Ahahaha XD

Wait, why'd it take them so long to figure this out again?? I should just be glad it's finally being addressed, I suppose.

I guess it takes time to get good firmware to help make the SD cards read/write faster, and makes it somehow copy protected , but still MONTHS from now.

Whatevever as long as I don't have to buy "nintendo brand" SD cards I'll be cool.

Finally. Does the Wii take larger than 2gb SD cards?

It doesn't right now. No. That is because there is a physical difference between 2+ GB SD cards. So I think the receiving hard ware has to be different. But I don't know for sure.

Next fucking Spring??  Seriously!?  This is the best they could come up with?  This better not even be the half of it.

Well, slow and steady I guess.

I wonder if they'll start to phase in SDHC support in the Wii hardware at some point...

SD High Capacity is exactly what I meant, ShyGuy. Silks just answered your question.

So the solution to the "clean out your fridge" paradigm is to "use a bar fridge as well"?

Good thing I don't care about this VC/Wiiware stuff right now, otherwise I'd be pissed.

I beleive the WII SD card memory problems lay with the fact that SD cards in order to maximise space do not have registries built into the chips themselves, unlike say RAM chips for a PC computer.
Thus the registries are built into the system instead so it is up to the system maker to increase the cost of the ports in order to be able to utilise increasing amounts of memory in SD cards.

thus the 2 solutions would be either to

A: introduce SD cards that have registries built into them (considering those crazily small Micro SD cards are aproaching 4GB, maximizing space for SD cards might not be sucha pertinent problem as it was during its initial inception)

or

B: come out with a USB SD card reader that has expanded the amount of registers for up to 64 GB 256 GB*crosses fingers*

Never the less on to the main topic this I think may be a neccessity as my hypothesis for the upcoming upgrade will be:

The SD channel

Which will require users to leave a signifigant amount of WII memory card space free, possibly the majority of the space if not all and have everything that was on the WII uploaded to SD.
This free space is of course a virtual memeory to download whatever game or program is selected in the SD channel and possibly to be used to help performace of say, the Web browser and WII ware games.

That is my hypothesis at any rate. 

Yeah, I've had a similar guess as to the most likely storage solution Bayou. We're on the line of thinking here.

So, um, it skips the step of saving it into the Wii memory? BFD, loading from the SD card is still slow as fuck and the copying to it is done only once anyway.

No it would still copy to the main WII SD memory,  the possible advantage would be having 2 SD memory sources for uploading and dowloading data, like streaming texture maps, geometry, audio for downloading or increasing the level of in game customizeability with an increase in the upload rate (which is usually slower for SD cards).

Say if N implemented solution B, you could possibly dedicate the old SD card slot for save game data only while having the USB card reader for dedicated to SD channel operations for better data traffic management.

The USB port could be a better source for data transmission though that depends on whether the Wii's USB is 2.0. I am not sure on that one.

I'm slightly underwhelmed by this "solution". I still only have the same paltry amount of space on the Wii itself and I still have to transfer the files onto my Wii memory to play them.

This doesn't sound like a solution at all to me.  It sounds like they are trying to trick us or something.

Over there is our Wii Memory Storage solution...

...Over here is the new Nintendo DSi.

What was over there again?

There's got to be something more to this. I refuse to believe that a company that's that successful can be that stupid.

This would have actually been a reasonable stopgap solution if they had done it several months ago, but they took this long just to get this far with months left to go before it's released.  I know Nintendo's engineers aren't that stupid, so I can only blame management.

This sounds remarkably similar to what we have now.  Can someone fill me in on what the difference exactly is?  I don't have enough VC games so that storage is an issue for me.  This sounds like Nintendo presenting the exact set-up they have now, calling it a new solution and hoping none of us notice.

Here's the solution: a f*cking hard drive.  The competition does it and it works.  Quit doing things stupid just because someone else thought of the right way to do something first.

Well this CAN be a solution if we are also able to play games off an SD card....

But, if that isn't the case, I'll be pissed.  And what it doesn't solve is the 40 meg limit on WiiWare, as if they let that get much bigger, then 2 gig SD cards will be a hassle.

I don't understand why they'd let you download straight to the SD card if you can't play them off it, that would make no sense. Hopefully they'll clear things up later today.

uhh yes you can play them off the SD card. Thats the entire point. Save direct to SD, play off SD and that way you have 2 gig card to save and play your game and your Wii doesn't get full.

the only problem is speed of the SD cards and piracy for Nintendo which seems to be the reason why its coming next year not now.

This is temp solution I'm betting on Wii HD in 2010 with HD graphics and 20 gig internal flash. If DSi is any indication this doesn't seem to unlikely.

Source?  No one I've seen is reporting this.  And you certainly can't just assume it.

Yeah it seems those claims came from some shoddy translations of the Japanese live blog. Anyone who printed that (including us) has retracted the statement as it wasn't ever actually confirmed.

Imagine this scenario (as if many of us have to imagine it):  You go to the Wii Shop Channel.  You see a game you'd like to buy.  You try to buy it, but you're told you don't have room for it.  You exit the Shop Channel, "clean out the fridge" to make room, start the Shop Channel back up, find the game again, and buy it.

After this update, you'll be able to go ahead and download the game anyway and take care of the rearranging later.  It seems to me that this barrier to impulse VC and WiiWare purchases was Nintendo's priority instead of solving the real problem.

Like an extra pocket to work with, since i suppose the issue all-along was "storage" and not game execution.

That's a great observation PartyBear. I think you are dead-on and that makes me sad.

If partybear is right, that is frigging ridiculous, and in my opinion sours the entire list of announcements.

That is NOT a "solution".  That is a slight enhancement to broken strategy.

God I hope they do this right.... /sigh

A 2GB SD card is significantly larger than the Wii's usable onboard memory, so I'd say that, if anything, you're starting out with a bar fridge, and adding the SD card is like adding on a full-size fridge.

Well it sounds like they found a way to encrypt the games faster, so there is a chance this could be ALMOST seamless going form SD card to system memory. Maybe it works similar to how Guitar Hero World Tour works.

I like Parrty Bear's idea actually.

If Nintendo has a sort of virtual memory channel that takes up about 350 blocks, permanently reserving that space for quickly copying SD card games over to the Wii for impulse play, then the storage solution does everything it's supposed to do in my opinion.

Otherwise it's far less palatable.

Party Bear's idea is a tremendous idea for a patch.  It's the sort of thing that a normal company would release ASAP once storage became an issue.  In other words had Nintendo already released this firmware update and mentioned that a permanent solution was in the works then we're getting somewhere.

But this is a FUTURE solution down the road?  What are you kidding me?  Why the hell would it take this long?  I work for a software company and this is a temporary workaround.  We issue a workaround in a patch with a typical wait time of about a month.  Then our actual solution would come out within the next year.  If I suggested what Nintendo is doing to my boss he would consider the suggestion completely unacceptable.

It just feels like they're doing it different because they didn't come up with the idea of a hard drive.  Note that Nintendo always does things in a weird ass Nintendo way if the idea was thought of by someone else.  It's like some weird inferiority complex.  "We can't admit the competition was right about something.  Better to do things sh!tty then to admit we were wrong."  The irony of course is doing something in a dumbass way looks worse than copying someone else's good idea.

What idea of PartyBear are you guys referring to?  The scenario of downloading a new game directly to the card instead of backing out to the menu to clean the fridge isn't an idea -- it's exactly how this update will work.

I was talking to the RFN guys and got the idea to display all your SD games on the Wii channel menu with some indication (like a highlight or gray-out) that shows they are on the card, not your system.  If the transfer speeds have been improved enough, you should be able to click on one of these off-system games and have it quickly load into a reserved space on the system memory to be played within a few seconds.

Well not necessarily his idea, but the fact that Nintendo is only presenting this solution to remove the barrier people have with buying games. Whereas before you needed to clean the fridge, now you do not. This solves the "storage problem" but doesn't bother with what people were actually complaining about which is the usage problem.

Great, I can download games to my SD card, but why in the hell can't I play them from there too?

The Wii memory should more or less just be augmented by the SD card memory, not treated as two separate things.

Indeed.  I just put a pessimistic spin on it.

If that were the case, and the system also automatically and quickly transferred less recently/frequently used games to the SD card if necessary to make room, I would consider it an acceptable solution.  There's no indication of that happening, unfortunately.  The sheer number of proposed solutions that fans have come up with is what makes Nintendo's actions so baffling, not to mention frustrating.

This entire problem and delayed solution is indicative of everything wrong w/ Nintendo right now.

Because they probably have to rearchitect their API so that the Shop channel actually has access to the encryption mechanisms for the channels it'll be putting on the SD cards.

Ideally, at the same time they're also revamping the DRM, so that it's permission-based instead of encryption-based. (That is, so that the console is asking "can I run this?" when you start a channel like an Xbox does, instead of just asking "can I decrypt this?" when copying it to the system and never checking again.) But that's not likely.

Oh whoops. I meant Bayous:

Anyways, why WOULDN'T Nintendo want to remove a psychological barrier to purchase? They are a for-profit company after all.

Nintendo's action on this issue goes to show that they believe that a more drastic solution will be expensive, difficult, and possibly create more problems for them. Clearly they've evaluated this issue and rated it of vastly less importance than the vehement internet community. In my opinion, a hard drive was NEVER in the cards for the Wii, and Nintendo probably ruled out the idea a long time ago.

Nintendo is already saying they have too many peripherals, so a hard drive was never going to happen.  However, I think that quite a few people have complained about this, more than just the internet minority.  Anybody that uses SD cards with the Wii can see that their user interface is pretty brutal.  I think Nintendo is also seeing the money generated by the VC, and don't want any negative press around it whatsoever.

There's nothing wrong with that.  What they're proposing is actually a good idea.  It just doesn't go far enough.  Because Nintendo is a for-profit company, they viewed complaints such as "I am less likely to buy stuff on the Shop Channel because I don't have room" from a different perspective than most of us.  We wanted a solution to the "I don't have room" part, and Nintendo wanted a solution to the "I am less likely to buy stuff" part.  Nintendo found a way to solve the part that concerns them without having much of an impact on the part that concerns us.

I'm really not as negative about it as I may seem.  I don't know all the details, so it might turn out to be better than it sounds.  Even if it's not, it is a step in the right direction.

Source

Good job Iwata, I feel very reassured I think it was a very humble and worth while comment.

So they're basically fixing what's broken, but not adding anything new.  That's fair enough.

I guess it is something of a solution, but they could've done better. I wish Nintendo didn't feel as if they needed to reinvent the wheel every time they needed to solve a problem.