http://wii.ign.com/articles/870/870937p1.html

Nintendo Looking into Flash Memory Solution
For the most avid Wii players out there.
by John Tanaka

May 1, 2008 - Nintendo's recent earnings report was full of great news for investors as the company's fortunes soared to record highs. But what does it all mean for gamers?

Company president Satoru Iwata provide some hints in a Q&A session following the company's press briefing last week. Today, Nintendo provided an English transcript of that session.

Iwata spoke at length on a number of issues, but one in particular caught our eye: the hot topic of the Wii's limited flash memory. Said Iwata, "Statistically speaking, it is true that there are a small number of customers who feel that the flash memory is too small, while many others find that they have plenty of memory. However, because this small number of people are none other than the most avid players, we know we have to review the best possible solution to eliminate their inconvenience."

So keep on complaining, Nintendo fanatics, and you may one day have full access to your virtual Wii games collection without having to delete stuff.

Iwata also gave some vague indication of the current performance of the WiiWare and Virtual Console download services. Total sales for the fiscal year for the two services combined came to 7.8 billion yen.

There's actually a fundamental difference between the WiiWare and Virtual Console businesses, Iwata explained. For the Virtual Console, Nintendo manages the full process of preparing software, even from 3rd parties. As it faces the business risks from distributing games on the service, it also takes a larger share of the profits. For WiiWare, 3rd parties face all the business risks themselves and handle marketing, and thus they get a larger portion of the profits.

cool. i can't believe that i missed this. they better say something about this at E3. thx.

Someone should start a petition so we can show them just how small those numbers are.

online petitions are useless and a stupid idea.

I think Nintendo's easiest solution is to allow gamers to run VC/WiiWare games directly from the SD card.

This can be fixed with a firmware update. This update would allow you to browse SD "channels" and then users would not need to delete/transfer between the two anymore.

I doubt anyone would fill a 2gb SD card with WiiWare VC games and if they did they can just swap to another SD card.

This of course would not allow for DLC. The only solution for that is a flash-hard-drive or hard-drive. I don't think this will happen. DLC is something that should be designed into a system from the beginning.

I'm not sure about the SD cards. Nintendo said that it would be too slow. But, they could just be saying that to be lazy.

Off the top my head I can't remember but are there any hidden ports on Wii?

Of course USB is fast enough for an external device such as a hard-drive/flash-drive!

I don't know of hidden ports but usb is good enough to not even think of anything else.

SD is too small of a storage space and to slow.

They just need to update the firmware so we can add external drives via USB. Plan and simple.

Plain and simple, you mean. but yeah, thats cool.

whoops~ lol, Thanks.

Or update the firmware to support SDHC.

For what the SD card needs to be used for, the speed is sufficient. It's the implementation that's the problem at the moment.

I've heard this might not be possible. SDHC may be hardware related and not possible to update via firmware.

I'd love it was that easy though. Then SD cards would not be a problem at all.

not for dlc anyways. i mean, playing stages from an sd card on brawl wasn't bad.

They will eventually port all VC and Wiiware games onto SD cards. Trust me, that's plenty of space. Nintendo isn't whoring out 1gb demos like Sony. Yes, Ninja Gaiden Sigma the demo was 1gb! Ridiculous. Then again PC demos are around that size now. About 2-3 SD cards at 512 mb each should last a hardcore gamer 3-5 years. I have all my NES, N64, and SNES games on a single 600mb CD. VC doesn't take up much space unless it's Neo Geo or N64.

It might be, it might not. It depends entirely on what Nintendo has got going on inside that shiny white box, and they are notoriously tight-lipped about technical specs. It could go either way.

Some devices out there that originally only accepted SD were able to accept SDHC with a firmware/driver update. So it's not always a given that the hardware can't do it.

Sweet! I really hope this is a device that can be updated to SDHC via firmware update. That would rock have a huge 16gb SDHC card etc.

Honestly, I don't think I myself would even fill 1 2gb SD card in 5 years....but of course if you wanted to throw mp3s on it that is a different story.

As long as Nintendo updates the firmware to allow us to run VC/WiiWare titles directly from the SD card I'll be happy. I'll be even happier if they can update the firmware to SDHC though.