From your point of view the Wii was initially created to be used on HDTV using the component cable or CRT using the RGB cable?
Some of the newer CRT's also had Component inputs. Wii to me looks best on a CRT, I use the component cables and it looks great.
I don't think it was necessarily exclusively designed for one or the other... it came out when HDTVs were just starting to become commonplace. The system supports widescreen and has component 480p capability. A few years after the Wii came out, HDTVs were really commonplace so they must have had that in mind with games later in the life. Just a guess. Nowadays I use one of those cheapo HDMI adapters for my Wii.
Some people don't like 480i, but I think it's great on a consumer CRT over component. I'm fortunate enough to have a PVM 20L5 for 480p, but I have to say that I was pretty sad to learn that Skyward Sword has no 4:3/forced widescreen. That's a pretty good use case for using a HDTV.
I think it was primarily designed for use on standard definition TVs, with the 480p support included for the (at the time) minority of people that had HDTVs. I suspect it was mostly intended to use component, since by the time the Wii came out the D端子 (which uses component signals) was far more common than the (RGB) JP-21 connector.
I am curious. Wasn't the Wii part of the same generation that the XBOX360 and PlayStation 3 were part of? So surely it was designed for HD? My family moved up to a LCD HDTV in 2009. I always thought we were slow to move up. By 2008 or so, Toshiba had no replacement parts for servicing the CRT TV here. That Toshiba CRT was a SDTV, with support for component video.
You are correct sp193. According to Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh_generation_of_video_game_consoles) it was released with XBOX360 and PlayStation 3 (same era) If I remember correctly for XBOX360 and PlayStation 3 the HDMI was implemented on TV's very good.
The main benefit of playing on an HDTV is that you can play games in widescreen. It's also possible to play in 480p on an HD CRT or using a component to VGA converter with a CRT computer monitor. The latter is good for Gamecube games, but if you're only playing Wii games, then a widescreen display is probably ideal. Not all Wii games support widescreen, though. About the 360: the original 360 didn't have HDMI. For HD, component and VGA were your only options. Later revisions added an HDMI port.
At the time of the X360 and PS3 release, our only HDTV was a large 720p projection TV. I remember the wonders of HD were still very new to me, using the OG Xbox with it's limited support for 720p and getting it hooked up to that TV. It was a smart move on Sony/MSofts part, since HDTV's exploded like a year or two later, so the consoles were prepared for it. The Wii not so much.
