Nintendo Announces Wii Wireless Router

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.

Comments

About time

[renegadesx]

They didn't lift a finger to do something about home security. Encouraging people to switch their wifi networks to WEP! And for security issues "switch your computer off"? WTF? Doesn't solve the problem of internet leeching and the fact that its just bad security practice.

Lets hope this actually has a secure layer (that identifies the device other than the MAC address) and is not just a repackaged WEP based WAP.

And also, a better solution than a hard drive? I am interested in that one, I just hope it's not releasing new models with 4Gb of storgage that will make us buy new Wii's or live with the storage issues. I am wondering what they have up their sleave to solve this issue.

Re:About time

[UserChrisCanter4]

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.

Re:About time

[renegadesx]

Yes I was refering to the DS, sorry I should have specified, my bad. Yes the Wii does indeed play nicely with my WPA2.

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.

Re:About time

[Jorophose]

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...

Re:About time

[BPPG]

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:About time

[Goose In Orbit]

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)

Re:About time

[Kentaree]

You can store the games on SD cards, only you can't play them from it, which means to play games not on the actual Wii memory itself takes far too time and effort

Re:About time

[Missing_dc]

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."

Re:About time

[tixxit]

I think they may provide a hybrid internet based storage. Basically, you can keep your most recently used stuff on flash, but the older and larger files get pushed onto a file server. It would be really cool if it was mostly (as much as doesn't affect playability of games) transparent.

Re:About time

[Goaway]

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 designed, like CSS on DVDs, that fall.

Re:About time

[LordVader717]

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.

Re:About time

[LordVader717]

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.

Re:About time

[Guppy06]

"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.

Re:About time

[geekoid]

Or store the data on a computer hard drive located elsewhere.

Re:About time

[Jorophose]

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? =/

Re:About time

[Goaway]

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 used.

Re:About time

[Jorophose]

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.

Homebrew solution

[The MAZZTer]

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:Homebrew solution

[Anonymous Coward]

You can already copy channels to and from an SD card and to a computer or another system from there. However the channels are somehow encrypted so they only play on the system originally downloaded from.

Re:Homebrew solution

[Stolovaya]

It's not anything crazy, it's just attached to the serial number for your Wii.

Re:Homebrew solution

[Pvt_Ryan]

not entirely true you can install the Internet channel from a WAD file..

Re:Homebrew solution

[IntergalacticWalrus]

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

[w3rdna]

WII Lanparty in the works.

"Better than a hard drive"

[Lord Byron II]

would be if they would make it possible to read games right off of the SD card directly without having to transfer them back and forth.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[SuperMonkeyCube]

This.

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"

[Anonymous Coward]

Or better yet if they would add in the firmware the ability to read HCSD. 2GB is much to small (with no internal hard drive to compensate).

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[crossmr]

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...

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Dwedit]

The SD slot on the Wii is very, very slow.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[edalytical]

We are now at 32 GB and it's a SDHC card which isn't compatible with older SD devices.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Anonymous Coward]

Up to 32 GB, at the moment.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Yosho]

Unfortunately, the Wii's SD reader can only read cards up to 2 GB, so you won't be able to get that much more space.

Also, as another poster pointed out, the Wii's SD reader is really slow. Trying to read a typical modern console game off of an SD card would be impractical.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Running through CowboyNeil translator now for ya ;)

I have a gullable child in my house that I want to raise in the 20th centuary. I dont want my child growing up with modern technologies like iTunes and I want to keep it that way, because having to insert and eject optical media that scratches easily is so much better than media centeres where a down arrow button lets you pick and chose the movie you want to play and much better than iPods that have docks built into just about everything from cars to stereo's, all because pirates like these technologies too.

Grow up

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Yosho]

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, but there's nothing stopping you from backing up all the games you like. The cards are even readable by a standard PC, which is even better than what you suggested. The games are only playable on the Wii they were originally downloaded on, which is fine, really, as long as you're not a pirate. The obvious question that comes up is, "What if my Wii breaks?" -- luckily, Nintendo can (and will) move all of your stuff over to a new Wii if you have to get a replacement, as long as you go through their official repair process. I don't see what's not simple about the legit way.

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.

There is another option -- legit downloads. I vastly prefer being able to buy something over the internet than having to go to a store to get it; it saves me the time and gas that would be involved in going to the store, and it saves the world the natural resources that would be used to a produce a disc that I'm only going to put in my computer once so that I can rip it. I wouldn't be surprised if, by the time your kid is old enough to have his own significant amount of disposable income, he thinks of physical discs like we do records and VHS tapes.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Darkness404]

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:"Better than a hard drive"

[jcuervo]

Standards are a bitch.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Yosho]

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...

Since you are answering the question I asked the parent poster, I'm going to assume that you share his opinion on loading games from the SD card -- in which case, I have to ask, why do you think that being able to load games directly from the SD card would be any sort of solution? The reader is going to be slow regardless of why you're reading data from the card. Adding support for running applications directly from SD cards is not a viable solution at all.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[CSMatt]

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.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Hitto]

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:"Better than a hard drive"

[SuperMonkeyCube]

FYI, there's no Hannah Montana here, but likely because I only have male children. Yes, corporate rock still sucks. However, it would be difficult for me to say no to Hot Wheels or Lego, which you may feel is more corporate oppression, but I don't. We can make music in our house, we do that. I can't manufacture Legos myself, I would be hard pressed to make building blocks from scratch, and it would be a little much to ask me to make an open-source Zelda game from scratch in my spare time that was even one millionth as good as The Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess.

As far as Bittorrent goes, I had it installed for a while, and didn't find anything that I couldn't get some other quicker legitimate way.

Back to the SD card - yes, the slot is slow and I discovered that backing up save games which are quite small compared to some of the Virtual Console games. All the more reason not to do any more writes to the card than you have to. I presumed (perhaps incorrectly) that it takes less time to read the data straight from the SD card than it would to make room in system memory by moving stuff out to an SD card, and then write the new stuff to system memory.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Pvt_Ryan]

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!

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Midnight Thunder]

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

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[SuperMonkeyCube]

Umm... No, I don't work for the RIAA. You may not like the law, but I would beseech you to respect the law.

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 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.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[LWATCDR]

Why not USB mass storage?
Or a Samba share?
Not Online. My ISP just isn't good enough.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Chris Mattern]

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.

"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."

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[CSMatt]

Just to clarify: when I said "corporate Hanna Montana BS" I was talking about the entertainment sector.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[SuperMonkeyCube]

Fine. You win. Is that what you wanted to hear? You can call me a luddite since I can't find any legitimate use for BitTorrent. You can call me a luddite for still using CD's because I hate the way pop music is mixed these days for iTunes and earbuds. You can beat me up as much as you feel is necessary for respecting the rights of copyright holders. You can trash me publicly for trying to hold on to some fragment of my progeny's childhood. Go ahead.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[IntergalacticWalrus]

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.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Pvt_Ryan]

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 several thousand pounds. Making someone pay for the song + say 20% as a punishment is fine but charging them 1000 times it's worth is taking the piss.

My jibe about the RIAA was because you implied that just because something arrives digially instead of physically that was a bad thing and must be illegal.

So respectfully get off your fucking highhose and stop being so narrow minded.

PS Not really sure if homebrew on the wii is against the license agreement but I paid £180 for the hardware so I'll do what I please with it.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[SuperMonkeyCube]

1) You're right, the RIAA does not correctly understand that piracy does not equal lost sales, but they try to impact any and all users as if that were the truth.

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 don't like Nintendo's overly slow implementation of the SD cards and obligatorily running everything from system memory , and that's why I'd prefer Nintendo have a consumer-ready solution. Don't forget, what we learn about hardware here isn't just for us to use personally. Presuming that we are all technology professionals here (another gross oversimplification, I'm sure) we don't have to just use technology for ourselves. We have to be able to support it for others. If something works well, we suggest it to others because we won't get called over there to fix it. If it's going to take a bit of work, both during setup and continually during operation, it's not usually worth recommending except to the most savvy of our clients.

3) I have made gross generalizations about Bittorrent that seem disparaging, but not about digital distribution in general. Didn't I point out that the XBLA and PSN models work fine, since they have adequate storage of a sufficient speed to make those work? I still find Bittorrent a waste of time for reasons I've already stated. Yes, I do know that there are other legal ways to get un-DRM'd content - I don't hear anyone at work asking me about the Amazon music store, for example. I would guess that's because they don't know how to get Amazon stuff on their iPod (even if it's trivial.) Most of them bought iPods and use iTunes and don't have to ask anyone anything until they drop them in the sink.

4) P.S. That's High Horse, and yes, I'm getting off now.

Re:"Better than a hard drive"

[Pvt_Ryan]

4) I know.. I just mistyped and didn't preview the whole thing. :(

Pleasure arguing with you.. :)

Wouldn't this be a Wiireless router?

[Anonymous Coward]

See what I did there?

Re:Wouldn't this be a Wiireless router?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wii see what you did there.

Re:Wouldn't this be a Wiireless router?

[Creepy Crawler]

Wii are not impressed.

Re:Wouldn't this be a Wiireless router?

[BitterOldGUy]

What the hell does World War ii have to do with it!?

Re:Wouldn't this be a Wiireless router?

[Flyers2391]

See what I did there?

yes, and it will be wiireless N capable ;)

Re:Wouldn't this be a Wiireless router?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all wiik.

Re:Wouldn't this be a Wiireless router?

[Rod Beauvex]

That's just a Wii bit too long.

Re:Wouldn't this be a Wiireless router?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Ugh. This whole thread is pretty wiik.

Re:Wouldn't this be a Wiireless router?

[JCSoRocks]

That's what shii said.

The homebrew-piracy connection

[tepples]

Of course Nintendo will probably not like it, since you know... piracy.

One stance: "Homebrew is piracy. Every download of Lockjaw is a lost sale of Tetris." But who would agree with that stance?

Re:The homebrew-piracy connection

[Anonymous Coward]

Two things. One: Alexey Pajitnov, the author of Tetris, does not receive royalties. (I could've sworn he was dead, assassinated or something. Must've been a /. April Fool's that I missed the "April Fool's" part.) Two: That video in your sig is poison. Jesus. It's like watching the guy on the right make fun of himself 20 years ago on the left, and they're both obviously gay.

Re:The homebrew-piracy connection

[KDR_11k]

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).

Re:The homebrew-piracy connection

[gfxguy]

The lawyers, silly.

Of course you're right, but that hasn't stopped them from doing it anyway.

Re:The homebrew-piracy connection

[tepples]

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.

from the get-out-of-me-brains dept

[etherlad]

from the send-data-through-the-wiither dept.

Damnit, editors, stop spying on me! "Wiither" is the name I gave my Wii.

Re:from the get-out-of-me-brains dept

[Anonymous Coward]

Wii see ye.

Re:from the get-out-of-me-brains dept

[jcuervo]

Wii see yii.

Fiixed.

Re:from the get-out-of-me-brains dept

[Anonymous Coward]

Wii sii yii.

Fiixed

Now iit's fiixed.

Re:from the get-out-of-me-brains dept

[CelticWhisper]

Is iit now?

Neato!

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be rather awesome to see a Nintendo brand router with 20+ gigs of storage that would stream to the Wii instead of storing it locally. Rather smart way around forcing embedding more cost in the Wii for those who want a cheaper gaming system.

Just wondering.

[Steauengeglase]

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.

Re:Just wondering.

[macshit]

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 before, but now you have wifi access to your internet router as well. I've no idea how the extra layer will interact with typical setups, but presumably they've thought about that and tested it. [The switch on the back says "router/bridge/auto", so there's a slight bit of control over how the layering is done.]

Since I'm in exactly this situation -- I have a wii and an internet router with only one jack for a PC, so my wii isn't online -- I'm looking forward to this product. It seems cheap and convenient.

Re:Just wondering.

[Midnight Thunder]

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 factory default setting. Doing so would in fact provide more security than some current solutions, seeing that a good number of routers seem to be left to their default settings, with the no encryption and their brand-name SSID. By having this a sticker on the back of the router should mean the only place the user needs to configure anything is in their Wii or DS.

Re:Just wondering.

[Steauengeglase]

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.

All the news sites got the HDD thing wrong !!

[Superken7]

Actually, if you read the original interview (in spanish) here

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

[Paralizer]

If it's meant to help kids connect their Wii's to the internet it likely has an auto-pairing feature that will be introduced with an upcoming firmware patch. So in Wii system menu they just say 'Use Nintendo Wii Router' and it finds the closest one, generates a random encryption key, and automatically pairs with it rather than the current configuration required on both ends. The router itself may even only accept client connections from MAC addresses that are assigned to the Wii.

The switch on the back that changes it from router to bridge confirms that thing thing is most likely not manually configurable and will do all the encryption/pairing automatically.

I am confused though why this was designed as a router and not simply a Wii access point? Surely most home users with broadband already own some form of router/switch they could just plug it right into, and the fact it has no built in switch seems to go along with that model.

This doesn't look interesting to me but all the kids/moms/non-techy people out there who don't know how to configure their home Linksys or DLinks will find something like this useful.

Re:Automatic makes it easy

[geekoid]

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.

AOSS

[Midnight Thunder]

Looking at the product page over at Nintendo, it would appear this device uses Buffalo Technology's AOSS 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.".

Where's all the data?

[tepples]

you can install the Internet channel from a WAD file

So why can't I install Doom from a WAD file?

Will the console after the Wii be called...

[foxylad]

... the Puu?

Nah, that's a sh*t name.

Everything is derivative

[tepples]

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.