint, versatile texture-environment processing subsystem including a hardware accelerated programmable texture shader/pixel blender that circulates computed color, opacity and other data over multiple cycles/stages. (...)

Certain of the above-described system components 50 could be implemented as other than the home video game console configuration described above. For example, one could run graphics application or other software written for system 50 on a platform with a different configuration that emulates system 50 or is otherwise compatible with it. If the other platform can successfully emulate, simulate and/or provide some or all of the hardware and software resources of system 50, then the other platform will be able to successfully execute the software.

As one example, an emulator may provide a hardware and/or software configuration (platform) that is different from the hardware and/or software configuration (platform) of system 50. The emulator system might include software and/or hardware components that emulate or simulate some or all of hardware and/or software components of the system for which the application software was written. For example, the emulator system could comprise a general purpose digital computer such as a personal computer, which executes a software emulator program that simulates the hardware and/or firmware of system 50.

Some general purpose digital computers (e.g., IBM or MacIntosh personal computers and compatibles) are now equipped with 3D graphics cards that provide 3D graphics pipelines compliant with DirectX or other standard 3D graphics command APIs. They may also be equipped with stereophonic sound cards that provide high quality stereophonic sound based on a standard set of sound commands. Such multimedia-hardware-equipped personal computers running emulator software may have sufficient performance to approximate the graphics and sound performance of system 50. Emulator software controls the hardware resources on the personal computer platform to simulate the processing, 3D graphics, sound, peripheral and other capabilities of the home video game console platform for which the game programmer wrote the game software. (...)

Host 1201 may be a general or special purpose digital computing device such as, for example, a personal computer, a video game console, or any other platform with sufficient computing power. Emulator 1303 may be software and/or hardware that runs on host platform 1201, and provides a real-time conversion of commands, data and other information from storage medium 62 into a form that can be processed by host 1201. For example, emulator 1303 fetches source binary-image program instructions intended for execution by system 50 from storage medium 62 and converts these program instructions to a target format that can be executed or otherwise processed by host 1201.