Nintendo has recently filed a patent which allows the transfer of Wii games to a Wii hard drive.
Whilst nothing has been officially revealed regarding the patent, online speculation has of course ensued. Gaming publication Siliconera have come up with what’s regarded to be the most logical explanation:
Nintendo’s plan is to make a separate hard drive partition for each DVD game. Once games are saved on a hard drive, the Wii reads a directory and shows all available games with box art. This is done by accessing a virtual DVD partition on the hard drive. The interface also displays ESRB ratings and the patent mentions possible parental controls.
Sweet! Now we can have more storage, and this should make transferring Virtual Console games easier if you bought a new Wii.
I’m hoping this means we’ll get patches for Samba de Amigo and The Conduit.
I think it will probably be a hard-drive wirelessy connected to the Wii, where you can store just about anything. It would be amazing if the hard-drive could connect to your PC through an LAN.
Hard Drive = YES!
:D
I wonder if this means I can put Street Fighter IV on there xD
Should of happened like 2 years ago
Wii H.D.!
Maybe with a hard drive we will finally be able to combine songs in rockband & rockband2 like every other platform. Hopefully we would be able to communicate with other players console to console as well :)
Nice this is pretty good news
So they are gonna do legally what pirates have been doing illegally for years? Take the money away from the pirates make it cheaper kudos to Nintendo for this plan.
@intergalactic potato – I doubt it would be wireless. First off, the games are anywhere between 1 and 4 GB (SSBB is actually near 8). Taking that into consideration, transfer time from disc to Wii Hard Drive would be painstakingly tedious. Making it a wireless affair would make it take an even longer amount of time.
@NintenGOD! – Don’t be naïve XD Nintendo wants money more that anything. ANYTHING. They’re obviously going to put in epic anti-piracy features on the hard drive that I can see being near impossible to crack.
Even if they did make it harder to crack the code for hacking the new Wii feature it wouldn’t be entirely impossible to crack, also the wii is nowhere as secure as a PS3 console since no-ones been successful in creating a hacked CFW except for Geohot.
I think that this is going to be used for Wii 2 backwards compatibility since I think they’re ditching discs in favor of hi-capacity flash memory cards and this way you can play all your old Wii games without using a disc…
So Wii HD will now have an HD? Lol.
@Shad – I know, but what I was aiming towards more was that they’re definitely going to do some epic encryption. Maybe code the transferred games to look like scrambled nothing when accessed. Also, we don’t know how this think works. It might be wireless as suggested, and may be even more difficult to hack because it has no ports of any kind. @.@
It would be nice if I could rip all the games me and my friends bought to the hard drive then play em with out the disc! Lmao < : Nintendo would never allow this to be that easy! Im pretty shure its going to need the disc in the slot to play the game. If anything it might just be for faster load times. Who knows
ABOUT TIME! With the Wii’s limited space (256-500MB, I think) , a hard drive would do a WORLD of good.
I hope this means that Wii HD (Hard Drive) is being prepared in order to transfer wii save games from your old Wii to the new rumored nintendo console Wii Hi-Fi.
Ok its great news but not for nintendo! Hackers are going to have fun with this feature. True or false ?
What if Nintendo has decided to go back to a cartridge of some sort realistically depending on how its done it can have more on it than a blu-ray disc… and we all know how Nintendo is about innovating… The only problem I could see with this is still no movie playback, but then again 3DS has movie playback… As for the hacking issue, it is a lot harder to hack a cartridge then it is to hack a disk… so… I think cartridges could be the way to go. Doesn’t really matter Nintendo knows how to innovate, they can get it done.
Yeah your right but i don’t think nintendo wants to take a step backwords for their future products and think about it the games require a lot of memory to store the data so it woukdnt work to bring back the classic methods, hackers are always up for a challeng and to be fair they have already seen this HDD feature as a big advantage for them. People already dont play they games off disk anymore, its all about external hard drives, besides i dont think hackers will even need to worry about nintendo presenting this feature because its already in use!
the hd feature your all speculating about is an upgrade for hotel chains and is a commercial application. according to our rep. after the wii2 launch wii1 be basically obsolet (if it wasn’t already) and becomes more viable for the whole trade-in deal if they can shovel off the units to hotels at very cheap install rates yielding high gross profit results for us in the resort/hotel buisness. our rep. said it is to compete with sony&MS in a demographic (family&kids) that nintendo does well with. my 12year old son was on this web page and asked me to explain it as he is a big nintendo fan and also wants a better game system. save up for wii2 kids.