Wii Ware specifics revealed

I'll download as many Wii Ware games as I can fit on my Wii until I have no space left (which I'm practically at now).
Once I'm full up, that's it. I'm not downloading any more VC or WW games until Nintendo wises up and lets us store the games on HDDs.

I don't care if they release Viewtiful Joe 3 on Wii Ware. I'm not cracking for anything. LINE IN THE SAND!

I don't get it. I'm pretty certain that even the most hardcore Nintendo Fanboy would agree that the Wii should allow external drives.

Nintendo could sell its own and not allow others, and while gamers would grumble, they would likely go along with it, thanking Nintendo for at least releasing a harddrive at all.

So to recap, in this situation, lots of people would buy this external drive, Nintendo gets more profit, and gamers get their HD. Next, Nintendo raises that 40 MB cap. A lot. Nobody loses! Why isn't Nintendo doing this? Really. I see no downside. What are they waiting for?

You can fit a lot of game into 40megs. And there's more to it than just a limit--some of the monetary incentives in the games encourage devs to go even smaller. There were some impressive XBLA titles done under the 50 meg rule (Wing Commander Arena).

It might seem counter intuitive that smaller sizes could lead to better games, but it's true. When size is no issue, developers don't bother to optimize code nearly as much (hence why Madden '08 looked better on 360 than it did on the more powerful PS3). But if they have a reason to go through and optimize, they are more likely to get the game running smoother and better. Attention to detail breeds more attention to detail, and results in better games.

I'm pissed at Nintendo about their idiotic drive resistance, but whether I had 500 gigs or the paltry 512megs, I'd want to at least incentivize smaller games. For now, this limit might bring a larger variety of content to market that much sooner than if . If they then raise the limit later like MS did, we'll get the best of both worlds.

"I'll download as many Wii Ware games as I can fit on my Wii until I have no space left (which I'm practically at now).
Once I'm full up, that's it. I'm not downloading any more VC or WW games until Nintendo wises up and lets us store the games on HDDs.

I don't care if they release Viewtiful Joe 3 on Wii Ware. I'm not cracking for anything. LINE IN THE SAND!"

I was literally going to post this same thing.

I've maxed out the available space on my system and aren't about to start using an SD card unless I can load apps right from it (so freakin' dumb). I'm incredibly...to fault even...loose with my wallet in terms of microtransactions, but N sadly won't see any more of my cash until I have a viable way to store my software.

I wouldn't even think twice about buying a Nintendo branded harddrive. If anything, games stored on the SD card should be playable without having to copy it to the actual console.

um, how are we supposed to put wii ware games that are 40MB if we have VC games from anywhere up to 36MB and actual save fiules, which take up a lot of space when the wii has F***IN' 512 MB OF STORAGE?!?!?!?!? THEY ARE IDIOTS! WE NEEEEEEED HARD DRIVE COMPATIBILITY!!!!!!

nintendo needs to sort it out and release a hard drive, atleast give people the option

They don't even need to invest in hardware. Just release a firmware update that enables usb drives, and let consumers (let's face it, the great unwashed don't need a hard drive--just the hardcore users) chose what works best for them. They could sell a branding option to someone like WD who could slap a Wii branding on their My Book externals for people who don't know any better. No hassle for Nintendo.

I also cannot download anything without deleting something. I also refuse to do the SD card or delete/redownload items.

Just saying my system is full means I have been a big customer of the VC.

I'm in agreement with pretty much everybody else. Nintendo needs to give us a hard drive!

I don't care if it's Nintendo branded or if it's 3rd party drives. I need more storage!

Transferring games back and forth to an SD card is an unrealistic expectation.

I will not buy a single WiiWare game until they allow USB storage and full SD support (running games off the external media). I'm really excited about some of the games coming out but I'm simply not willing to go through the hassle of redownloading them over and over because I don't have enough space to store them.

Nintendo has to know that this is an issue, and I can't even imagine how much money they will miss out on due to this. To use conservative estimates lets say there are 10 million Wiis out there (probably a few million more by now) and I would estimate that merely 1/10th have filled up their available storage or will do so over the next year. So, we have 1 million customers eager and willing to buy more product, but are limited buy system storage and don't want to deal with the inconvenience of losing save games and redownloading content. Even if each of those 1 mill. were only going to buy an additional 1000 Wii points, that is $10 Mill. right out the window. I believe my estimates are very conservative, and that in reality they could be missing out on 100s of millions and that amount will only grow with time.

I don't get it, so what's the difference between a wiiware game, and a virtual console game? Especially if DR maria will be a wiiware game

I'll keep downloading stuff (Bomberman will be my first hit, and probably that Hudson Shooter) until i have 250 blocks left (a large enough buffer that i can keep making new game saves for real games without worry), and then i'll probably just find workarounds until Nintendo cracks and releases an HDD

My guess is that it will be Nintendo proprietary (for DRM Worries), and that it will come by the 08 holidays at the latest

I mean, Nintendo knows who the VC caters to, and its a much easier solution for them to appease the fanbase then for them to fix their other glaring-but-fixable fault WiFi Connection, which would require a lot of work, this would require little work and net them a lot more profit then any hypothetical restructuring of WiFi Connection

Two words people.

Transfer Rate.


USB external HD's cannot sustain a high enough transfer rate to play games.

Nor can the SD cards. (there transfer rate is lower than USB)

Now, a 10k RPM drive has a cache large enough to overcome the USB transfer rate restriction, but those drives are still pricey.

Nintendo has fast servers, 40 megs should take less than 5 minutes (which... assuming SD cards use the full 150kbps transfer rate means it is 1 minute longer to download than to transfer).

To me, 1 minute more per download, and nintendo has to worry about keeping backups of MY GAMES FOR ME. Means I am happy that the setup is like it is.

Seems like everywhere I go lately I have to make the same argument. I wish people would stop jumping onto the "gotta have it bus" and start getting on the "stop and think" train.

Way I see it, don't need a hard drive. SD cards are fine, and some of you sound very lazy not deleting VC games to make room for other VC games.

I only keep twelve (12) games on the Wii; which is one entire Menu page just for VC games. I'll probably include WiiWare to that roster.

@nytestalker,

Good point about the transfer rate, but totally one that can be worked out. I'm not so sure running games off a usb flash device would be too slow, and even if it was, Nintendo could totally reserve blocks of main system memory to transfer the data over to the the internal flash in real time, then run the game from there.

While you and I may have reliable connections, not everyone does. I'll be the first to admit I am lazy, and the prospect of having to re-download a game, then reboot the thing, would keep me from ever playing the lost levels again after i deleted it. I mean, who wants to wait to feel inadequate?

@ Nyestalker

Most (if not all) VC games can actually be 100% loaded into the Wii's RAM (not the NAND Flash RAM, mind, but the actual RAM), so it could be a slower initial load, but you could boot it up once, then be done with load times until you were done

@nytestalker

What are you smoking? I just transferred a 100mb file to an SD card on my PC it took 25 seconds, same file to a USB drive connected to another PC on my network, 13 seconds.

Factoring in the menu changes, navigation and finally downloading, even Mario Bros probably ranks up there in multiple minutes to re-download. Nintendo is hardly speedy nor reliable in their download service either, good luck getting a game same day a major patch is released.

Seriously, if they want a transparent "download as you use" service then they need to make it transparent! Channels need to exist whether the are stored locally or not, the download should only be a pause and the user's network capacity should be the only limit on the speed to which it downloads.

Of course, as many would agree, using the USB port on the back of the damn machine to enable Mass Storage would be the best option, even if they just plug in a usb thumbdrive. Why Nintendo is stubbornly refusing to enable this along with SD play is beyond me, it even trumps the stubbornness over friendcodes which at least has some protective motivation.

Honestly Nintendo, I'd happily give up 250 of onboard storage as a form of cache if you allow USB drives and SD play to store the active channels. And yes once I have that, you will need to increase the available channels in the OS.

Personally a HDD isn't that important to me. I'm waiting for Nintendo rework their whole online store to allow me to switch my online profile to whichever Wii I own so that I can transport my VC games to another Wii myself. Until I know that I can redownload anything from my online profile and use it no matter what hardware I'm using I won't be investing in anything substantial that is available online.

A note to everyone here...

Please use the acronym HD and HDD appropriately.

HD = High Definition
HDD = Hard Disk Drive

I've actually been limiting my VC purchases because of space(and money) I only get games I have really loved, or always wanted to play but never did before. I only have about 5. The fear of running out of room is definitely an issue for me, and I don't really like the idea of re-downloading, or saving to a SD card. I don't have a SD card, but I would like more memory for the Wii.
It just makes no sense to offer so much awesome downloading content, and have too little of storage for them???

@nytestalker

i used to play World of Warcraft from an external USB hard drive since my internal hard drive was full when i got the game. the transfer rate was fine and only slowed down when i got to the large cities (and even then it might have been my shitty connection doing that). i dont understand why they wouldn't be able to just load the parts they needed to RAM and run it like that. if games can play with no load times then i think it SHOULD be possible to do this.

Right now I'd be satisfied with SDHC compatibility and direct play from an SD card. We don't need much storage but a logical and painless way of dealing with purchases should be an utmost priority. Lets not slip back to the condescending Nintendo tone of old.

Totally with you on the online accounts linking to purchases. Biggest hurdle there would be ensuring you're not just giving your account to everyone to load up on their Wii. Locking the account to a Wii Serial would also then require online verification before using any VC/WW title. It's not impossible but I don't see it as easy either.

What surprises me is the size of Nintendo but still the slow rate at which they develop their OS. After a year I had personally expected the wrinkles to be ironed out and several coats of polish to be applied.

@ jelster


SD cards (standard ones not highspeed ones) are rated @ 150kbps

Assuming 25 second duration of transfer.

25 x 150 = 3750.

3.8 megs.

So I am not sure how fast your SD card slot is... But it is apparently NOT standard.

Lets assume 5 minutes as the transfer time.

5 * 60 = 300 (300 seconds)

300 (seconds) * 150kbps = 45000kb

So for 5 minutes, you would transfer 45 megs. Roughly the size of a WiiWare title. (a bit bigger in reality)





As for the network transfer to exteranl device.

You do understand that the other computer holds the data in ITS RAM while it waits for the drives cache to become avail.. So I am fairly certain that from computer to computer you have a VERY quick time but the second computer is busy after the first says its done.

Better test would be copying a 40 meg file from that second machine over to an external device. IIRC USB 2.0 is rated for 450kbps, however due to write times on 5200 and 7200 rpm drives ( as well as read times) you cannot sustain a 450kbps transfer rate. While the 10k drives could.

See... this is why I dont bother even talking. Half the people dont get it.


@B1gC72

COMPUTER... Dude. Are you really gonna ask me why your computer. Running (ill assume atleast xp) was able to play a game off an external device?

Lets go down with some mathz.

Atleast 1 gb of ram right? WoW eats up what half that? so theres another we'll say 300 megs left over for cacheing.

Next.

Windows Swap file.

Theres ATLEAST a gig's worth of room to store stuff in temporarily.

Next - Video card. ZOMG I bet you have alteast 128 megs. So we can say theres ANOTHER 100 megs worth of pure cache space avail.

The Wii does not have all this EXTRA cache room. It has a teeny tiny cache for video, and an equally tiny cache for the cpu.


A computer can do it because it has tons of extra space to cache whats needed. Not to mention my low estimates, nowadays computers have 2 gb's fo ram, 512 meg video cards and multiple gig swap files.

Supposedly, the Wii has even LESS than the claimed "512MB" of memory. I'm betting it's being used for the OS/system files. Either way, we have so little space for VC/WiiWare its ridiculous. I only have 3 N64 games, and 2 SNES games (along with the Check Mii Out Channel, Everybody Votes Channel, and the Internet Channel), and I'm already down to 700 blocks. I'm really hoping for some upcoming SD card support, that allows me to play my VC/WiiWare games through the SD card, with the upcoming update to the Photo Channel, but I doubt it will happen. I guess I'll just stop buying VC games once I reach the 500 block mark.

Link:
http://forums.atari.com.au/index.php?s=3d97e147438d47c2021659250339701b&showtopic=3935&pid=58862&mode=threaded&show=&st=&#entry58862

@ Markus

Yes. The Wii's NAND RAM is only about 280-290 MB for all user purposes, the rest goes to the Firmware, you can check if you just pop in a 512 MB SD Card, find out that its 3868 "blocks" while Wii starts at about 2100 blocks

>>USB external HD's cannot sustain a high enough transfer rate to play games.

Total BS. USB 2.0 is more than enough for games, movies, anything your heart desires. I know because one of my PCs media drives, at 200gigs, is hooked up via USB.

>>See... this is why I dont bother even talking.

Go with that instinct.

@nytestalker

You're basing your SD analysis on the base rate for an SD card, reality is even standard cards run 6x150 kB/s (900 kB/s) read speed so your 45meg file is done in 51 seconds. The card I performed the test on was 2gig and cost $35 4-5 months ago, that has a 10 MB/s rate.

To put that into further perspective a cheap SD card is 33% slower than a DVD read at single speed (1350 kB/s) and my cheapo SD card is 9900 kB/s. Likewise USB 1 has a peak rate of 1536 kB/s and USB 2 is 61440 kB/s.

As you can see when you're not massaging the figures your suggestion that downloading is better and faster than local storage methods is totally ridiculous. BTW you'd need a 7mbit internet connection to get that same 45meg file in under a minute. Suddenly it's not so realistic.

Still this all leaves the point that whether you use SD, NAND Flash, DVD or a USB mounted HDD or Flashdrive to store that data on, it is likely to have a negligible effect on loading that data into the Wii's memory for execution.

Perhaps as you suggested, you should spend less time posting and more time reading before you confuse exasperation with ignorance.

Just wanted to say that N64 games went as high as 64MB in size (Resident Evil 2, Conker's Bad Fury Day, and Pokémon Stadium 2).
And then NeoGeo games... King of Fighters 2002 was about 180MB... And Garou: Mark of the Wolves was about 128MB... NeoGeo games were rarely small...

So, I don't get what's with the 40GB limit. Just seems odd to me.

And to who mentioned it:
This Dr. Mario is an all-new Dr. Mario. It isn't a port of an existing one. Virtual Console is for ports of games on older systems (hence the name). WiiWare is for original downloadable software.

So, Final Fantasy Cristal Chronicles for Wii is going to be only 40MB?

"Two words people.
Transfer Rate."

One Acronym, nytestalker.
RAM

Man, the farther I read down on nytestalker's posts the less I think he has any idea of what a computer is or how one works...

I'll buy whatever looks good, I have a 2 gig SD card, so I'll just swap things around - i don't mind. I have like 40 VC titles right now, including all the N64 games. it's really not that big a deal to put swap them off an SD card as I need them, takes no more than a minute or two, which, in my opinion, is worth the time so that I get to play all those wonderful games. And with all 40 games on the SD card, I've barely made a dent in the 2 gigs. so yeah, I'll buy what I like, which will probably be quite a few of them.

If they don't want to sell a hard drive, that's their business, I'll make due, and trust that they have their reasons.

Just to add my £0.02 worth, something everyone is forgetting about the whole redownload of VC games that you have deleted, what about those of us that have limited data contracts? e.g I have a 1GB limit a month on my internet connection.
Having to redownload games all the time, even if they're only 40MB or smaller in size will eat a considerable amount of that limit up

As for external HDD, I'm on the fence. The data transfer rate would have be very high and Nintendo would want to make sure that there was a way of locking one HDD to one Wii

Why do you say the HDD transfer rate would need to be very high? The Wii has USB 2 so can comfortably pull 40-60 MB/s. Even a slow rate would be capable of loading VC/WW/Channels fast enough. Only when you start wanting instant access to 100's of megs of data would speed bottle necks become apparent.

You also don't need to lock the HDD to the Wii but rather the content on the HDD is locked to the Wii (like it is on the SD card). I'd guess this might be the reason why you can't play directly from SD card as perhaps the decoding process only ever happens on the secured Wii memory. Still, that is why I said that having a buffer on the Wii to transparently load games from SD/HDD would be a fair solution.

Click channel, encrypted channel is loaded from SD/HDD and placed on internal memory, channel loads. You're none the wiser.

I say they should make another model of the Wii with a small hard drive, and a USB external one for those of use who already have the system and don't wanna exchange it.

There is a very (very!) simple solution to this. It goes with what Jelster said:

1.) Add USB Mass Storage support. USB2 caps out at 480 Mbps (60 MBps), which is only marginally slower than most people's computer hard drive bus (ATA = 100 or sometimes 133 MBps).

2.) Download a game to your Wii's main memory (which is obviously copy protected).

3.) Encrypt the game using a key generated from your console's internal serial number in an asymmetric (public/private) algorithm. This may take a little while depending on the algorithm, but only has to be done once. Write the encrypted file to the hard drive.

4.) Decrypt the game data on the fly when it is needed, directly into ram. This is both easy and fast; it's actually how a DS works, except that the decrypt key is not (to my knowledge) different across consoles.


The above plan is simple to implement, effectively free (no licensing needed AFAIK), and pretty much bullet-proof, as long as you choose your algorithm and key lengths well. Get cracking, Nintendo.

One acronym people...

LOL