Game consoles as visualist tools? Sign me up! Nintendo doesn’t make it easy, as usual, but it looks possible to turn the Wii and perhaps even the GameCube into homebrew gaming, interactive visual, and video devices. My Wii is now on its way, so I look forward to giving Flash a try. Best resource so far: the incomparable Mario Klingeman aka Quasimondo has a promising technique for getting control data out of the Wii controllers, which, really, is the whole point. A number of Flash developers are now making homebrew games for the Wii and Opera browser.

What about Processing and Java? The Wii Opera browser lacks a Java runtime, but many new Wii owners will have a basically useless GameCube console sitting around. That brings us to Gamecube Linux. So far, any embedded Java runtime must have been fully experimental, but there is some promise to make GameCubes into powerful video/multimedia machines on the cheap.

Anyone have other resources? (I’ll keep you posted.)