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Wii System Menu 4.0 Released
dougisfunny writes "The Wii System Menu 4.0 has been released. It adds a number of features that people have been waiting for, including the ability to use SDHC cards, as well as the ability to download and play things directly off of the SD/SDHC card rather than the internal memory. This was announced at GDC09 by Nintendo's President Saturo Iwata in his keynote address. More information can be found at Nintendo's website."
This has nothing to do with ability of the system as there has been homebrew for a while that enables this feature, but rather that royalties would have to be paid in order to legally enable it. If consumers would be willing to eat the price of the upgrade without bitching, I am sure they would be willing to sell it to you. (Remember how the original xbox required a seperate remote in order to use DVD playback?)
My PS2 fanboy friends used to give me a hard time about that dongle because the PS2 does DVD playbackit out of the box. That is until i pointed out that I could save my games out of the box.....
Good-bye
Yeah, I would advise you to just use the Twilight Hack and install the Homebrew Channel and then update - the update does not remove the Homebrew Channel but it does close the hole for the Twilight Hack once and for all, or at least so it would seem. There isn't really a drawback to having the Homebrew Channel on your Wii, except for the maybe 1meg of space it takes up. That way if you later decide you want to use homebrew, you won't have to wait for the next exploit. Team Twiizers, the team behind the Twilight hack, have been sitting on other exploits for when this finally got properly patched, but it's going to take them time to actually put out the next hack so if there's any chance you want homebrew just hack it now and then update.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Some people don't like to have half a dozen devices connected to their TV's if one device is capable of performing most of those tasks. I fondly recall the "debates" I had with the gf over where to put the DVD player I insisted we buy after I got frustrated with our PS3's lack of IR remote-control support when I have an otherwise homogeneous system with my Logitech Harmony.
Others, still, do not have enough input sockets on their TV's to support new devices. If I somehow only have one component input, to which my DVD player is currently connected to, and later buy a Wii, it would be nice to not be forced to balance like a monkey trying to reach behind the TV to rewire each time I switch devices.
Right, so I should probably include relevant links for those too lazy to Google. Consider this a mini-guide to homebrew on the Wii.
Phew. That's probably the most effort I've ever spent on a Slashdot post. These links should be enough to get anyone started. Since I'm tired of typing HTML tags, I'll just list a few recommended apps: GeeXBoX is an excellent media center app, and there's also a handful of mplayer ports, then there's all the emulators, Gecko OS lets you tweak a few aspects of the System menu as well as use cheats (but don't use them online, people have been getting banned), FTPii is useful if you're too lazy to take your SD card out of your Wii, there are a few Wii Linux distros in their infancy, and of course, a plethora of games (including Quake!).
One last thing, Team Twiizers is working on something called BootMii, which is essentially a replacement of some very low level boot code on the Wii. Once this is finished, Wii homebrew will essentially have complete access to everything on the Wii. Keep an eye out for it; among other things it should make a Wii relatively brick-proof. It'll be on Hackmii of course.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Losing an exploit, but gaining significant and long-anticipated new features. This is only a downgrade to a fraction of a percent of Wii users... and the majority of them are playing copied games, and Nintendo doesn't really need to worry too much about irritating them. They'll crack it again soon anyway; Nintendo just has to make these exploits irritating enough that normal people would have no desire to use them.
No, you can't play the game directly off the SD/SDHC card. You can save downloads and games to the card, but they still have to be loaded into system memory to run. The earliest articles about the update were clear on that. - that the big thing was the rasing of the storage limit from 2gigs to 32gigs, but that it was for storage only.
Still, upping it from 2 gigs is a good thing. Hopefully they'll upgrade the Opera browser to start using all that space.