What Developers Want From the Wii's Successor 229
donniebaseball23 writes "Wii 2 rumors are flying in advance of Nintendo's official reveal at E3 in June, but what would game developers like to see in a Wii successor? 'Without a doubt, my first request would be for an improved digital marketplace more along the lines of XBLA and PSN,' said one developer. 'We'd love more processing power, which is essential, and a better GPU as well,' said another."
A related article asks whether a high-powered new console really fits with Nintendo's strategy: "Nintendo is undoubtedly building its new system around a chipset it can buy for cheap and develop for with ease, and it'll be the system's peripheral capabilities (literally peripheral, if rumors of its fancy controller pan out) that catch people's attention — that the company will bank on using as the hook for consumers."
Small digital market place not a bad thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the things I have liked about the Wii is getting the games, and feeling like I have purchased a complete game. No "online passes", no resale penalties, not constantly feeling like I have to purchase additional DLC for the game to be complete. The simplicity of the Wii is what got me back into gaming, and the aforementioned aspects of the "Digital Market Place" being so integrated into the gaming experience, or at least how publishers exploit it, is what's driving me away.
To me, a true HD Wii with a modern GPU, decent raw processing power, and higher capacity media for games would be perfect.
Nintendo doesn't have a choice, they must compete (Score:3, Interesting)
Nintendo got away with it on the Gamecube, and then again on the WIi. They got away with it because Xbox was still very new, and the PC technology wasn't vastly outpacing console gaming. Now we are in another era, and it's time for the consoles to move the bar. If console hardware design isn't vastly superior to PC design, the console gaming will eventually become a thing of the past as Xbox will probably lead the way of combining the features of the PC into the features of a console.
The solution would be a modular design with upgradability in the core components. Simply put, if Wii 2 isn't at least a generation ahead of the PS3 and Xbox360, it will not be able to compete. The expectations of gamers now are photorealistic PC quality 3d graphics. The majority of console owners own PCs too, it's just a different world now.
I would buy a Wii 2, but Wii 2 has to be able to do things my PC can't do. The PS3 proves that pricepoint does matter in the short term but PS3 is also successful in the long term so it's not just price. It's mainly about the games. Nintendo wont be able to get by with another fancy controller, they are going to have to change the technology.
I think one way would be to go back to cartridges. SSD now has enough space on it to surpass DVDs in all areas. Another would be to have extremely powerful GPU, and a lot of ram. Finally they need to get the internet right. Built in WiFi would be helpful.
My idea for a more secure cartridge based system (Score:2, Interesting)
Here is how it would work:
1.The CPU in the Wii would contain special write-once fuses like on the XBOX 360 (IBM designed the CPU for both consoles and I am sure they could add the fuses to the next gen Wii CPU). During manufacturing, these fuses would be programmed with one of 3 high-strength RSA keys (RSA being picked because its harder to make SONY-style key generation mistakes with it) depending on which region the console was intended for. (that or the key could be designed directly into the silicon mask for the chip). The CPU would also include (in addition to the regular PPC core) on-chip accelerator modules for fast decryption of RSA and AES.
The cartridges would contain one or more flash chips (wired up so they appear as one large piece of memory) plus a special custom security chip. The security chip would contain 3 special write-once memory spaces that are either programmed at cartridge assembly time or built into the mask of the chip. Each of the 3 spaces would contain the same AES key but encrypted with one of the 3 different RSA keys. If a given game release is for USA only, it would have the AES key encrypted with the USA RSA key but would not be programmed with AES keys encrypted with the JAP or EU keys. Different cartridges (including different region variants of the same game) would have different AES keys.
The data on the flash chips would be encrypted with this AES key.
How the security would work is as follows:
1.Cartridge is inserted and the console is powered up
2.The console tells the security chip which region it is
3.If the security chip has a key for that region, some form of cryptographic protocol is used to transfer the RSA encrypted key blob to the console (the kind where sniffing the bus wont give you the RSA blob no matter what you are able to sniff). Otherwise the console displays a region error.
4.The RSA module in the CPU decrypts the RSA packet (without key material ever appearing outside the CPU) and hands the decrypted AES key to the AES module (again the key never appears outside the CPU)
5.Data is read from the flash memory chips and decrypted on-the-fly by the AES module.
6.The game is loaded and executed.
The decryption modules (including all keys) are not accessible to the main CPU with the CPU simply asking for cartridge data and it being decrypted on-the-fly and handed to the CPU.
Even if you were able to dump the entire contents of a cartridge (e.g. if you got code running on the device and used that code to dump every piece of decrypted data) you would be unable to produce cartridges without the RSA private keys for the 3 regions and knowledge of the authentication between the console and security chip that allows the security chip to verify that its talking to a legitimate console. (and the console that its talking to a legitimate cartridge)
You would be unable to just read the encrypted data from the flash chips on the cart and duplicate that because you cant get the RSA encrypted blobs from the security chip without the special hard-to-reverse-engineer secret handshake.
The weakness in this system is the physical security of the chips (i.e. decapping the chips to read their contents) but there are well-understood methods to make doing that extremely difficult.