Nintendork Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 Lots of threads around at the moment claiming get ready for Wii, like it's Y2K or something. Lots of shops claimed you 'needed' a big old 2gb card to get the most out of your PSP.. which was true and the scare factor made lots of people buy it. But with Wii you get 512mb on board, for a reason.. to store stuff. Have a read of this story which details the Wii virtual console in number of hypothetical situations to put it into perspective. Of course ontop of Virtual console goodies, you'll have save files which could easily take a few Mbs, and downloadable original content such as demos for your DS and Wii. http://web.mac.com/stewart.lawrence/iWeb/wii/VC%20Stuff.html Personally I think the on board 512mb will be safe, and sufficient for your average gamer. With rumours of an online database to store your details and purchases.. do we really need to worry so early? We've all got USB thumbdrives and stuff that will no doubt work. It's a pretty good read, well presented stuffs. It was digged.
Emasher Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 umm what if we have siblings (i think this would be better of in the virtual console thread)
Nintendork Posted October 15, 2006 Author Posted October 15, 2006 Seven hundred and fifty dollars (USD), 25 N64 games, 31 Snes games, 50 NES games, 358MB! What? N64 games are huge! Then again, I suppose its not bad that you have 106 games on there. And you had to work your wallet hard to get it filled that much. Remember, new games are 50 to 60. You’d only get 5 Wii games at best from that $250. Even with siblings you are going to an extreme I think. Considering Nintend Europe will be releasing these games in episodic formats at a couple a month. Demo content is typically quite spontaneous and wears off after a few hours, easily deleted.. save files are no doubt going to be efficient in size so you could have plenty. 32mb thumb drives which you get in crackers would do the job for taking save files around your mates.
Emasher Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 look i can tell by the way you talk you are an only child, the game saves on the vc will be on the same storage thingy as the games (we all know what happens whel small children get hold of game saves.) and also game saves for wii games will of coarse be at risk. (without an sd)
Rick Dangerous Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 32mb thumb drives which you get in crackers would do the job for taking save files around your mates. We dont know if they will work though, do we? It seems a bit odd they would support these and not hard drives. As the only reason why they wouldnt support Hard drives (in my opinion) would be the fact you could potentially run games off it. Like a chipped xbox. I do agree though the internal memory should be plenty for the time being. Just wait and then the SD cards will be even cheaper.
demonmike04 Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 We dont know if they will work though, do we? It seems a bit odd they would support these and not hard drives. As the only reason why they wouldnt support Hard drives (in my opinion) would be the fact you could potentially run games off it. Like a chipped xbox. I do agree though the internal memory should be plenty for the time being. Just wait and then the SD cards will be even cheaper. Its apparently been confirmed by Iwata, but I havent seen anything of the sort. A source would be great Nintendork.
Nintendork Posted October 15, 2006 Author Posted October 15, 2006 Hard drives are a bit extreme, flash is very simple. If it is true that the OS is based on linux then in theory either could and should be supported. But really external hard drive to save games? That's a bit overkill. I might not have any blood relatives but I have a lot of friends on our Smash Bros file, we have over 400 humanoid hours clocked up on some characters. The idea of sharing is not alien to me. But yeah I can see why you'd need to back it up if you've got little'ns playing and they'll gladly click any button for 30 minutes until they get a game on screen. I didn't say save files would be seperate from downloadable content.. but save files haven't really taken a huge leap forward in file size through the generations. Even with an entire family playing a range of games it's not going to take a substantial amount of save space. If it is true that once you buy something, your profile has that content unlocked for life then the risk of losing virtual content is irrelevant.. as you could just re-download it. With GMail giving away upwards of 2.5gb for free, who is to say Nintendo won't let you store everything online in a save file, and you merely (re)download whenever you want or need it. I am verging on speculation now, but this seems logical to me. • Will games downloaded from the Virtual Console store be tied to an account like Xbox Live or a one-time-only download like iTunes? Tied to an account. Kaplan discussed a scenario where a player's Wii was broken or destroyed, but would be able to re-download titles they had previously bought to a new Wii machine. Because my left leg was burning from an accidental Zippo oil spill, I neglected to ask if a user would be able to log into friends' Wiis and play their Virtual Console downloads away from their home machine. Wiimotes only have 6kb of memory, enough to store a Mii character.. but if that Mii is instantly linked to your save files online courtesy of Connect24 then you always have your content with the Wiimote being the key. It's not as if this system is being built on Windows XP and you'll lose it every couple of months. • Will Wii users be able to add storage via USB hard drives? No. The Wii's storage will be exclusively via flash memory storage, such as SD memory cards, at least at launch. Kaplan said a hard drive addition could be in the future, but that sounds more like a "Sure, why not?" response than one based in any immediate plans. Obviously I have made an assumption, I consider it to be reasonable. USB thumb drives work on flash. The Wii has 2 USB slots Perrin Kaplan says flash will work, only gives the example of SD. I assume that by plugging in a USB drive it will initiate in the same way. It's a reasonable assumption, especially as Iwata spoke of it.
Emasher Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 friends are different than siblings. you get along with your friends and they understand how the game works and stuff. younger siblings are button mashers (esecialy sisters) you lend then a gba or ds game and they delete your file because they dont know how to play without saving. if you leave your gc card in they wont check to see who's it is and they'll delete all your files. siblings are different than friends and thats my attempt at poetry (but it is true)
Pyxis Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 I dont think Nintendo would support USB storage if it couldnt make any money from doing so.
Nintendork Posted October 15, 2006 Author Posted October 15, 2006 If Nintendo wanted to make money SD wouldn't be supported.. it would be proprietary. It is about making it user friendly, cheap and thus accesible.
Fresh Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 I'm just going to go with the 512 untill its full, then buy a SD card, simple.
raven_blade2006 Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 I dont think Nintendo would support USB storage if it couldnt make any money from doing so. They need to support USB storage. Its a must. If the capability is not present in the operating system at launch then they can easily produce a system update patch that will enable it. In the near future Wii must be able to take: *USB Hard Drives *Thumb drives The more storage solutions, the better. Right now we dont know how the online service will work properly. If there are downloadble demos for Wii, how will they be stored and what size are they likely to be? Many questions still need answering.
Emasher Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 i think a mod should merge all the vc threads and make a vc official thread.
system_error Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 I doubt we will see much demos for Wii games because 512mb is not sufficient for a demo. Look at the PC/360 demos which are u to over 1GB sometimes - so the Wii won't have any demos but little games eg. new games developed for the VC.
Nintendork Posted October 15, 2006 Author Posted October 15, 2006 That is true.. DVDs are relatively cheap these days.. perhaps we'll get demo discs with magazines. However 360 demos are a bad comparison as there will be lots of high definition textures making up that demo. Wii could be half that, but even then.. it's too big.
pedrocasilva Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 I doubt we will see much demos for Wii games because 512mb is not sufficient for a demo. Look at the PC/360 demos which are u to over 1GB sometimes - so the Wii won't have any demos but little games eg. new games developed for the VC.you could have a HDD add-on later on the consoles cycle, and bare in mind that the textures needed are much smaller, 3 to 4 times the size... perfect texture's for SD are 256x256... for HD it's 1024x1024, and Unreal Engine 3 even recomends 2048x2048. And then... there's this coming: One of the most interesting talks at London’s GDC (Games Developers Conference) this week came form one of the lesser known companies called Allegorithmic, who claim they will be able to reduce texture file sizes in games by up to 70%. The biggest impact however will be the benefits this will have to digital distribution. Games with texture quality and diversity matching Half Life 2 may soon be available in minutes of downloading rather than hours – for gamers this can only be a good thing. Source: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/10/04/Game_file_sizes_could_soon_be_70_smaller/ I still don't know what's the catch since they aren't explaining, but there must be one; like, increasing loadings, since the console hardware itself doesn't support this texture compression so they might have to be converted, similar to the way PS2 does S3TC (not supported through hardware) wasting 3 MB of RAM to run the program. 1GB of textures can easily be 256 MB on Wii (even without this new "compression" method), and textures are the main reason for a demo to take up as much as 1 GB. All this to say that perhaps demo's for some AA+ games are not out of question, but we'll have to wait and see.
raven_blade2006 Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 Is it possible for Wii to run demos like the DS? Could you be able to download demos and run them on the consoles own memory until it is turned off? Temporary demos perhaps...
pedrocasilva Posted October 15, 2006 Posted October 15, 2006 Is it possible for Wii to run demos like the DS? Could you be able to download demos and run them on the consoles own memory until it is turned off? Temporary demos perhaps...that could work for mini games but what about "real" games? There's no "downloadable demo's for... say; Mario 64 DS, a 3D game. Sure with Wii you could load a N64 (3D) game completly into the RAM and run it, but still for GC and Wii games who are bigger than that and can use the RAM for a lot of things (such as fetching) it's not a very good idea.
fatnickc Posted October 16, 2006 Posted October 16, 2006 I'm just going to go with the 512 untill its full, then buy a SD card, simple. I won't wait until it's full up, but I'll wait until I have only 60MB or so left. I wouldn't want to have to be told my game wouldn't download fully unless I cleared some space, and have to run out to a shop to buy an SD card.
DCK Posted October 16, 2006 Posted October 16, 2006 I'm not expecting to fill up to that amount anytime soon. I don't suppose there's a lot of downloadable content the first few months.
martinist Posted October 16, 2006 Posted October 16, 2006 There arn't many places that sell SD cards in my area. I guess i can get a 2GB card off of eBay or somthing, anyway in Nintendorks report on VC game storage it showed you can fit a hell of alot of VC games into that 521Mb space. I'll maybe just wait untill that space is full untill i invest in an SD card for my Wii. Its like what i did for my GC and other systems that use a memory card, just wait untill its full and then replace it
system_error Posted October 16, 2006 Posted October 16, 2006 you could have a HDD add-on later on the consoles cycle, and bare in mind that the textures needed are much smaller, 3 to 4 times the size... perfect texture's for SD are 256x256... for HD it's 1024x1024, and Unreal Engine 3 even recomends 2048x2048. And then... there's this coming: Source: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/10/04/Game_file_sizes_could_soon_be_70_smaller/ I still don't know what's the catch since they aren't explaining, but there must be one; like, increasing loadings, since the console hardware itself doesn't support this texture compression so they might have to be converted, similar to the way PS2 does S3TC (not supported through hardware) wasting 3 MB of RAM to run the program. 1GB of textures can easily be 256 MB on Wii (even without this new "compression" method), and textures are the main reason for a demo to take up as much as 1 GB. All this to say that perhaps demo's for some AA+ games are not out of question, but we'll have to wait and see. I really doubt that this "new method" will have lossless compression of textures unless it uses procedural creation of textures/geometry. With such a feature you can actually make good looking games with a few kb (http://www.farb-rausch.de/) but the problem is that it needs more time to develop, loading times are higher and the quality so far is not as good as with real textures. Textures will be always compressed on a console that is for sure - after all it takes longer to load a big uncompressed texture into RAM instead decompressing a smaller one it into RAM.
pedrocasilva Posted October 16, 2006 Posted October 16, 2006 I really doubt that this "new method" will have lossless compression of textures unless it uses procedural creation of textures/geometry. With such a feature you can actually make good looking games with a few kb (http://www.farb-rausch.de/) but the problem is that it needs more time to develop, loading times are higher and the quality so far is not as good as with real textures. Textures will be always compressed on a console that is for sure - after all it takes longer to load a big uncompressed texture into RAM instead decompressing a smaller one it into RAM. It's not that method, though, this is pixel texture compression, it's diferent from that method where the textures are generated by algorithms (and thus take just a few kb). That would mean big loadings despite the low DVD space taken. This is just promising further compression, they seem to use other means to "encode it" though, since they refer to photoshop as improper to compress the textures. That's why I said I still don't know the catch, but I'd say there's definetly one, since the current gen GPU's haven't been designed to use that, it might be good for consoles such as PS3 though, since it's biggest limitation is bluray transfer times (9 MB/s @ 2x), Xbox 360's 12x DVD drive is faster than that (16 MB/s) and has less GB; 25 GB disks full of textures must be a pain in the ass to load, that's why they need the HDD so much to make it standard, because IMO they'll be using it for streaming and fetching (AFAIK Xbox and X360 never used it like that). This is getting way offtopic though.
Tellyn Posted October 16, 2006 Posted October 16, 2006 Is it possible for Wii to run demos like the DS? Could you be able to download demos and run them on the consoles own memory until it is turned off? Temporary demos perhaps... Iwata-san never expanded further on DS demos via the Wii, but I think it's still possible, maybe a secret they're saving until November or late this month.
Pestneb Posted October 16, 2006 Posted October 16, 2006 how many games were officially released for the nes/snes/n64? I heard 600/900/500? not sure how accurate that is, if true that would require 1Gb on snes and nes alone, and probably about 6 Gb on snes games
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