Nintendo opens SD slot for Wii storage solution
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 7:46am by Derek
Do not adjust your monitors. That is not a tiny hard drive.
Nintendo has announced it will open the Wii SD card slot to solve the system’s data storage problem.
A Wii system update in Spring 2009 will enable the use of SD cards for storing downloaded Wii games.
Eliminating the need for constant data transfers, customers will also be able to play their downloaded games directly from the SD cards.
Stay tuned to Infendo for more Wii storage details from Nintendo’s North American conference, scheduled to begin later today.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:00 am
Finally, eh? Ockam’s Razor. The answer was sitting in our Wii consoles the whole time. Spring 2009 though, oy. That’s going to make Guitar Hero World Tour tougher to stomach this winter. Not to mention all the Wii Shop stuff I’ll be buying with the holiday’s inevitable pile of Wii Points gift cards.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:30 am
Oh thank god!!! It’s about damn time!
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:47 am
Too little too late.
They should have seen this coming before launch and added SDHC compatibity aswel. Thats right, we still wont be able to use cards higher than 4GB!
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:49 am
Yay! I just recently had to delete some stuff to make rom for my Mega Man addiction . .I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do when I needed more space. They really should have done this at launch though.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:53 am
I’m worried that the update will kill homebrew. Still, with the ability to run custom firmware, hopefully someone will patch it if it’s a problem.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:54 am
This is really good news. I just got an SD card and starting moving stuff over to make room for all the awesome WiiWare that’s started coming out.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:59 am
One question: is 2GB enough?
Or will the opening of the SD slot allow for larger capacity cards? Maybe that’s a stupid question, I don’t know exactly how the slots work.
Will we be able to switch out SD cards like Gamecube memory cards?
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:05 am
*standing ovation*
Yes, it’s been a long time coming… but this is the best possible solution, and far better than a separate hard drive or storage device for Wii. Now to keep fingers crossed that the actual implementation is as good as it sounds.
The Wii doesn’t need the massive amount of storage seen on XBox 360 or PS3 systems. We aren’t likely to see games that require multi-gig installations before being playable, unlike the PS3. We aren’t going to be downloading HD movies to the console, unlike XBox 360. And SD cards are cheap enough to buy “on demand” or even include inside the game (for titles like Guitar Hero or Rock Band that want to encourage a pay-for-DLC model).
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:15 am
Finally.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:24 am
What Cisco said.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:25 am
So they’ve essentially raised the cap from .5GB to 2.5GB. 5 times? Okay, that’s pretty good, but 2.5GB is still pretty tiny.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:27 am
2.5GB isn’t awful but it isn’t great either. The only nice thing is that you can more easily swap SD cards than you can copy files in/out.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:41 am
Thinking about downloadable songs for GH:WT/Rock Band 2 and whether 2GB is enough.
When I downloaded the full Metallica’s Death Magnetic album for GH3 360 it was about 1.2 GB, about 80mins of music. Apparently the files i downloaded are ready to go for GH:WT as well: drums, guitars, vocals included. Will the Wii’s version of GH:WT require the same amount of memory space? Or will the music/files be more compressed?
What I’m getting at is this: If I download a lot of GH:WT songs for Wii, will I have to change out SD cards often to play them all in one particular session? I.e. will I be juggling SD cards whenever I play GH:WT?
Again, I’m just wondering if 2GB is enough.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:45 am
So if I understand this correctly (which would be a miracle for me), I won’t have to do anything special, just download some kind of update (or whatnot) when the time comes, and my Wii’s current SD slot will suddenly become capable of being used as an easy memory transfer sytem (unlike it is now, where you have to go to the menu to transfer anything). In other words, games will automatically be able to use the SD card for saving, and DLC can be used via the SD slot without a hassle?
Plus I can use different SD cards pretty easily (like someone else mentioned, kind of like switching out GC memory cards).
Any chance that we will also be able to use these cards for saving GC games (instead of using the GC memory cards).
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:10 am
@Joshdad
It sounds like you’ve pretty much got it. I don’t know if I would count on saving GC games to the SD card. It would make them look pretty stupid for having the GC card slots in the first place.
As far as SD cards, this is where I meet all of my card needs. (free shipping) I usually go with the PQI brand myself. There are several good ones to be found though.
http://www.meritline.com/
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:12 am
easier…
http://www.meritline.com/search.html?ipKeyword=2GB+SD&N=1&sBy=
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:12 am
This should be enough for me. But some people still need a hard drive, I guess.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:21 am
@ Brian
Thanks, it’s nice to know that not everything gets by me.
2 more questions though.
1) Why did they wait so long to do this? Is this something that took a lot of work to accomplish, or was this something that they could have done at launch?
2) regarding SD cards. I have one, but have not used it much. My question is, if you download a VC game (for example) and put it on your SD card, can you then use that same card in someone else’s Wii to play the game, or does it only work on your system? I’m sure that you can see your photos from your SD card on someone else’s Wii, but I imagine that you can’t play a downloaded game like that.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:45 am
Glory Hallelujah! And I must say, there are quite a few things in that line-up video that have my attention.
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:01 pm
@Joshdad
1. The delay could be twofold. They may have failed to guess how well the Wii Ware and VC services would do. I think the real reason is that they are afraid of piracy. It will be easier for people to do illegal things with the Wii now that this SD card slot is being opened up for storage this way. I’m sure it could’ve been done at launch, but the fear of piracy had to have been there from day one. So why do it now? I guess they are realizing they had to do something for the angry customers and this was the cheapest thing for them to do.
2. You won’t be able to run your SD card games in someone else’s Wii; that is until the pirates find a way to do it. Then Nintendo will be very sorry that they opened up the SD card to us.
Hopefully a few bad apples won’t ruin it all for us.
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I think the answers to (1) and (2) might be related.
The answer to (2) is that VC games probably won’t work on other people consoles, because it will be locked to your system. Nintendo really doesn’t want to change this, because that would mean that people could easily copy and trade files to their SD cards, leading to rampant piracy.
The answer to (1) is that, after screwing up how the SD card slot worked initially, Nintendo had to find a way to make SD cards usable while still preventing piracy. Although it sounds simple, this probably meant a significant change in how the Wii interacts with the SD card slot behind the scenes – especially since it must work for both for new and existing content. Can you imagine the outrage if Nintendo rolled out this change and existing games (like Excite Truck, Endless Ocean, and Smash Bros) could no longer use the SD card? Eep!
This is the way the SD card slot SHOULD have worked since day 1… unfortunately they either didn’t think it would be necessary or didn’t know how to implement it until recently. Oh well – better late than never.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:24 pm
This is the perfect solution as long as it’s well implemented. Don’t complain about the card size limit, 2 gig will be plenty and if it isn’t just get another card. It’s still the most cost effective and elegant solution.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Over 100 DLC songs on a single SD card sounds like a good deal, Jonkind. I used to have to swap out LPs cause they only had up to twelve songs on them. Don’t get me started on 45s!
I have not even gotten to the point of filling the Wii’s internal memory. My console is used daily. I own 25 Wii games, 10 Gamecube games, 4 VC, and 2 WiiWare. Come whenever in 2009 that this solution is coming, it will be appreciated. By then maybe I will need it.
I assume that the holdup is because the interface will require changes along with the way the process of playing games is executed. Then extensive testing will be required (my specialty).
Anything done right takes time (just ask Microsoft).
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:53 pm
this will do. this will do just fine.
now make demos available for Wii ware.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm
@Blue Rocks: ah, but that is my point… how many songs can you fit on a 2Gb card? Like I said, I downloaded the Death Magnetic album for GH World Tour (10 songs, ~75 mins of music total) which took up 1.2 GB on my 60 GB XBox 360 Harddrive. Am I going to fit just 5 or 6 more songs on that SD card and have to switch out fairly often?
Does it say somewhere that you can fit over 100 songs on a 2GB card?
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Don’t know why this feature hasn’t been in from Day 1.
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:38 pm
“now make demos available for Wii ware.”
Yeah, and regular Wii games too please.
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:43 am
Sweet!
And 2G is WAY more than enough…
i mean, its been enough till just a couple of months back with the Wii’s 512(?)mb!
well the point is that 1G is almost twice as much as what the Wii has internally.
October 3rd, 2008 at 6:11 am
2 gigs is a good start. This is a very huge admission for Nintendo, considering they were completely committed to the ‘Delete and Download’ mentality since launch.
What I think pushed them to finally unlock what was supposed to be a launch feature I think was twofold – one was finally settling on a copy-protection system (Nintendo would NEVER go to a consumer format lightly – consider every one of their systems, including the Wii, uses a completely proprietary format) and two would be the need to scrub the servers clean of repeat traffic.
It costs Nintendo more money, in the long run, to force people to download and re-download a particular game. As we are mostly aware, Nintendo is a classic business in that they want you to spend your money and walk away – they want your repeat business. They don’t want you to walk over to Nintendo HQ with your copy of a game and plunk down in front of their screen and use their console – it costs too much.
So I’m excited about this. I think it should have happened when WiiWare came out, but I’m still glad we can get up to 4x more storage. And SD cards are on the cheap. Hard drives…eesh…moving parts and flimsy magnetic write heads…give me solid state any day.
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:11 am
Well said Danny.
You can put me in the “why an external HDD box when you can have a solid-state solution that’s already built-in on each and every Wii?”
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:42 am
I would’ve preferred the possibility to directly play stuff from the SD card. From what they said it’s just the ability to download directly to the SD, so the Wii memory fill remain empty, and speeding up the copy process, so when you’ll play a VC or WiiWare game it will be (hopefully) quickly transferred to the Wii memory and then played.
better than nothing, and it should’ve been there from the start anyway.
October 3rd, 2008 at 5:19 pm
All the reports I’ve been reading (Infendo, GoNintendo, Kotaku) have said there will be playablitiy from the SD slot.
October 3rd, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Am I misunderstanding the max here?
SD cards go up to 4gigs.
Does the Wii have a 2 gig read limit on SD cards?
I bought a 2 giger at launch from newegg on the cheap and now 4 gig sd’s are about $10-$15 a pop. 2 gigs are fine, but 4 gigs is “never erasing anything for duration of the console’s life cycle” territory for me.
October 4th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
um…..are people here or infendo sure of this news? the only thing i heard from the press conference was that you will be able to download wii shop channel games directly to sd card instead of having to download to wii internal memory and then to sd card and back, which eliminates one step. i still haven’t head anything about playing games off of the sd card. can you someone send me an article to confirm this? i have doubts believing what infendo is saying. please read this sarcastic article from destructoid:
http://www.destructoid.com/nintendo-offering-a-brilliant-solution-to-wii-storage-woes-sd-cards-106316.phtml
they understand the news the way i understood it. this really needs to be cleared up. nintendo was very vague on this subject.
October 5th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
I really don’t care what else this update does. If I can store and run games off the SD memory directly, Nintendo..its about time.
ps dont forget to update those graphics, add some HD, and get some reasonable internal storage for the next console would ya.
People always argue that huge graphics are not everything, true, but its about time Nintendo, especially for the next console. Great graphics means you can have the option to make “eye popingly” brilliant looking games down to (god bless) the most simple looking games like kororinpa or bomber man, to even 8-bit looking games. But at least the option would be there for big name developers or niche market developers. Sony and Microsoft will want some of Nintendo’s market, all Nintendo needs to do is “beef up the graphics” (Iwata San) and they can bridge a gap.
Just a little rant which is part of an obstacle, Nintendo should not be making little mistakes like the lack of ease of operating an SD card in a console or its tiny 512MB internal memory, but flash or (solid state) memory is the way to go.
October 7th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Honestly Nintendo should have had that feature ready when the Wii launched. But I guess it’ll be a good thing. But I won’t really need it right away. I barely have the opportunity to download anything, that last thing I downloaded was Lost Winds three-four months ago.