Honestly if Nintendo released a higher end Wii 2 and for the first year maybe just kept developing Wii games but offered HD versions of Mario Galaxy 2 and Metroid Prime Other M and Zelda on Wii 2 in 1080p + Dolby Digital + a more streamlined Wiimote ... I'd be quite fine with that.

They can ramp up "built only for HD" titles later on, but you'd have third party stuff like FF13 and RE5 and Dead Rising 2 to go with those first party games in the meantime.

Maybe it is time for the traditional idea of how one console phases out another to be thrown out because quite frankly it's an outdated method really based on the days of the 80s/early 90s, where most main consumers of game systems were kids who had to get permission from their parents to buy a new machine and parents weren't about to plop down cash more than 5 years at a a time. 

Maybe its time for an idea like "forward compatibility" to be really tried out. 

Under that definition, the Super Wii would have a:

1.9 GHz CPU

648 MHz GPU

I just want to point out that HD-DVD is still alive, its alive in China and that format is beating out Blu Ray in that market by a considerable margin. If they retain disc based media and want to produce the cheapest option around from a licencing perspective it will be based on that format. The flip side bonus is that HD-DVD will be impossible to pirate as the media will not be available in a few years anyway.

Furthermore if they use Blu Ray they will be paying their fees to Panasonic rather than Sony on the per console basis. Sony holds the patents in the discs, Panasonic in the players themselves (mainly).

The Chinese format is actually technically called CBHD (China Blue High Definition Disc). Toshiba basically licensing HD-DVD to Chinese companies that are selling drives and discs in China for less than Blu-Ray.

This actually probably makes it less likely Nintendo would go this route though since China is a haven of piracy, I'm not sure they'd want to touch a Chinese HD-DVD knock off with a 20 foot pole. Maybe if Toshiba had kept the patents to themselves and sold them exclusively to Nintendo ... that way no one else could use them in this manner.

If Blu-Ray does not take off in China, that probably improves it's anti-piracy features really.

If Nintendo only has to pay Panasonic a fee for the Blu-Ray drives ... that works great, because they could very easily make the drive "propietary" and then technically the game discs are not actual Blu-Ray discs even if they're based off the Blu-Ray tech and not pay Sony even a cent. 

For those that don't remember, the GC does not use a "DVD". Nintendo developed a proprietary format with Panasonic back in around 2000 (when it became obvious that the N64 died due to cart constraints). They own the technology (maybe not all, but at least in part).

$10/unit in licensing fees over the course of a generation can save Ninty $500m+. Its much cheaper for them to develop their own format (or pay another company to dev it for them), than it is to pay licensing fees.

The problem with proprietary drives/discs though, is manufacturing capacity. If the existing BluRay disc makers can't do it - then you need to build your own. Very, very expensive and slow.

I still like carts: the "ace" in the sleeve of carts, is what happens when the tech gets good enough that read rates can get close to slow, internal memory. You don't need anywhere near the same amount of RAM as other consoles (no need to preload/cache data). Imagine plugging in a 4GB game cart... and effectively having 4GB of (R/O) RAM available.

You could make the most insane GTA style game with something like that...

Nintendo signed a deal with Panasonic to use DVDs in Project: Dolphin. They modified the format to be a propietary mini-DVD format later on. Panasonic gained rights to make a DVD player version of the GameCube.

But the GameCube discs are still basically DVD (albiet mini-DVD). Pirates have burned GameCube games on DVD discs that run just fine on a hacked GameCube. The system can read DVD discs because really it is a DVD drive, they just tacked a few modifications onto it. If it was a truly, completely propietary format, this would not be possible (ditto for the Wii "disc drive"). 

Nintendo could do something similar with Blu-Ray ... yes saving $10/unit in licensing fees is great. But that doesn't stop Nintendo from offering a $30 dongle for to "unlock" the movie playback (they come out $20 on top that way). This was the original plan with the Wii, but I guess by 2006 it became pointless with DVD. That way they actually stand to likely make a profit off anyone who wants to play movies on the system. 

For the flash memory idea ... why not just reserve a 4GB high speed pool of flash RAM onto the system itself for game data? That probably makes more sense than making every game use flash. 

You're not very well informed ...

The Gamecube disc was Panasonic's proposed DVD format that was not accepted by the DVD consortium, and it had a fundimental difference from DVD that made it very well suited for videogames; it was a Constant Angular Velocity (CAV) disc which meant that seek times and latency were dramatically reduced, and developers could get tiny load-times without putting too much effort into it.

There wasn't a massive difference between the Gamecube drive and a DVD drive because Panasonic produced a modified DVD drive that read their proprietary format. The thing everyone who owned a modded Gamecube will tell you is that burned Gamecube games had loading times that were 3 to 5 times as long as the original game, and games that loaded on the fly (which there were quite a few of) were practically unplayable.

Now, what Nintendo may or may not do isn't really important, and many people will simply point out that over 3 generations of handheld systems and 5 generations of home consoles Nintendo has never seen value in converting their game system into being a media hub. Today they could create a DVD channel and sell it for $10 to cover the cost of licencing fees associated with it, and they don't because they don't see value in it. Whether that changes in the future is up to Nintendo, but they would have to see value in adding Blu-Ray ... And (for Nintendo) the piracy protection benefit of "spitting out" any format that doesn't look like their proprietary game format may outweigh any benefits from playing movies.

You're calliing him uninformed and at the same time admitting that the Gamecube drive was essentially a modified DVD drive. What you're arguing over is semantics and doesn't change the bottom line.

With minor modifications of a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drive you could get one drive to play the opposite format (potentially at the expense of playing the original format) but that doesn't mean that HD-DVD is "essentially" the same as Blu-Ray ... There was a (never launched) HD movie format that was based on DVD technology which was based on 10+ layers per disc, and one of the (proposed) benefits of this format was that with (very) minor modifications to existing inexpensive hardware players of this format could be released at a very low price; but this doesn't mean that this format was "essentially" the same as DVD.

Basically, when I think of a format being "essentially" the same I think of most DVD-based game console formats where the games are produced on DVD discs with a proprietary file structure; I don't think of formats with large differences in the format that produce noticeable benefits and trade-offs.