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.
Re:About time (Score:5, Informative)
Are you referring to the Nintendo DS, which still supports WEP only (as far as I know)?
The Wii has supported WPA from the get-go. The Nintendo Wifi USB Connection (now discontinued), supported WEP for the DS because the DS supports WEP only. Many sites recommended it as a cheap and easy way to activate and deactivate a quick wifi network for your DS without stepping the whole network down to WEP (although I'm unable to tell if it uses WPA for Wii-only communications when using the default Nintendo application).
As it is, though, the Wii is plenty happy to connect to a WPA or WPA2 network.
As for better than a hard drive, I'd imagine that simply fixing the firmware to allow for "merging" the internal flash and a simple 4GB SD card would work just fine.
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The WiFi dongle I have running on a VirtualBox guest and it's ok, still a little bit of an inconvience switching on and off a virtual or plugging/unplugging the device. At least it tries to lock it down to certain Nintendo devices.
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The Nintendo Wifi USB Connection (now discontinued)
Curious... they've recently reappeared in my local Game store (unless they just happened to find some in a cupboard somewhere)
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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.
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Or store the data on a computer hard drive located elsewhere.
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Well, it's likely you'll be able to stick games on the SD cards. It looks like a much more "controlable format".
I mean, we all hate to say it, but we know it's going to happen. Every DRM can and will be cracked though, it's just about them making sure it won't be during a sales period...
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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.
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Every DRM can and will be cracked though
Can? Probably. Will? Not so much.
Like others pointed out, it's been possible to store games on SD for a long time now. Nobody's cracked the protection on those yet. You can't copy them, and you can't create your own and load them onto a card. Same goes for the Wii game discs.
There's plenty of DRM schemes out there that haven't been cracked. It's the ones that are added onto an insecure format as an afterthought that are easy to get rid of, like copy-protected CDs, or the lucky few that are just badly design
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Not many.
Just WMP's DRM, and even then it was reverse-engineered a long time ago, and likely solved "officially" by the MPlayer/ffmpeg team.
I wouldn't doubt that there's "cracks" for the Wii's SD card DRM that just haven't surfaced yet. There's a lot of ways to keep things under wraps on the Internet.
It's just, nobody really cares about breaking some forms of DRM... And yeah it's too bad you can't play off the SD cards yet. Maybe it's a speed issue? =/
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I wouldn't doubt that there's "cracks" for the Wii's SD card DRM that just haven't surfaced yet.
That makes no sense whatsoever. There's no reason at all to keep something like that hidden. The only thing it's good for is fame, and you don't get that by shutting up.
It's easy to make strong copy protection on custom hardware. Just use public-key crypto and keep the keys in hardware. That's what the Wii does, and nobody's managed to touch it yet. The only things we have so far are cumbersome workarounds using bugs in games, and hardware modifications, neither of which in any way attacks the algorithms us
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But you don't get raped by new kids who ruin everything by attraction a big company's attention.
It's only a matter of time before somebody hits the Wii with hardware equipement.
Or alternatively, makes a better emulator. Dolphin can boot Wii games. Doesn't get passed the main screen but can boot 'em. There are ways to get the "WiiKey" which is from what I can understand the encryption system.
There are already modchips for the Wii. No need to crack the SD encryption.
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The games can be copied to SD cards. Admittedly, nobody has properly cracked the DRM on them, but it's easier to install a homebrew emulator and put an unprotected ROM file on it.
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If you buy one of their routers, it will come with 12GB of online swap space for your Wii's internal memory. To quote Nintendo's future explanations of the service: "Look, its better than a HD because there are no moving parts and we make nightly backups."
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"They didn't lift a finger to do something about home security."
Unlike the DS, the Wii supports WPA2. Not even the Xbox 360 does that.
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).
The homebrew-piracy connection (Score:2)
Of course Nintendo will probably not like it, since you know... piracy.
One stance: "Homebrew is piracy. Every download of Lockjaw [pineight.com] is a lost sale of Tetris." But who would agree with that stance?
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I think you confused that with the guy who got the Polonium injection (same first name I think but I can't remember his full name).
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One: Alexey Pajitnov, the author of Tetris, does not receive royalties.
Nor did John Pemberton and other inventors of Coca-Cola get royalties from PEPSI products.
It's like watching the guy on the right make fun of himself 20 years ago on the left
Thirteen to be exact.
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The lawyers, silly.
Of course you're right, but that hasn't stopped them from doing it anyway.
Everything is derivative (Score:2)
Try coming up with your own ideas, shitface.
No idea comes out of nowhere; everything is derivative of something. Linux is derivative of UNIX. GNOME is derivative of Mac OS and Windows. Animal Crossing is Harvest Moon without the speed-up.
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Where's all the data? (Score:3, Funny)
you can install the Internet channel from a WAD file
So why can't I install Doom from a WAD file?
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There will probably be a homebrew solution for backing up and restoring channels before Nintendo introduces their solution, if not already.
You seem to be confused about the real issue here. You can already back up and restore channels using an SD card. What people want is a big enough storage solution to keep all of their downloaded games installed at all times, without having to swap them constantly because they are out of space.
WII Lanparty (Score:2, Funny)
WII Lanparty in the works.
"Better than a hard drive" (Score:2)
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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
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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...
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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 n
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Seeing as you are a parent who is well-versed in technology, why not take the opportunity to introduce your child to media that can be redistributed freely? Personally I feel that corporate Hanna Montana BS is much more destructive than the ramifications of BitTorrent technology.
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Just to clarify: when I said "corporate Hanna Montana BS" I was talking about the entertainment sector.
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p>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.
Why do you work for RIAA??
Digital distrubution is the future!
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I understand digital distribution is the future, but we're not quite there yet on the Wii.
iTunes works just fine, but you'll tell me that Steve Jobs is a money-grubbing ogre feeding off of the table scraps of the record companies. iTunes passes the Grandma test of technology, though. I haven't used iTunes for anything except a podcast manager, but I can see that it's easy to use. (I don't even o
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iTunes works just fine, but you'll tell me that Steve Jobs is a money-grubbing ogre feeding off of the table scraps of the record companies. iTunes passes the Grandma test of technology, though. I haven't used iTunes for anything except a podcast manager, but I can see that it's easy to use. (I don't even own an iPod!) XBox Live and PSN are decent models for digital distribution, too - but those machines have hard drives! So, to re-iterate my point:
I thought that the Wii had a way to make digital distribution better, play things from the SD card. If that's really not possible/practical, then I am going to wait until Nintendo delivers something that's easier to deal with instead of doing the pirate thing so I don't inspire bad ethical practices amongst my children.
The wii does have a way to do this via homebrew and why do you assume that I am talking about piracy?
There are any number of vendors I can buy music from online that will let me download the mp3s and are not DRM protected like itunes.
I am not going to insult Steve either as he is there to make money and that's fair enough. I dislike the RIAA because the sue everyone, in alot of cases (by the look of things) even those that are innocent and they look damages for songs worth £0.50 in excess of sev
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2) I don't have anything against Wii homebrew, but I wouldn't be willing to chance running legitimately purchased Virtual Console games off the SD card via homebrew if a Nintendo update nuked them because it thought I was being bad. I really do hope that people are successful making their own homebrew games and that works out long-term. I still do
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4) I know.. I just mistyped and didn't preview the whole thing. :(
Pleasure arguing with you.. :)
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"Because it's desperately important to me that my child believe it's still the 1990s for as long as possible. Please don't tell him Bill Clinton isn't president any more."
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That might be a good idea. SD cards you can buy in stores are hitting around 64 GB I think.. or 32 GB..either way much bigger than the 512 MB included in the Wii...
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We are now at 32 GB and it's a SDHC card which isn't compatible with older SD devices.
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We are now at 32 GB and it's a SDHC card which isn't compatible with older SD devices.
The following Wikipedia artilce indicates that 32GB is the maximum limit available to SDHC cards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital_card [wikipedia.org]
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Why not USB mass storage?
Or a Samba share?
Not Online. My ISP just isn't good enough.
Re:"Better than a hard drive" (Score:4, Informative)
The SD slot on the Wii is very, very slow.
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I can't believe how many times I hear this nonsense.
How do you expect it to work, when the SD card slot on the Wii is so unbelievably slow??
Have you ever copied a channel or save file to/from an SD card? Here's a hint: It takes like 5 fucking minutes for a 128 block file. Now ask yourself, with those godawful transfer times, would it be possible to run a channel directly from it? IMPOSSIBLE.
Wouldn't this be a Wiireless router? (Score:5, Funny)
See what I did there?
Re:Wouldn't this be a Wiireless router? (Score:5, Funny)
Wii are not impressed.
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Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all wiik.
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Re:Wouldn't this be a Wiireless router? (Score:4, Funny)
Ugh. This whole thread is pretty wiik.
Will the console after the Wii be called... (Score:1)
... the Puu?
Nah, that's a sh*t name.
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from the get-out-of-me-brains dept (Score:2)
from the send-data-through-the-wiither dept.
Damnit, editors, stop spying on me! "Wiither" is the name I gave my Wii.
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Wii see yii.
Fiixed.
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Is iit now? [iit.edu]
Just wondering. (Score:2)
Since wireless on the Wii seems to work, is this supposed to be some kind of Snap server/router combo or is this one of those "ease" by way of giving the customer "choice" to increase "value" scenarios? If this is the latter, no thanks.
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I must admit I have no idea what you're saying/implying (what is a "Snap"?), but it seems fairly clear that this is just a convenient way for people with an internet connection, but no wifi access, to get their wii online.
There are two jacks on back: "internet", and "LAN". You plug your existing internet router into the "internet" jack, then plug in your PC (which presumably was previously plugged directly into the internet router) to the "LAN" jack.
So your PC presumably continues to work more or less as
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Sorry, by Snap I meant a setup free, network mounted drive. If I recall they are the company with a patent on such a device (could be wrong).
This still leaves me scratching my head. Outside of streaming all content, how exactly does this address the storage issue.
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Looking at the images it looks likes they are trying to make this as close to zero setup as possible. With DSL networks this will still require a computer, since you will have to provide your user/password combo, but with cable it will be more or less plug and play, since most cable solutions I have seen use DHCP.
What is interesting is the setting for the bridge/router mode selection is actually in the form of a switch on the back. All I wonder now is whether the SSID and WEP Key will come as a random facto
AOSS (Score:2)
Looking at the product page [yahoo.com] over at Nintendo, it would appear this device uses Buffalo Technology's AOSS [wikipedia.org] solution. The Wikipedia entry describes AOSS as "AOSS (AirStation One-Touch Secure System) is a system by Buffalo Technology which allows a secure wireless connection to be set up with the push of a button. Recent AirStation residential gateways incorporate a button on the unit to let the user initiate this procedure.".
All the news sites got the HDD thing wrong !! (Score:3, Informative)
it literally says:
"Estamos trabajando en una soluciÃn de almacenamiento y es especialmente importante en América, porque nuestros consumidores estan usando wii points para la consola virtual y Wiiware, y quiero que la gente tenga la expectativa correcta; nunca hemos dicho que sera un disco duro, ni hemos mencionado como solucionaremos esta cuestion, pero vamos a entregar una mejor manera de almacenamiento para los juegos, de la que hoy tenemos"
The important part says:
"We have never mentioned how we will solve this matter (storage), but we will deliver a better solution to storage than the current one."
It _nowhere_ confirms it WON'T be a HD (although you could _guess_ it won't be). Some news sites have even taken it as far as saying: "they will deliver a better solution than a hard drive" - which is nowhere near reality if you read the original.
Automatic makes it easy (Score:2)
The switch on the back t
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Since the Wii will find your router(anyones near by) it's pretty trivial to connect out of the box. Creating another router you connect to in no way makes it easier.