Nintendo Announces Wii Wireless Router 85
CVG reports that Nintendo has announced a wireless router, the purpose of which is to "streamline the process of getting your console online." It will be released later this month in Japan. No word was given regarding when the rest of the world will see it. Pictures of the router are available at Famitsu, though the text is in Japanese. 1Up also points out statements from Nintendo execs discussing the limited storage for the Wii. They say there will be a "better solution" than a hard drive.
Homebrew solution (Score:4, Insightful)
There will probably be a homebrew solution for backing up and restoring channels before Nintendo introduces their solution, if not already.
Of course Nintendo will probably not like it, since you know... piracy. Though the channels are probably encrypted or tied to the console or something like that.
The router should be a better option than the wifi dongle. That thing was a bit invasive. I don't like having 1000 network connections in my Network Connections dialog that I only use rarely. VMWare, Bluetooth, Hamachi... I'd also like it if my protocols would reappear in network connection properties so I could set my DNS servers, and I'd really like it if my old nVidia drivers would stop BSoDing, or the new ones wouldn't completely break OpenGL, and if TF2 would stop randomly disconnecting me from servers with an error code noone seems to know how to fix. We all have our dreams.
Oh yeah, I really didn't like how the dongle forced ICS on. That seemed unnecessary (and it was... I got it working with ICS off when I bridged the dongle's network with my LAN).
Re:"Better than a hard drive" (Score:2, Insightful)
A Thousand Times, this.
Seriously, even if Nintendo made you put some sort of Nintendo brand SD card in it that had some hidden unreadable-by-PC sector in it or some hash that uniquely identified the user some other way I would be happy to do this. I'm not even interested in doing this the pirate way. Right now, I'm not going to get any downloadable games. If they could just make the legitimate way simple enough, I could be happy with it.
I'm sure I'll get branded a fanboy for this, no worse than getting modded up for being a snitch for Nintendo, anyway.
Oh, I remember the other reason why I'm not going to do this the pirate way besides my unbridled fanboyism. I have an impressionable child in my house that still thinks music and movies come on disks, and not from Bittorrent, and I'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible.
Re:"Better than a hard drive" (Score:3, Insightful)
Out of curiosity.. what is your exact problem with the way the system currently works? You can copy downloaded games to SD cards already. You can't play them from the card, which is mildly inconvenient,
Except for the fact that for a 200 some block game it takes ~15-20 minutes to move it to the SD card or back to the Wii. Its beyond mildly inconvenient whenever I have normal internet speeds that are faster. And the same SD card will read and write incredibly fast on my computer so it isn't an issue with the SD card speed...
Re:About time (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, it's likely you'll be able to stick games on the SD cards...
Already possible on the wii. Although, you can also simply delete downloaded games, and re-download them later for no additional charge.
Both of these take some tinkering around, and some people might not consider either to be acceptable solutions. It would be very nice to use some sort of PC-based game server, you would be limited only by your PC's harddrive capacity. Although Nintendo would probably want to stay as far away from the PC as possible, for several reasons.
Re:"Better than a hard drive" (Score:2, Insightful)
Your argument wouldn't be flawed if it wasn't for the homebrew scene.
Try and backup a small NES game to your SD from the regular menu. Ugh. So slow.
Now do it with Waninkoko's Wad Manager. BLAM BLAM, specifications represent, yo! It's not utterly slow an' all!
Hell, let's do it again with the saves. Copy a normal savegame to your SD card. Sloooooooooow. (Then try to copy your mario kart or smash bros save. No you can't, nintendo decided on a whim that SOME games wouldn't have backup-able savefiles.)
Last one now, wii media player can read movies from an SD card, tried it with zohan the other day, the entire movie was flawless. If a mere store-bought SD card can load a movie, loading a NES rom into the wii's RAM should have been there from the start. I mean, I don't think 2006 was such a dark age of technology when we could only read SD cards at the pitiful speed the wii system menu does today. It just reeks of "lazy", and I'm a fanboy of the highest order.
Re:About time (Score:3, Insightful)
Duh, they already have this feature. If you delete the game file, you just have to head to the shop channel and download it again for free.
You still have to keep the save files, but they take up like one or two blocks.