Wii & Memory

headn00b

So the Wii comes out here on the 8th December and I can barely contain myself. I'm still not even sure exactly what I'll be buying with it (other than the requisite Zelda) but I do have one question that I need cleared up before the big day.

I know the Wii has a certain amount of flash memory built-in, but is this enough for VC downloads and game saves, or do I need to buy an SD card for this?

JAEF

How large (in storage terms) will VC games be? At present what is the average size for games on each of the formats?

Nintendo: Games vary in size but approximately NES games will be 1MB, SNES 5MB and N64 32MB.

It comes with, I believe, 512 MB to start, which is sometihng like 2200 "blocks" [Edit-That might actually be on the Wiimote. I'm not sure. It's nearly impossible to find any information on it, but I know it's there somewhere. Console or remote.]

Donkey Kong (NES) takes up 19 blocks.

So you have plenty of room for saves and your initial VCs, and there is no need to run out and buy an SD card to start.

Daedalus

And whatever you do, don't, for the love of God, buy a Wii-branded SD card for $60 when any fucking SD card will work.

I was at BestBuy picking up my Wii and I saw they had "Wii memory cards" out for $60 for 1GB. In the camera section they had 1GB SD cards for $20. The Circuit City next door had 1GB SD cards for $12 that day (on sale) and Newegg was probably even lower.

I laughed my ass off until I noticed someone in the checkout line had one of these $60 cards. They're the same fucking thing, people!

Hazzelhoff

so what size / speed will the wii accept? I hear 2 gig is the max but I am still lost as to how fast they can be.

Ruckus

Hazzelhoff wrote:

so what size / speed will the wii accept? I hear 2 gig is the max but I am still lost as to how fast they can be.

Write speed on the card shouldn't impact the drive writing to it.

It's like in the olden days the minimum requirements for games or software used to have "10x CD-ROM Drive". It doesn't mean that if you have a 32x CD-ROM that it somehow wouldn't let you install and play the game.

fforde

NES games are about half a meg in size. SNES games 2-4 megs. N64 games 8-32 megs in size. The Wii has 512 megs of built in memory. You wont be running out of space any time soon. The only games that take up a considerable amount of space are the N64 games, and there is only one available right now. To put it in perspective, if you were to buy 10 N64 games, 10 SNES games, and 10 NES games, you have your internal memory filled a bit over half way. Plenty of room to spare.

You can also not copy a Virtual Console game to an SD Card and then play it on another Wii, they are locked to the console they were downloaded on, so there is really no reason to get an SD card unless you want to transfer save games.