Wii Hardware Discussion

[Teppo Holmqvist]

You do realise that, for example, a game like super mario brothers 3 for the NES (which is 3 Mbit) would fit 1365 times on the internal 512MB flash memory?

 

And even more if games are packed some way. For example most NES games pack into half of their original size if packed with zip or rar.

[knightendo]

And even more if games are packed some way. For example most NES games pack into half of their original size if packed with zip or rar.

 

you're right and haven't nintendo said they are doing this?

[pedrocasilva]

But, it's nice that they allow mass-storage usb devices.

It's a shame that they "only" allow usb devices though, a firewire port would be neat and a lot better for devices such as hard drives; faster, more reliable, no packet loss... it would be the best choice for some add-on's, depending of what they might throw in.

 

Interestingly enough, firewire even has something to do with Nintendo:

 

The standard connectors used for FireWire are related to the connectors on the venerable Nintendo Game Boy. While not especially glamorous, the Game Boy connectors have proven reliable, solid, easy to use and immune to assault by small children.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewire

 

Someone had been playing too much Gameboy.

[Owen]

Anyone know whats those letters say on a kinda button under the flap?

 

Looks like SY/1C to me....which means? nothing.....

[Fresh]

Sync probley, like the Xbox360 and its controlers you sometimes need to sync them to get it too work.

[knightendo]

all this talk of extrenal HDD drives seems funny to me. i mean, i'm putting my Wii under my telly, i'm not gonna ruin it by having drives hanging off it like the HDDVD drive some people's 360 will have. but that's only a personal note, what i find funny is that unless you are planning to download every single VC game you're not going to need one! the Wii has more than enough flash to cope for the first long while, after that a decent sized SD card (which you know nintendo will release their own of) will keep you nicely topped up for everything you could possibly want!

[Jamba]

Sync probley, like the Xbox360 and its controlers you sometimes need to sync them to get it too work.

 

It is SYNC and yes you're right that it does the controllers. You need to press sync to connect to controllers to the system as it will then recognise them as you press a button on the remote. There was an official press release about this somewhere. Looked back at this thread much?

[Charlie]

after that a decent sized SD card (which you know nintendo will release their own of) will keep you nicely topped up for everything you could possibly want!

 

Which Nintendo will over-price you with. Get a decent one from eBay, 2 gigs for £30.

 

If you have an external HD already you might as well use it.

[knightendo]

Which Nintendo will over-price you with. Get a decent one from eBay, 2 gigs for £30.

 

If you have an external HD already you might as well use it.

 

thats fair enough but i think nintendo may surprise us with the prices, if not then yeh buy any third party ones, was just mentioning ninty will probably release them too. the thing about the HDD's, it sounded like some people here were thinking of buying one for Wii, when really you'll have all the storage space you need for a while, then all u'll ever need with an SD card

[Charlie]

thats fair enough but i think nintendo may surprise us with the prices,

 

Yeah, the £30 for the USB WiFi Stick wasn't a very nice surprise, but a surprise none-the-less.

[knightendo]

Yeah, the £30 for the USB WiFi Stick wasn't a very nice surprise, but a surprise none-the-less.

 

didn't think it was too bad, especially given the fact that it was tailored to casual gamers and was so easy to set up. saying that, i did get 25% knocked off mine because i work in GAME

 

and when i wanted a wireless controller, even though GAME had they're own brand for fifteen pounds cheaper WITH rumble i still settled for wavebird. only once i got it home did i realise what technology was inside it and how much better it is than other wireless controllers where you have to point right at the cube. but at the time of purchase i didn't know... and i still went for the nintendo product lol... i may be the same with SD, never know lol!

[Charlie]

didn't think it was too bad, especially given the fact that it was tailored to casual gamers and was so easy to set up. saying that, i did get 25% knocked off mine because i work in GAME

 

and when i wanted a wireless controller, even though GAME had they're own brand for fifteen pounds cheaper WITH rumble i still settled for wavebird. only once i got it home did i realise what technology was inside it and how much better it is than other wireless controllers where you have to point right at the cube. but at the time of purchase i didn't know... and i still went for the nintendo product lol... i may be the same with SD, never know lol!

 

The WaveBird wasn't that much more expensive that a normal controller though (which are still too expensive) was it? It is an excellent controller and I happily paid however much for it (I got it cheap from DVDcrave.com years ago).

[xernobyl]

It's a shame that they "only" allow usb devices though, a firewire port would be neat and a lot better for devices such as hard drives; faster, more reliable, no packet loss... it would be the best choice for some add-on's, depending of what they might throw in.

 

Interestingly enough, firewire even has something to do with Nintendo:

 

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewire

 

Someone had been playing too much Gameboy.

Why do you say that? USB 2.0 is faster than firewire (even if not that much), and most USB disks are USB 2.0.

And also I don't know anyone with firewire disks, while everyone seems to have a USB (2.0) disk.

Then you probably would also want a RJ-45 port, because there are also disks that use it.

[gaggle64]

I think nintendo semi-confirmed that the Wii will be compatible with any USB mass storage devices that use those unified drivers that windows XP have.

Oh please god yes! I happen to have a spacious external hard drive that wouldn't say no to some new data to munch on. Save me having to buy any flash memory cards an' all.

[Charlie]

Why do you say that? USB 2.0 is faster than firewire (even if not that much), and most USB disks are USB 2.0.

And also I don't know anyone with firewire disks, while everyone seems to have a USB (2.0) disk.

Then you probably would also want a RJ-45 port, because there are also disks that use it.

 

There are loads of firewire external HD's on Amazon and the likes. It does have a RJ-45 (ethernet) port... sort of. Nintendo said they're releasing a USB one.

 

Question: Which is faster Hi-Speed USB 2.0 or FireWire?

Answer: In sustained throughput FireWire is faster than USB 2.0.

 

Question: If Hi-Speed USB 2.0 is a 480 Mbps interface and FireWire is a 400 Mbps interface, how can FireWire be faster?

Answer: Differences in the architecture of the two interfaces have a huge impact on the sustained throughput.

 

http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm

 

I'm sure you can also get Firewire 800, but I'm not entirely sure....

[pedrocasilva]

Why do you say that? USB 2.0 is faster than firewire (even if not that much), and most USB disks are USB 2.0.

And also I don't know anyone with firewire disks, while everyone seems to have a USB (2.0) disk.

Then you probably would also want a RJ-45 port, because there are also disks that use it.

Trust me... it isn't. USB 2.0 is just a cheap interface that allows further hardware shrink (in mp3 players for example) and cost effective cables.

 

Don't be confused by the rated speeds you see emblazoned across USB 2.0 and FireWire product boxes. Despite USB 2.0's 80 Kbps speed advantage over FireWire, our testing showed that the additional overhead of USB 2.0 made it slower than FireWire. For high-bandwidth devices such as external hard drives, the difference was as high as 70 percent. On a positive note, we noticed that the CPU usage of each interface was similar on our Pentium 4 1.3-GHz test system. During a 1.54GB data transfer from our system's internal hard drive to an external drive, USB 2.0 averaged 40 percent CPU usage compared to 37 percent for FireWire.

Source: http://www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/39129/USB_20_Versus_FireWire.html

 

Firewire is faster, has higher power output for external devices, and it doesn't need a "computer host to operate" meaning it doesn't need the CPU to deal with it, sure in the transcription above it says "firewire wastes 37% of the bandwidth while USB 2.0 is wasting 40%"... but consider that that with firewire the thing is transfering 70% more data... so the CPU is having work to send all that over... It's USB 2.0 that is unefective, partially because it has a whole load of packet loss.

 

FireWire is kind of a "external" SCSI bus, thus it has higher sustained data transfer rates, a feature especially important for profissional image, audio and video editors. It's impossible to edit video through a USB 2.0 external drive, it's too darn slow, it's also a big bottleneck for pretty much every professional aplication if you set it to be a scratch disc in photoshop, for example. I'm a firewire whore... I want it in everything possible.

 

Also I did say it's similar to the original Gameboy game cable right? it goes beyond the appearance, it also has similar features... it allows you to link two devices together, "peer to peer", yes... network enabled.

 

Don't get me wrong... USB is good for modems, mouses and inexpensive stuff that don't need a big bandwidth... it's just that Firewire is so much better and it would be a lot better for a official add-on, be it a Nintendo HDD, or maybe a Mario Artist with video output capabilities, it's not that expensive anyway.

 

We were talking about firewire 400 here... but there is already a firewire 800 since 2003. if firewire @ 400 Mbps beats the hell out of USB 2.0 @ 480 Mbps imagine what 800 Mbps is

[Blue_Ninja0]

if firewire @ 400 Mbps beats the hell out of USB 2.0 @ 480 Mbps imagine what 800 Mbps is

 

Double the bps, double the fun.

Firewire would be nice, but for the average joe the USB will be easier to use to transfer files between your PC and your Wii. Just grab your USB storage device (including MP3 players and the like) and just transfer to your heart's content. Not everyone has SD card readers on they'r PCs, but they sure have USB.

[pedrocasilva]

Double the bps, double the fun.

Firewire would be nice, but for the average joe the USB will be easier to use to transfer files between your PC and your Wii. Just grab your USB storage device (including MP3 players and the like) and just transfer to your heart's content. Not everyone has SD card readers on they'r PCs, but they sure have USB.

I wasn't trying to get rid of the USB plugs, I was just saying that one firewire port would be pretty clever as a expansion port to official add-ons, because of it's high performing bandwidth and advantage to the cpu... all of us have USB 2.0 devices, so why not having a extra port that most of the people won't use, with tech advantages like the ones stated?

 

As for fast networking/link cable between consoles, (400 Mbps from firewire compared to the 54 Mbps wireless with packet loss is a big diference). this could open path to some good stuff from the developers (and it would be awesome if Wii were to get linux)

 

Having USB 2.0 is good, but only having that is a constrain.

[Shino]

The Wii doesn't have a FireWire connection for the same reason it doesnt have a Cell processor (or equivalent).

[pedrocasilva]

The Wii doesn't have a FireWire connection for the same reason it doesnt have a Cell processor (or equivalent).

cut corners? that's what I've been saying... Firewire is not "that" expensive. and PS2 already had one, a few years back (not used though).

 

Cell and EE are bad architectures, IMO though, I don't see why are they related to this.

[Ren of Heavens]

4-8 GB SD cards should be enough. They are also a lot faster than an external hard drive.

[pedrocasilva]

4-8 GB SD cards should be enough. They are also a lot faster than an external hard drive.

don't be so sure about that.

 

Standard SD's against my 186 GB secondary IDE100 drive... not formated for 2 years and with 614 MB free, not exactly the best performing drive out there.

 

Flash available for sale is not as fast as most people seem to think of it. A USB 2.0 external hard-drive is actually faster than that. let alone Firewire.

[Shino]

That's IDE and not USB, right?

[SpinesN]

First off

Firewire > USB [/conversation]

Only problem is licence fees $.25 per port per device. So say nintendo sells 1 million wiis then lose 250000 they didn't have to spend. USB is a one time licence fee. That and the hardware is cheaper since as others have said the system cpu is used to manage packets.

 

Second (@Pedro)

Nice speed on the pron drive :p

 

Third

Why does speed matter when you will be loading 3mbit files :?

 

Current flash speeds (~22MB/sec I think) will be more than fine for me.

[pedrocasilva]

That's IDE and not USB, right?

yes, but that "pron" drive it's so slow now that if it was on USB the diference wouldn't be much, just a little inferior.

First off

Firewire > USB [/conversation]

Only problem is licence fees $.25 per port per device. So say nintendo sells 1 million wiis then lose 250000 they didn't have to spend. USB is a one time licence fee. That and the hardware is cheaper since as others have said the system cpu is used to manage packets.

 

Second (@Pedro)

Nice speed on the pron drive :p

 

Third

Why does speed matter when you will be loading 3mbit files :?

 

Current flash speeds (~22MB/sec I think) will be more than fine for me.

Still it's us who pay that value in the end, and I don't mind paying for it at all, but yeah, you're right, it's just like the HD-out it's cheap as hell but Nintendo chose not to go for it, fair enough the console muscle to do graphics in HD would be costy...

 

I believe USB 2.0 lacks royalties, intel basically gave it away.

 

I don't think we'll be loading just 3 mbit files though, now I think the saves tend to go as high as 1 MB for RPG's and sports games and there should be updates and possibly more levels and maps for shooters, MMORPG's and such.

 

I won't lie though, I'm being picky and a wishful thinker at core, but I think Wii is lacking a special high speed port for expansion... I'm hoping to see linux on Wii (not piracy), and specially a media center like the xbox one, I won't buy the console for it, but I'm definetly keeping a eye at it. Firewire and a HD-out (even if not suitable to run Wii games at that resolution) would sure be nice.

 

I'd really like to see a oficial HDD by Nintendo to go with Wii design, I feel that SD's are like memory cards, I don't like the idea of filling one, storing him and bring up another, too much confusion.

 

Being able to share a folder at the computer by wireless LAN and that being acessable through Wii would be nice too.