TurboDuo Games heading to the virtual console

Ya, good luck putting 2 or 3 of these games on the Wii’s 270MB of available memory. Even if the audio is compressed to MP3, you’ll still find yourself with a game of over 100MB. Nintendo better get their act together and make a HDD for the Wii or at lease allow people to use VC games from SD cards.

Oh God…Cho Aniki…I heard that it was confirmed for the US, and I’m still kinda in disbelief. I can’t wait to see what the ESRB rates it.

Two words: Hardcore compression.

Two words: Hardcore compression.

1 word: Fanboy

Seriously, when will fanboys finally stop kissing Nintendo’s ass and admit that there’s not enough room in the Wii’s internal memory for a good library of VC games? Transferring games from SD to internal and deleting is a PITA.

Yes, there isn’t enough room in the internal memory for many of the larger games coming out for VC now, but surely none of them are going to be over 500 MB anyways. Hopefully there isn’t a downside to this announcement, such as the red book audio being replaced or the cutscenes being removed. But I would clear out everything from my memory just to have Ys Book I and II on my Wii. There’s no doubt Nintendo knows that memory will begin to be a problem now and they’ll find a way to give us more space. It’s crazy to think that the only group not noticing the problem is Nintendo its self. Being a blinded fanboy is one thing but disregarding the idea that there will be solution to the problem down the road is silly too.

Yes, there isn’t enough room in the internal memory for many of the larger games coming out for VC now, but surely none of them are going to be over 500 MB anyways. Hopefully there isn’t a downside to this announcement, such as the red book audio being replaced or the cutscenes being removed. But I would clear out everything from my memory just to have Ys Book I and II on my Wii. There’s no doubt Nintendo knows that memory will begin to be a problem now and they’ll find a way to give us more space. It’s crazy to think that the only group not noticing the problem is Nintendo its self. Being a blinded fanboy is one thing but disregarding the idea that there will be solution to the problem down the road is silly too.

Actually, they can’t be over 270MB because that’s about all you got out of the 512MB of internal memory to save VC and saved data. Also, the limited amount of memory in the Wii and not being able to use SD cards to play on the fly is to prevent piracy and we all know how Nintendo is paranoid about the subject (N64 carts and NGC small DVDs).

Now all we need is Ys IV on virtual console.

While there’s starting to be a bit of a backlash against people throwing around the word “fanboy” too readily (or at least there should be by now), and while most CD games from the period didn’t compress all that much due to the hardware being unable to decompress in real-time and the ease of playing Redbook audio, it is true that compression can only go so far. Even if all the music from a Redbook-heavy CD game is compressed into MP3s, we’re still talking perhaps 20 megabytes for that alone. If there’s FMV then that balloons. The Wii’s internal flash is 512 megabytes, with a good bit of that likely reserved for system software and possible updates.

Further, everything we’ve seen of Nintendo’s VC approach so far has been, as far as possible, to run the unmodified, released ROM code. When they do change it, as with the modification to Kid Icarus’ password system, they remain within the limitations of the original system. If they stick to that, then it’s probably impossible that they could compress the audio data. The TurboCD is probably not powerful enough to decode MP3s in realtime without dipping into Wii-native routines.