'World's smallest' Wii is the size of a deck of cards, uses custom PCBs

Christopher Harper
·2 min read
Photograph of the world's smallest Nintendo Wii, "Short Stack", alongside a deck of playing cards for scale.
Photograph of the world's smallest Nintendo Wii, "Short Stack", alongside a deck of playing cards for scale.

The world of custom console (re)building is brimming with makeshift handheld and "Mini" versions of classic or current consoles — recently, the custom Nintendo Wii scene saw the introduction of another contender for "smallest Nintendo Wii." The Short Stack, posted on GitHub with recreation instructions by James Smith aka "loopj", is a fully-functioning Nintendo Wii trimmed and stripped down to the size of a deck of playing cards with the use of custom PCBs and 3D printing.

So, is the Short Stack really the world's smallest Wii? It just might be! On the YouTube side of this scene, Noidtronics showed off a Wii Nano that he claimed to be the smallest but ultimately seems slightly larger or the same as the actual prior crown-holder, Shank Mods' aptly-named Kill Mii.

Comparison shot of the other two
Comparison shot of the other two

At the size of a deck of playing cards, it would seem that the Short Stack is indeed the world's smallest Wii despite many similar efforts in the past. However, the others were mainly done by stripping down components and utilizing existing hardware— Short Stack leverages two custom PCBs (Periphlex and Wii Power Strip) for supplying power and input to a nearly fully-stripped motherboard.

While Short Stack should be reproducible from the documentation and instructions shown on its GitHub page, you'll still need an incredibly high degree of technical expertise and willingness to buy extra hardware to build this yourself. Even the GitHub page firmly warns readers of motherboard trim, fine pitch soldering, and PCB assembly required.

But once complete, Short Stack lives up to the dream of "world's smallest Wii" near-perfectly. It doesn't have an (uncomfortable) screen and controller like Kill Mii or full-sized GameCube controller ports like Wii Nano, but it's smaller than both and still has full controller support. GameCube controller support on Short Stack is achieved through headphone jacks and converters, since it would have been too small to support full GC ports like Nano.

You can't play games off discs, of course. The drive is gone, and there's no room for memory cards. Instead, you use a microSD card for that.

There may be room to go even smaller. "I estimate you could reduce the volume by a further 25-30% without losing any functionality, but it would be an incredibly tight fit and tricky to assemble," Smith wrote on GitHub.

Overall, it seems like the Wii modding scene is going to be hard-pressed to make smaller Wii consoles than this while still using original hardware. Even as-is, the custom PCBs required for this downscaling is some of the most intensive yet. We're getting to the point where custom Wiis have more resemblance to Raspberry Pi Pico builds than the full Raspberry Pi.