Wii owners, it's time to dust off that little white box in your entertainment center.  At Satoru Iwata's keynote speech at GDC earlier this morning, Nintendo announced the final pieces of information on their internal storage solution for the Wii.

The Wii's 4.0 system firmware will include support for SDHC cards up to 32GB in size, and games from the Wii Shop Channel can be downloaded directly to the SD card.  Once downloaded, the game can be launched directly from the SD Card, using a new caching system which allows the Wii to place the game into a temporary memory allocation.  A demonstration of Zelda II: The Adventures of Link was used to show off how SD card launches work, and the response time was pretty quick.

Once you've done the firmware update, a new SD card icon appears at the bottom of the Wii's main menu, letting you quickly navigate and launch games directly from the SD card slot.

Oh, and one other little tiny bit of information about the storage solution: It's available right now.  Or rather, will be in a matter of minutes.  The firmware launches today, and the Wii Shop Channel will be updated once the Iwata keynote has completed. If storage issues on the Wii have kept you down, this'll almost certainly improve your spirits.  Not to mention, it gives that underused SD card slot a sense of purpose and drive.

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Jeanne Gliebe said:

... Hmmmm... Will it let you save/back up games on the SD card? My Wii is in for repairs and I'm desperately hoping I do not lose my Animal Crossing town. I sure would have liked to back it up

March 25, 2009

Steven Richins said:

... Just got ours back from repairs with Animal Crossing still intact.

March 25, 2009