USB mass storage for Wii
A company called eSOL limited have issued a press release. It says their products have been selected by Nintendo for use with the Wii. The specific products are "PrFILE2" FAT file system and "PrUSB/Host" USB host stack. Nobuyuki Ueyama, the Executive Vice President of eSOL commented:
"I'm very happy that we could take part in the development for Wii, a new game console from Nintendo. I believe that our products were selected because Nintendo valued our long, successful history with many digital consumer products and high reliability and functionality based on that. We will continue to provide superior products and technical services to strongly support developers in embedded software development".
From what I understand, these are software products that will allow you to use any USB storage device you want with the Wii.
Posts
Wii Freak
To tell the truth I don't really care.
Gonzo
What's the storage capacity with the Wii when you get it?
um
What about people who bought a sd card, is the sd card now obsolete?
Unknown
512 MGs Flaash memory.
medbluemetallic
This might actually be really cool. In the highly improbably event that a program "like" Itunes (why not?) becomes available for use on the Wii, a USB drive could be used to save video files. Then you could download episodes of your favorite shows and then watch them from the comfort of your couch. It would also ease the process of listening to digital music on your home theater. Woohoo!
Scooby Jew
512 megabytes of internal flash memory, if I'm not mistaken. With my luck and my history of horrible memory, I'm sure I'm wrong though. Anyways, I think that's pretty cool that now we can have a lot more than less than 1 gig of space on our Wii.
Zendalf
This might just make it so you can share VC games over the internet. Illegal!
Elementrat
Jeez what took you so long Nintendo? And please, make a Hard Drive as well.
DJames
May as well use the computers memory like you know, when you plug it in.
jimbotron173
The Wii console has an inbuilt 512mb of Flash RAM (Random Access Memory) as well as support for SD Cards. What a USB mass storage device will allow Nintendo to do is release games in USB format as well as an alternative to storing channels and game files on the actual Wii Console. USB mass storage can also enable the optical drive on the Wii for DVD playback. This was rumoured quite a while back, with Nintendo saying at around E3 2005 or TGS 2005 that a "USB dongle" would be needed to play DVD's, something that puzzled everyone. Perhaps that is what they are for?!
Andy
So if we get this usb device for Wii, then we can watch dvds and play cds. Does anyone know how to play music through the sd card?
Nova
I thought you could already use jump drives on the Wii.
Nate
Wii comes with a 512 MB SD card, official Nintendo released ones are 1 GB, and 2 GB.
Tim
This will be tight. Hopefully you can transfer stuff between sd Wii and usb (flash drive, hard drive, or whatever) because my sd doesn't have room for the music I want on my Wii, so with that my memory space is only limited by the size of the usb (flash/hard drive) but hopefully with this update that means I can download stuff via internet channel.
bob
You would probably have to download another channel too (for an external memory drive), but what would also be good idea would be able to visit a page, e.g. Watch something then press back and be able to go back to what you were watching and have it fully loaded. I understand this would need a TON of space, but could you use your hd/flash drive or something to do that? Also being able to download straight to your usb drive would be good too.
cabose117
I heard that if you format an external USB HDD that was powered via AC plug to FAT32 format or a Flash Drive to FAT32, it would add to the number of available blocks. It's probably false though, I haven't tried it yet.