Nintendo Confirms Original Downloads for the Wii 80
The Computer and Videogames site touched base with Nintendo in the wake of an interview with a game company in Game Informer magazine, to check up on their plans for original content on the Wii. A marketing director from Hudson Entertainment stated in GI that the Wii would feature a new games channel for downloadable games, and CVG wanted to follow up on the claim. Nintendo's response was that while they haven't decided on the specific method by which they'll be offering the games online, downloadable original content is definitely in the cards for the console's future. No timeframe was given for this content, but it is reassuring to have this piece of the Wii puzzle reaffirmed by the company.
Re:Wii Online A Complete Disaster (Score:3, Informative)
Nintendo has always suggested that original online content would be distributed through the Virtual Console; in fact they commented that it would allow games like "Tetris" to be viable (from a development perspective) again.
Actually playing games online? Who knows!
It has been confirmed that Pokemon Battle Revolution and Battalion Wars are both online games produced by Nintendo, and that the necessary libriaries have been made available to third party developers.
News/weather channels? 480p is all you get!
That doesn't seem to bother the people who are buying Wiis at a rate of 3 to 4 times that of the PS3.
"Home offices do not meet this requirement" -- N (Score:3, Informative)
I used Windows as an example of an open platform on which one can demonstrate skills using GCC and a graphics API to develop video games. The others are Mac OS X and Linux, but due to the smaller market share, it is more difficult to recover expenses through donations or registrations if a developer does not port a product to Windows.
What you say contradicts Nintendo's stated policy [warioworld.com]: "an authorized developer must have a stable business organization with secure office facilities, equipment, personnel and financial resources in order to insure the security of Nintendo proprietary information and in order to ensure an effective environment for working with Nintendo and/or its licensees. Home offices do not meet this requirement" (my emphasis). Are you permitted to disclose details of how you were able to work around this restriction?
Re:Sure it is! (Score:3, Informative)
Wii itself has 512MB flash RAM and ~2100 free blocks.
A 2GB SD Kart provides ~16384 free blocks.
F-Zero is 99 blocks large.
DonkeyKong is 19 blocks large.
This means that one block is 128kbytes large and in turn it means that the Wii reserves around half its Flash content for non-user stuff (firmware and such). If that block size is correct it means that F-Zero is 12MB large while the plain ROM dump should only be around 1MB. From this it looks like the Wii can only hold around 20 SNES titles.