current output

[Necromancer]

How is USB sucky?

There's nothing wrong with USB for most tasks, but it's a bit slow for running programs directly from an external hard drive.  Still, it'd be OK if they'd allow it to work with any USB drive.  Most likely, they'd require their own overpriced drive, in which case a built in drive would look cleaner, run quicker, and be more convenient.

[SignOfZeta]

I seriously doubt this would be a problem on the Wii, especially with VC games most (if not all) will run from memory once loaded.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Wii's optical drive was on the USB bus.

[Necromancer]

The optical drive is irrelevant, as it wouldn't be able to feed a quicker bus anyway; the VC games are also mostly irrelevant, as the file sizes are too small to make much difference.  My point was that a hard drive will be needed if WiiWare is ever to rival the offerings of Live Arcade, which oft times are over 200MB in size.  With files this large, the speed difference would be quite palpable, and the greatest advantage of having a hard drive is decreased load times, not equally long load times (equal to the optical drive).

[SignOfZeta]

I seriously doubt it would be equal to optical discs. USB2 is pretty damned quick.

[Kitsunexus]

How is USB sucky?

Because it's not a cool little hard drive port that goes *click*!

[Necromancer]

I seriously doubt it would be equal to optical discs. USB2 is pretty damned quick.

USB 2.0 has a top speed of 60MB per second, with a real world throughput of around 25MB per second for hard drives; I've never seen any specs on the Wii's optical drive, but a 16x DVD drive has a data rate of 21MB per second.  I'd say that those numbers are fairly close, at least much closer than the gap between a optical drive and a eSATA drive (50-100MB per second).

[kenomac78]

it doesnt matter as an USB hard drive would not even work with the wii, because its nintendo's way or the highway, unlike M$ or SORNY who allow alot of customization and exprimentation  with their products, compared to nintendo.

[ceti alpha]

Ah, OK, you're talking about the selection of games being released. It seems Nintendo (or whomever) is unable/unwilling to secure rights from certain 3rd party companies to release their games on the VC.

Karma?

[Keranu]

it doesnt matter as an USB hard drive would not even work with the wii, because its nintendo's way or the highway, unlike M$ or SORNY who allow alot of customization and exprimentation  with their products, compared to nintendo.

Personally, I don't really like the idea of consoles getting "customization" because I think that takes away from the purpose of a console. People talk about modding their X-Boxes to play emulators and movies and what not, and while that's all awesome and all, it's stuff that I can do with my computer. I mostly buy a console just to play games designed for it.

[Necromancer]

it doesnt matter as an USB hard drive would not even work with the wii, because its nintendo's way or the highway, unlike M$ or SORNY who allow alot of customization and exprimentation  with their products, compared to nintendo.

The discussion was about Nintendo adding functionality to the Wii, not what it is currently capable of.  If they were to start selling a Wii HDD to allow content similar to that on Live Arcade, it would have to connect via USB, as there's no other appropriate ports available.