Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Not trying to be rude but where have you guys been?
This was confirmed after the new Wii site went up.

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Is this some kind of super special memory? Why only 6kb? Flash memory is dirt cheap nowadays.

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Why 6kb? It's probably enough for storing the data needed for customisation... other than that, it's not meant as a memory card for taking saves with you and such, so I guess that's why it's not huge.

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Yeah, 6kb is ridiculously little for something like this in 2006. If they really want the wiimote to be the mobile carrier of a player's identity, they should've done better than that, cause future uses will be very limited. File this one under "What were they thinking?"

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Yeah, I agree with #1. There was a video somewhere (it might've even been the September 14th press conference) that showed the guy making the Samuel L. Jackson Mii and towards the end he mentioned that you can just save it to your controller and off you go. This is old news guys, sorry!

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I'm with #1. . .

You guys OK in there? Did 'ya hit 'yer head 'er something?

Remember the video that you guys posted that showed the Wii's falling out of the remote to land in the "parade" space?

Earth to joystiq. . . come in joystiq. . . :)

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6k is loads of room for the Mii, all the options are pre-set in the program so all the Wiimote would need is an index for the selected options that comprise the Mii. Spore has WAY more customisation options than the Mii, including 100% user created shapes, and each creature compresses to a massive 3k.

The Mii, imho, is one of the best features of the Wii. The more games that allow me to use my Avatar, the better.

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Are you guys kidding; 6kb is acceptable?

6 kb is 0.006 MB; check out how cheap flash memory is at retail and tell me this is acceptable.

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@Wiiboy - 6k is loads of room if the only function is loading Avatars. If they want to transmit save game info, then no, 6k is not enough. It would be nice to have your own Wiimote save all your save games, game settings, Miis, and "friends" list. Then you would never have to worry about other people altering game settings, overwritting saves, and cluttering up your friends list with people you don't know. Also, the ability to go to a friends place, load your Mii, saves, game settings and friends up for some gaming would be very slick. You would run into possible data corruption issues with this idea... yet with Wii24connect, settings saved on the system and an ID# on the wiimote, you could achieve all these features with 6k anyway -- with a far less chance of data loss. So yeah, 6k could easily be enough for me to go to a friend's system with my Wiimote, load up my saves, my Mii, my game settings, and my friends list.

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This has been known since the press conferences of september.

On the subject of 6kb.
It is very very small... considering how cheap flash memory is, and considering that it will ALSO be used for storing audio to be played on the speaker, it will not be of much use in my opinion.

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Darn, Draracle pointed it out before I could. :)

No ammount of storage they could put on the wiimote would be enough. Something new could always come out that would take up too much of it.

So access it over the internet instead, and your wiimote from afar shares all the combined space of your shiny new massive SD card in your home Wii.

I think it'd be pretty cool if you could bring your wiimote with you and sync friend codes with people you meet, apart from each of your home Wiis. I seriously doubt this will happen since the wiimote doesn't have much in the way of an obvious interface for this behavior, although I suppose the speaker could be used for it.

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Artr, it will NOT be used for anything related to audio. This is non-volatile flash memory, which has a very limited re-writable life compared to regular battery backup ram.

Writing to it every time a sound played would simply be a waste.

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There's never been a specified number as to how many Miis you could take with you. I always assumed it to be more like one or two.

Also, if you click the link, you'll see he told about being able to send them through the Message Board... something I'll probably take advantage of so I can get my friends on my Wii even if they aren't actually playing with me.

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well if the wii mote has a lot to put the sd memory cards , it might work for more customnization
since those cards are small

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For Miis, 6kb would be a HUGE amount of space, even if they're programmed really sloppy. I've coded for microcontrollers that had less than that and was still able to store quite a lot of data. The only data that needs to be stored for a Mii would be a few variables indicating which selection was made for a certain feature, and that would fit in a few bytes if done well.

Maybe the amount was chosen because it was pretty much the lowest they could go for the lowest possible price, even if a bit of that space is wasted(Looking at price per kb for example)

Of course, it could also be used for storing calibration data and some personal preferences, or maybe a few custom textures/icons(As seen in Animal Crossing and Mario Kart DS) Even then, 6kb is plenty of space.

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No one has really considered data transfer here.

Maybe that is why they have such limited storage - how long would it take to transfer massive ammounts of data to the controller?

Sometimes simpler is better.

You know, nintendo didn't have to put any mem in the controller, but they did, so lets give them Kudos for being inventive and stop critisizing them. Besides, they may have upped the mem since then, who knows...

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Why does every feel the need to complain about the 6kb?

The Wiimote is a very specialized and cost-sensitive device. I imagine the remote includes a standard $2 or so microcontroller that acts as the brains of the unit. Microcontrollers tend to come with 6 to 128 kb of flash memory to hold programs and data. I bet Nintendo's Wiimote firmware only takes up a fraction of the microcontroller's built-in flash and thus has 6kb left over, which they're not letting go to waste but instead using for Mii storage.

Call me crazy, but I've always figured the Wii Channels/Mii were a relatively new concept. The controller, on the other hand, has been designed and showcased since E3 '05. Using the left over memory already in the Wiimote design was probably an afterthought after the Miis were born, and a good one at that. Certainly better than completely re-designing the Wiimote to include a seperate and larger flash chip integrated external to the microcontroller. A new controller design in 2006 would have most likely resulted in PS3-style shortage of Wiimotes this holiday season. Ick.

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judging from the creation tool I saw, you could probably keep a mii avatar to around 24 bytes. A friend would cost no more than about 16 bytes (auth code and mac addy). You could easily store a lot of global game settings like sensitivity, for 16 bytes or less. Of course, I do agree that memory is cheap, and it would have been nice to be able to store savegames, and information from every game on your remote, but alas.

In any case, you could do alot of what you guys want with 6k memory.

10 mii avatars, 50 friend codes = 1kb

This is of course assuming the memory structure of storing things is along the lines of my rough plan.

So here's hoping that friend codes stick to the console and controller I guess.

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You know what would be sort of neat? If the Wii-Motes were able to 'sync-up' to one another, and you could transfer friend codes like that. No input required. People could just take their Wii-Mote with them, if they were to go to a friend's house, and just like that, they can add each other.

Even still, I'm grateful for being able to hold the Mii characters, alone.

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Oh no! Legend of Zelda won't be as fun now because WE DON'T HAVE MORE SPACE FOR AVATARS!!!11!!11!1

Get it together, you whiners.

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Yet again, nintendo is the first one to add an inavation, like built in controller memory, to their console. I cant wait to see olaberations of this. I could just imagine a memory hack for a controller like this.

I cant wait for a time when all of your information is stored in your controller. It would contain your ID, game saves, Avatar/Mii, your friends list, and all of your settings, and downloaded games and videos. Call me crazy, but i think we could see a controller harddrive hybrid next generation, considering that they already make regular sized flash drives that hold 64 Gigs.

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And here's me thinking that Nintendo fans were more interested in game play than console specs.

You all sound like PS3-fanboys M I RITE?

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@ 22s "You all sound like PS3-fanboys..."

Hardly. :|

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Yet again, nintendo is the first one to add an inavation, like built in controller memory, to their console. I cant wait to see olaberations of this. I could just imagine a memory hack for a controller like this.

I cant wait for a time when all of your information is stored in your controller. It would contain your ID, game saves, Avatar/Mii, your friends list, and all of your settings, and downloaded games and videos. Call me crazy, but i think we could see a controller harddrive hybrid next generation, considering that they already make regular sized flash drives that hold 64 Gigs.

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