Walkthrough: Wii System Menu 4.0's SD Card Channel

It's funny. This is almost EXACTLY what my guess was when the rumors first started about the storage solution. The only difference was that I was expecting it to show up as a channel on the Wii menu, rather than getting it's own specific button on the menu.

I can't wait to see what the homebrew scene does to take advantage of these new features.

....."backup" launcher, huh.

Yeah, i use the backup launcher to test the new games and see if they are worth buying at launch price or wait for them to be on the bargain bin, or not buy them at all.

Thanks to it I have saved quite a good ammount of money on games that i would had buyed blindedfold.

By WiiBrew I meant the Twilight Hack.

well the first picture has the "Homebrew Channel" right above the new SD button, so I would assume so

wiibrew.org says it won't interfere unless you try running it off of the sd card or copying it back. As much as I want to update my console I think I'm going to wait and make sure.

That's true... but it did seem to take a bit of time for the SD Menu to launch. I wouldn't necessarily want to wait for it to load every time I went to the Wii Menu. :)

Keep in mind though that it had to load a TON of content. I have almost every VC game, and a BUNCH of WiiWare games, so that may have been a factor.

Does it matter? Wii doesn't support over cards over 2GB.

VC and Wiiware games take up so little space on the SD card that you don't need a 32GB card anyway.

Oh. My bad.

The point is that they could have done this in a more affordable way for their consumers.

You can get a 16GB SD card for about $30 bucks. 8GB is about $15-$20.
Personally, I'd rather spend $30 on 16GBs that I'll probably never fill anyway than spend $90 on a USB HDD that's 4 times and size and will also never be filled to the brim.

32GB is more than plenty for now. Those games can't be that big. In a year or so, those 32GB cards will be cheap.

I found 32GB for under $75, which is obviously outside of the price range I'm willing to spend, but if you drop down a few GB, you can find 16GB for under $28, and an 8GB would only run you less than $15. I found all of those at newegg.com and each of them had free (usually 3 day)shipping to boot.

I honestly can't see how you would need more than about 16GB really. If you actually NEED more than that, then you probably have so many pages of VC and Wiiware titles that you'd be able to sort through them faster by having a second 16GB or 8GB card that you simply switch out instead of trying to hunt through all the pages that a 32GB would take up.

The difference is a $90 USB HDD will get you 160 GB's of space or even more depending on where you buy it and can be used on multiple devices. It's about consumer affordability more so than what is adequate for today. You have to think ahead with these types of decisions. It's not to say you couldn't get multi purpose use out of a 32 Gb SDHC card but it's more limited than having a USB storage device. It doesn't make sense to limit storage to an SD card IMO.

The thing is, you can already fit anywhere between 50 and 800 games on a $5, 2GB card. An 8 GB card ($15, I guess?) brings that to 200 to 3200 games. You don't really need to think that far ahead about a $5 - $15 purchase...

Plus you don't have the thing taking up extra space beside your TV.

I would be nice to have USB support in addition to this, but this solution would seem sufficient for the vast majority unless they start allowing Wii game demo downloads or something. 512MB was simply too small, but even 2 or 4 GB card is going to cover most people's VC and WiiWare purchases.

IMO, unless they start offering demos, this essentially closes the debate over the Wii storage issue.

My sentiments exactly, Vidikron

Vidikron is correct. The thing is that I already have a grip of USB devices but if I need additional space I'll have to go out and buy an SD card. I'm just glad they finally decided to do something about the situation. That deserves some credit. It just seemsmore practical to allow the use of a pre-existing USB HDD. Not that big of a deal ...

That's what the gallery is for! Get your slide-by-slide walkthough on, friend!

It takes like 8-10 seconds for me

Granted, i only have one game on there right now (Sin & Punishment, which i bought specifically to try this)

Also, does this mean we can now view photos that are stored on SDHC cards in the Photo Channel?

No.

I don't even own those games, I just know that it's impossible given the current situation. The game has exclusive access to the SD card and cannot be patched. The IOS which the game queries for info about installed content, again, cannot read the SD card while the game is using it. The game cannot be patched to change the interface so that the SD card is accessed through the IOS and the game uses that.

Mostly.

If Nintendo was clever, they could modify IOS to patch just the NSDK (which is statically linked into the game code) to use a new SD card interface. IOS controls /dev/di so they could pull this off, assuming that an NSDK patch is small enough that it could fit on the system memory. If this is done then the IOS could read the SD card and give said data to the game.

This, however, would be really hard. There are about 30-40 different versions of IOS (the Wii downgrades when you put in an old game) and who knows how many versions of NSDK that have to have patches written for. It took Nintendo a year to patch out the signing bug from all versions of IOS.

However, considering the amount of Wiis that will most likely suffer flash memory damage from excessive copying and re-copying of titles from the SD to the NAND, it might be worth it to at least have a mechanism for future games to allow patching and mark themselves as "SD-safe" so you can launch them from the SD. The downloadable titles are capable of being patched already.

So, to answer your question, don't count on it.

Hear hear!

My thoughts exactly!

Never been a problem for me. I rarely see RAM referred to as Memory anymore.

And yet that's always been a proper usage of it. Memory has traditionally meant system RAM. If someone says "flash" or "flash memory", I know they're talking about storage. "NAND" earns them extra points. However, just "memory" to me implies system RAM and always has. Then some people call hard drive space "memory" and are just plain wrong. It's annoying and can be misleading.

The 360 system settings categorizes the hard drive under "Memory."