I'm making an analysis on this, and I'm coming to the conclusion that the wii does everything the original xbox does (even the gamecube was a capable of that) , but better by a considerable amount. It's not at the level of hd consoles, but not last gen either, and hope you read my analysis which should be done this month.

To my knowledge, based on a lot of reading on these systems, the Wii is roughly on-par with the original Xbox.  Better in some ways, potentially weaker in others (talking CPU/GPU properties, not harddrive or online), but overall, it's a slightly more streamlined Xbox in it's overall horsepower.  The Xbox was not exactly a current-gen system last generation.  It was a step above in the way the Wii is now a step below.  It was a step above in the way the TurboGrafx-16 was back in the day when it was competing with the NES and Master System.  All were 8-bit systems, but the TG16 could handle 16-bit graphics. 

The Dreamcast, PS2, and GameCube were all fairly comparable in overall horsepower--and of these three, the GameCube was quite a bit more powerful--and was also designed early on to be easy on developers.  Early games like Luigi's Mansion and Pikmin were partially intended to show the deep detailed lighting and texture work the GC was capable of.  Go back and look at some of the finer points of Luigi's Mansion--one of the things complained about with the N64 was it's painfully limited texture abilities.  Luigi's Mansion was loaded with more detailed texture use--it was a showpiece for Nintendo to say, "we listened--the textures are everything you want them to be this time around."  The original Xbox was pretty much a league ahead of the other three in every way except one minor area in which the GC was actually more powerful.  (It dealt with a minor texture point--I don't remember the details, but the GC could handle this certain point at a factor of 8 and the Xbox at a factor of 4, however, the Xbox had a trick that doubled the use or speed, essentially making it the same as the GameCube.  I'm sorry I don't remember the specific nature of this point, but it dealt with textures.)

Part of the reason the original Xbox only appeared to be on about the same level as the PS2 and GC was because the PS2 was the weakest and most popular system--so it was the default system.  Easier to make a game on a weaker system and just port it to the slightly more powerful ones than it is to make a game optimized for a powerful system and port it backwards (like RE4 going from GC to PS2).  This is, actually, the same thing happening with the Xbox360 and PS3.  The X360 is the more popular, slightly weaker system--so it's a "default" system for a lot of developers.  Then the games just get ported to the PS3 and/or PC.  Doom 3 is about the only game that showed how much power the original Xbox had in it, and I'm fairly confident that even that game failed to fully utilize all that the system had to offer, graphically.

 I'll keep an eye out for your analysis.  Will it be on the board, or as an article?

If developers like Tecmo can pull off graphics on the wii with fatal frame IV then developers have no excuse to make the shovelware games they're making now

So even the last generation consoles such as the gamecube and the original Xbox can still push their graphic capabilities, and the latest games so far in these consoles arent what these consoles capable of.

Does it mean Microsoft waste their money on xbox 360 just to compete with the PS3 even their original xbox still have much to prove? No wonder Ninty says that gamers dont need more high end graphics consoles such as the 360 and PS3, Microsoft dont even tackle the potential of the original Xbox

Actually the wii is better than the xbox in all ways. Some say the wii can't pull of some shaders that the original xbox could, but that is because the architecture of the gamecube, and the wii support for the shaders, but you have to develope in a different way to utilize them. The gamecube in power was about equivalent to the xbox, but the xbox's gpu could do a little bit of things the gamecube's couldn't. Here is an article that satates the gamecube being able to pull everthing off the xbox could.

http://revoeyes.blogspot.com/2007/07/wii-has-more-power-than-you-think.html

"They only say it can't do some of the things the original Xbox could do, like shaders. They are very wrong though and they need to go back to Gamecube school (or talk to Factor 5's Juilan Eggebrecht) to find out that even the Gamecube could do everything the Xbox1 could do, only with a different method. The Xbox1 worked similar to a PC, so if developers made a game for it they would make it like a PC game. They couldn't do that with the Gamecube since developing a game on Gamecube was completely different. Custom shaders, custom lighting, custom textures - custom everything. Xbox and PC follow a code that most developers know and its not all custom. They have programmable shaders, like Shader Model 2.0 for instance."

The wii does everything the xbox does, but with some more things, and a little better in everywhere. Wait for my analysis. My analysis will be on the board. If it doesn't get critizied too much I will get a contributor to put it in the articles. 

Arguably, Microsoft needed the Xbox360 to compete with the PS3--the problem is that they rushed it to market too soon and killed the Xbox too early.  If they do this again, they'll be rushing themselves right out of the gaming market altogether.  This is what hastened Sega's demise.

They released the 32X, then less than a year later, jumped the gun with a sneak-attack early launch of the Saturn.  And only a couple short years later, they rushed the announcement of the Dreamcast which caused already unhappy developers to drop Sega entirely.  The Dreamcast launched with less support than it should have had.

Sony is doing the right thing in keeping old consoles alive on into the launch and beginnings of newer machines.  Nintendo was smart like that once, when they continued to release the revamped NES and NES games into the lifecycle of the SNES.  They let the N64 fizzle and garner a bad reputation.  I think they had no choice but to kill the GameCube prematurely because the Wii isn't substantially more powerful.  Also, it helped them because then there's only room for one machine--the Wii--for consumers to choose from.

Sony is keeping the PS2 going a little longer than they should, though.  I believe one of the obstacles preventing the PS3 from really garnering success (aside from it's ridiculous price, lack of AAA-quality exclusive titles, and lack of exclusives in general, and lack of consumer-aware differences from the cheaper, more supported Xbox360) is that they gave consumers a choice for too long.  "Oh, why should I spend $500 on this Playstation, when this smaller one is only $120?  That's the most popular system anyway, right?"

^^

I have never drawn the comparison between Microsoft and Sega like you have. It's pretty much dead on like the rest of your analysis here. Excellent post.

I would like to see the study that shows the GameCube could deliver all the same goods as the original Xbox.  I've compared the specs in seperate windows side-by-side from Wikipedia, and the Wii is awfully close to the original XBox--and the original XBox seems awfully powerful compared to the GameCube. 

I'm curious, are you factoring into your analysis the engine High Voltage developed for the Wii?  It's clearly not pushing Xbox360-quality of graphics, but it's clear from some early footage that it's pulling of some impressive stunts.  I'm one of the people that agree that Super Mario Galaxy pulled off all manner of stunts that most people thought were impossible on the Wii with the sharp, realistic lighting and real-time shadows, light-emitting particle effects, and massive high-poly characters.  Keep in mind, their released tech demo listed all the aspects of the engine they'd built.

Also, if you will, I'd like to hear (read?) your opinion on whether or not the Wii can take better advantage of High Def TV's with a firmware update.  I'm pretty sure it could be updated to stretch to one level higher than 480i.

I think that the sooner The Conduit, Disaster: Day of Crisis, and Factor5's (Kid Icarus) game come out, the better since these are all intended to be pushing the Wii's hardware to higher levels.  I know, some of the released screenshots of Disaster have looked pretty bleak, but some of the released footage has also been pretty impressive.  Like I said (potentially a different thread, I suddenly don't recall), I've watched gameplay footage of Alone in the Dark on the Wii and a lot of what I've seen has practically sold me on the game.  It even looks like they may have the motion controls working almost perfectly.  I'm hoping that game garners at least 80% for ratings because it's become a highly anticipated title for me.  Finally, I think The Conduit will only get better and better looking as High Voltage finishes tweaking the engine.

That article you posted was pretty good, but I'd like to see a more recent one with some more details.

The Wii can support up to 480p, just like the awesome GameCube could.

Julian Eggerbrecht from Factor 5 pretty much confirmed that the GC was on par with the original Xbox.If I'm not mistaken Mikami did as well.

Julian's own words. Link:

http://revoeyes.blogspot.com/2007/09/wii-is-more-powerful-than-xbox-gamecube.html

Original:

This whole mess started when Robbie Bach went on saying that the Wii was less powerful than the Xbox.Sadly analyst N'gai Croal who has no idea about tech went out and tried to agree with him and made himself look like an idiot.

I'm also surprised when you said that you did an analysis of the specs on Wikipedia because last time I checked GC's cpu beats the celeron of the Xbox and the TEV mimics anything that the NVidia gpu did.

The good thing aboput this is that when the Wii starts to get pushed we're gonna hear all the "I didn't know thw Wii could do that" comments which will no doubt give Wii even more points.Thanks to this propaganda being accepted earlier on by the biased gaming media this will turn out very well in the long run for Nintendo.This as well as third parties not being fully on board by 2010 to try and catch up ensures an unusually long lifecycle fro the Wii.

The only problem I have with this is that a successor to Wii coming out in 2015 is becoming more and more likely by the day.Good for Nintendo, but damn that's a long time from now.