Nintendo Wii is Running Out of Storage
Dec. 15People have been complaining about the Wii's wimpy 512MB of internal Flash memory for a long time. Sure, not many people download enough to fill it up... but it's really easy if you like the Virtual Console. IGN has an editorial up about the issue, and suggests some fixes.
The way I see it, Nintendo has two choices, both of them incredibly easy. The first is simple to enable the playback of VC software from SD Cards, which can store up to 8GBs of data more than 15 times the size of Wii's flimsy 512 MBs of internal flash RAM. I'd be happy to use 2GB SD Cards, if nothing else, and these are extremely cheap to buy. A Wii firmware update that allows access to the SD Cards in such a way is all that's needed of Nintendo. Alternatively, the Big N could merely support an external hard drive via one or both of the two USB 2.0 ports located on the rear of the console you know, the ones that are currently not being used by anything except for external microphones. People like me could buy a 2GB SD Card or 6GB external USB hard drive for somewhere in the neighborhood of $30-50 smackers.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me-- what do you think?
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Comments
This guy has obviously never tried to copy a VC game to an SD card before. I was backing up The Dynastic Hero the other day and it took more than five minutes for the thing to transfer. It seriously would've been faster to delete it and then redownload it later on from the VC store.
Just imagine the load times if you were to try and play it directly from the card! I'm guessing the whole game can't be loaded into memory all at once, so there'd be huge pauses every time it tried to load a new music track for Duo games. N64 games probably wouldn't even be playable.
The external hard drive thing sounds more likely, but of course Nintendo would want to develop their own storage solution first, instead of losing some easy money by making the Wii compatible with every USB hard drive out there. Storage is a problem, but either way they solve it, it's not going to be as simple as a firmware update.
I do agree that the external hard drive would probably be the better way to go. However, since Nintendo is now allowing generic SD cards to be used, it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch for them to also allow third party hard drives.
My guess is Nintendo is concerned about potential pirates being able to download a large volume of things easily to a single hard drive that can be plugged into a PC... otherwise I don't see why they wouldn't have already allowed external drives.
TribeMindMD: What do you mean "now" allows generic SD cards? I bought my Wii at launch and have been using a "generic SD card" to this day. The Wii has always supported pretty much all SD cards.
I agree with most of the points already presented. I doubt the Wii can not read data from an external source (especially through the SD card slot) fast enough to support real-time play very easily, unless they cooked up something proprietary, like they tend to do. Piracy could be an issue, though I don't see why there can't be some kind of security measure that allows your game to only be read by your system (again, proprietary storage could help that). Then again, pirates can get around the darndest things!
That makes me wonder if Nintendo actually had a reason for only going with 512 MB of internal memory in the first place? There's got to be a reason, unfortunately I'm not technically knowledgeable enough to know what it could be.
Either way, the comments on the IGN post were (as the axiom goes) clearly the work of muscular dystrophy and AIDS. It took me like one and a half pages of downloaded Virtual Console games and a dozen game saves to run completely out of room. That's far less stuff than I was planning to use the memory for.
What I meant by "now" is that for past consoles like the GameCube, Playstation, etc. you had to buy special memory cards. That's all.
As for the lack of internal storage, it may have been a cost cutting measure. ::shrug::
I kind of think Nintendo went with 512MB because that's large enough to save some things to, but not remotely large enough that you could mount game .isos to the hard drive.
TribeMindMD: My mistake!
Lynxara: in that case, they could have gone with any memory capacity that's less than 4GB.
Even though your average game disc can hold around 4GB of data, a lot of games--and I suspect the casual games that sell so well on the Wii--are going to be much smaller when ripped to .iso.
I guess I'll have to take your word for it, unless one of us actually rips a Wii .iso and happens to find that nearly every one of them is a 4GB file. Until then, we'll just have to assume I made that number up.
So I got curious and went and looked at some Wii .iso sites, and you're right that they're all a little over 4GB... but this has to be junk data or padding. I've ripped way more sophisticated PS2 games than some of the titles I'm seeing floating around torrent sites, and they usually hovered around the 3GB mark. There's nothing going on in, say, WarioWare that should make it a larger disc .iso than, say, Kingdom Hearts II.
It's apparently all in the compression, but that's about as far as my knowledge of such matters goes. There's at least one Wii game that's around the 2GB mark, but I can't remember which one. It's quite the anomaly!
Anyways, I think the Wii memory limitation is a strange issue. I'd personally love to hear something from someone that works for Nintendo, at least for clarification. I can't help that I like N64 games!
(Well, except for Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, which is the reason I can never manage more than 1 hour of playing Zelda games anymore)
I'd have to imagine that "hackers" will find a way to enable alternative storage solutions (for piracy uses or for legitimate uses) whether or not Nintendo comes up with their own solution. Even if Nintendo comes up with their own proprietary storage solution, eventually someone will create a workaround.
The thing is, though, it may take a long time for such a solution to be widely available. Since, you know, companies tend to crack down on those types of things when they cut into the profitability of a console's active lifespan.
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