Nintendo's Wii Storage Solution — SD Cards

Lucas123 writes "After gamers complained for the better part of a year, Nintendo finally came out with a solution to the Wii's lack of storage capacity — a 2GB SD card from which users can execute games, adding to the console's measly 512MB of onboard storage. The card is expected out in the Spring. With the ability to download, the card should allow users to store up to 60 games." This news came out of the same press conference that announced the Nintendo DSi we discussed earlier today. They made a number of other announcements as well, including Gamecube remakes for the Wii, updated to make use of the Wiimote, Club Nintendo coming to North America this year, and the Wii Speak Channel, an online voice chat utility.

Re:"Proprietary"

[AKAImBatman]

1. I had no trouble getting a Wii without a bundle. Neither did anyone I know. In fact, it seems that those who fell for the bundle deal were in the minority. FINDING a Wii in the first place was the greater challenge.

2. The article means SD Cards in general. No proprietary card is needed.

3. The article is wrong anyway. No expansion solution was announced. All that was announced was the ability to download directly to SD Cards + an "easy" way of copying games to main memory. In effect, nothing has changed.

Re:blah

[YojimboJango]

I don't know what version of the wii you have, but all my SD cards work. I'm using the one that came with my camera (a 512) in there right now.

No SDHC

[tepples]

I don't know what version of the wii you have, but all my SD cards work.

None of my SDHC cards work, which I believe was AxemRed's point.

Re:SDHC?

[Malevolyn]

Actually, this is incorrect. The only (publicly available and misleadingly named) ISO loader still requires that you burn the game to a DVD. Even with a chipped Wii you still have to burn the game onto a DVD. Like GP said, a 2 gig SD card can hold a lot of WiiWare and VC games which can be downloaded and installed illegitimately, not to mention the homebrew WAD manager can install from USB storage devices.

What I'm getting at is that an official external hard drive for the Wii won't change anything, period, because anything it wouldn't one to do anything that can't already be done.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:blah

[poot_rootbeer]

Is SDHC really a hardware thing? I've had plenty of devices that have enabled it with a firmware update.

SDHC is electrically compatible with SD and uses the same pinout, but they use different addressing modes; with vanilla SD, each address value represents a single word; with SDHC, it represents a block.

Depending on how the device has implemented I/O, it may or may not be possible to add SDHC support with a firmware or driver update.