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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.
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).
WII Lanparty in the works.
See what I did there?
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.
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.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
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.
The SD slot on the Wii is very, very slow.
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.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
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...
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
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
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.
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.
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.
you can install the Internet channel from a WAD file
So why can't I install Doom from a WAD file?
Or store the data on a computer hard drive located elsewhere.
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