Wii

We bought Duncan a Nintendo Wii for his birthday. Even though his birthday is not until the end of the month, we've given it to him three weeks early.

We are hoping the novelty factor will have worn off by then and when he returns to school, he might actually start to think about school rather then wondering when he can get home again to play on his Wii.

In trying to set this up, I think I over thought it a bit. We have a Panasonic 42" High Definition Plasma display ( model TH-42PHD6). We have high definition cable from Comcast connected via the Component RGB IN sockets in slot #3 on the back of the TV. What I was hoping to do was get a RBG Component cable for the Wii and some kind of RGB switch to allow us to share that slot 3 on the TV. It wouldn't be high-def, but it would hopefully be able to use the 480p mode on that slot on the TV to give a clearer sharper picture.

I bought an RGB switch from Firefold. What a piece of crap! It arrived in an envelope with no padding and no invoice. The unit rattled when I took it out of it's shoddy packaging. Needless to say it didn't work. I guess that's what I should expect for $37.99. I'm trying to raise the enthusiasm to return it. I'll probably just add it to the pile of stuff that I might be able to salvage something out of at a future date. Firefold certainly won't be getting anymore of my business.

So we ended up using the video and audio input ports on a combined DVD/VCR to connect the Wii up to the TV. This has the added advantage of the audio going to the special receiver and the surrond speakers.

Just for grins, we also connected the Wii upto the Samsung SyncMaster 215TW that I've got connected to my work laptop. I was able to use the Wii RGB component cable there. The picture is definitely clearer and sharper. The audio is lousy but what do you expect from a video monitor?

Duncan doesn't seem to notice or care about the slightly lower picture quality. He's just happily playing away. He's got the Wii Sports that came with the box. We also bought him Wii Play and a second remote.

The Wii is one of the nicest gaming consoles I've seen. I particularly like the games like bowling and golf where the use of the remote is very natural. In fact, I'm aching quite a bit this morning from too much bowling.

The last challenge now is connecting to the Internet with it. It found our secure wireless access point (correct SSID), but gave up an error 52030 when doing the test. I've tried most of the things suggested to fix this (changed channel, disabled firewall, changed MTU etc...), but it's not working yet. The one thing left to try is updating the fireware on the Linksys WRT54G router. It's currently v2.04.0. That's probably quite old.

At the moment, I've got no idea how to do this. I need a break. It can wait until Monday, when I've had a chance to research it. If anybody has any pointers to relevant web pages, please add a comment.

[Technorati Tag: Wii]

[Technorati Tag: Nintendo]

[Technorati Tag: Linksys]

( Aug 05 2007, 10:54:34 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [10]