37 replies to this topic

[grahamf]

All I'm going to say is that it's a moot point. The N64 was designed to have upgradeable memory, the Wii U is not. They only thing we can ask is "will 2gb be enough?" And I think it will.

[EvilMoogle]

Upgrading defeats the purpose of buying a console. 

 

[Dharmanator]

Nintendo is always on the cutting edge of cartoon graphics. The Wii U is plenty powerful enough for the next gen of red/ green overalls, giant gorillas, bananas, mini-carts etc.

No one cares if the Wii U can beat the ps3 or 360. The ante as been upped and we all saw it coming. Nintendo knew they were not going to be close to the performance of the next gen but went along anyway with their strategy of living off the popularity of their 25 year old franchises.

I like my Wii U. I don't love it. Consumers are agreeing with me and waiting for real gaming machines this year.

My Wii U will be my Nintendo 1ST party game machine and that is it. Developers know this is how many feel about Nintendo consoles now. We can see the results of this now.

[MorbidGod]

Nintendo is always on the cutting edge of cartoon graphics. The Wii U is plenty powerful enough for the next gen of red/ green overalls, giant gorillas, bananas, mini-carts etc.

No one cares if the Wii U can beat the ps3 or 360. The ante as been upped and we all saw it coming. Nintendo knew they were not going to be close to the performance of the next gen but went along anyway with their strategy of living off the popularity of their 25 year old franchises.

I like my Wii U. I don't love it. Consumers are agreeing with me and waiting for real gaming machines this year.

My Wii U will be my Nintendo 1ST party game machine and that is it. Developers know this is how many feel about Nintendo consoles now. We can see the results of this now.

I totally agree with that last statement. Hopefully Nintendo can correct that problem later on. But as of now, and forever really, it is true.

[routerbad]

The WiiU has 1GB for games & the other 1GB is for the OS, so it has twice the amount as the PS3, which is not a lot, the laptop i am using which was £400 has 8GB or GDDR3 & is twelve months old.

 

The WiiU should of had 5GB, that's 1GB for the OS & 4GB for games, both the PS4 & X1 are said to use a lot of RAM for the OS & other things like Kinect & the game/video streaming, so even if they use half of their 8GB they have 4GB left for games where the WiiU only has 1GB.

 

Developers & programmers have always wanted more RAM, they always have & always will.

 

The only way a RAM pack could work is if Nintendo gave everyone the sticks of RAM & had them install it as it's very easy & simple to do, this is for everyone that already has a WiiU & then on a set day release a update that recognises the updated RAM & new WiiU units already have the more RAM installed.

PS3 had, initially, 256MB available for games.  They expanded that later by 70MB.  So no, it has 4X the usable RAM for games, and with a little OS optimization they can free up another 512MB no problem, 

Nintendo is always on the cutting edge of cartoon graphics. The Wii U is plenty powerful enough for the next gen of red/ green overalls, giant gorillas, bananas, mini-carts etc.

No one cares if the Wii U can beat the ps3 or 360. The ante as been upped and we all saw it coming. Nintendo knew they were not going to be close to the performance of the next gen but went along anyway with their strategy of living off the popularity of their 25 year old franchises.

I like my Wii U. I don't love it. Consumers are agreeing with me and waiting for real gaming machines this year.

My Wii U will be my Nintendo 1ST party game machine and that is it. Developers know this is how many feel about Nintendo consoles now. We can see the results of this now.

"cartoon graphics" isn't a level of graphical fidelity.  It's an art style, that works for certain games that Nintendo makes, that is all.

 

The only reason Nintendo every started using a cartoony art style in their 3D games was the lack of RAM and cartridge space in the N64.  They had to use incredibly small textures stretched and blended and blurred over large areas to create environments.

 

Gamecube did a lot more, TP and Pikmin showed that they were able to create more realistic environments on their hardware.  The characters in those games certainly were not uber realistic, but the environments were incredible.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I believe you are mistaken, the PS3 OS resides in that 256MB of system memory so it actually leaves less than 200MB available for games, at launch it was considerably less than that.

This is why they had more problems with Skyrim on PS3 because they didn't have the luxury of unified memory where you can change where its allocated, using less for graphics so you can use it for system data.

 

This is why its so baffling that Nintendo have reserved 1GB for OS as supposedly that is all the PS4 has allocated and it has to fit the recent video encoding into that too.  I can only guess that perhaps part of that 1GB is actually used for game caching, but out of developers direct control.

[Goodtwin]

USB 2.0 data transfer is only about as quick as the disk drive on the Wii U, so there is no benefit to using a ram expansion via usb, and nothing else is possible.  The disk drive in the Wii U has a max rate of 22.5 MB/s, while the 360 had about 16MB/s, and the PS3 was around 10MB/s.  The Wii U disk drive allows for a lot more data to steamed in from the disk.  The Call of Duty games on Wii did this.  There wasnt enough ram to load the entire maps, so they would stream in the textures on demand.  Developers could always store a texture pack in the flash memory as well to alleviate the disk drive from being overworked.  I personally dont see memory as being a huge issue.  The Wii U is going to be a 720p console for the majority of games, so the use of huge high res textures doesnt really make much sense.  It wouldnt be that hard to scale back all the textures used in a PS4/X1 game to fit in the Wii U's memory.  For example, if you were to take Forza for X1 and render the game in 720p instead of 1080p, you could start scaling back texture quality quite a bit before the difference became noticable on screen. 

[Plutonas]

They could do it, in a form of "virtual ram", use 2-3 gigs from the included sdram (hdd). I think IBM cpus have this ability, to sync and create virtual ram.  I think nintendo did some bad choices, they could give us a much less horse power hungry controller, with touchscreen, more like a mouse... Avoid the big costs of a tablet and invest in more hardware...

 

but I think western industry behaves bad to wii U, because they want to promote their DRM and the "for them" big leagues.  Imagine if wii U takes off in sales... They had to ditch microsoft in a 100% rate.

 

So I believe there is more behind the doors, that the eye cant catch.

Edited by Plutonas, 03 July 2013 - 09:29 PM.

[djlewe78]

Ive always wandered why console manufacturers dont design there consoles with the ability for customers to upgrade the systems power. They do it with p.cs and as long as they designed it so its just a matter of plugging and unplugging components it would be a perfect solution. If your happy playing simpler games like Mario and indie titles you leave it, but if you want bigger mmos or shooters you buy an upgrade. All developers need to do is release the the game online and if your system ain't powerful enough it directs you to an online store and you order order your part. Players online ids will show how souped up they are and im sure that it would start a trend similar to people souping up cars etc.

[grahamf]

They do it because it's cheaper, and because not everyone upgrades so developers still have to keep the un-upgraded consoles in mind, effectively addind more difficulty to developement.

And have you ever bought an add-on module for the Gamecube?

[Nintyfan86]

They do it because it's cheaper, and because not everyone upgrades so developers still have to keep the un-upgraded consoles in mind, effectively addind more difficulty to developement.

And have you ever bought an add-on module for the Gamecube?

Only to play GBA games on the TV .

 

In all seriousness, the only add on module model that made sense was the SNES chip on a cart model. Even that was bad, since it would increase the cost of the games in some cases. 

 

To answer the original question, an upgrade-able console, or a PC-like device for dummies (so to speak), would be a disaster. Games would be fine I guess, as you would have a low spec, but you would only be able to make so many parts interchangeable.

 

You would need to solve a problem of making it possible for everyone to upgrade it without much user error. I guess, since it is all embedded, they could put the system on a tray, or in one spot, but in that sense, you are just keeping the shell. Otherwise, you have all of the problems already mentioned, and experienced first hand, by Sega.  

[TheDoritoKing]

The CD attachment for the N64 would of helped wonders if it came out along side the console... I dont even think it hit North America. If the CD attachment was out for N64 Square would of kept FF7 on Nintendo IMO.

There was no CD drive; the 64DD used proprietary, lower memory, Zip-based disks. 

I always imagined an add-on for the Wii U being a pass-through on the back, that would be flush but make the machine significantly longer; it would add DX11 support, 3GB+ of RAM, and other things that would change minds. 

Edited by TheDoritoKing, 08 July 2013 - 07:29 PM.

[grahamf]

There was no CD drive; the 64DD used proprietary, lower memory, Zip-based disks. 

I always imagined an add-on for the Wii U being a pass-through on the back, that would be flush but make the machine significantly longer; it would add DX11 support, 3GB+ of RAM, and other things that would change minds. 

Any longer and it won't fit onto a AV shelf.

 

That being said, we're back to developers either having to support systems that may or may not have the expansion pack, or force all users to buy the expansion pack to play games.

[MorbidGod]

Only to play GBA games on the TV .

In all seriousness, the only add on module model that made sense was the SNES chip on a cart model. Even that was bad, since it would increase the cost of the games in some cases.

To answer the original question, an upgrade-able console, or a PC-like device for dummies (so to speak), would be a disaster. Games would be fine I guess, as you would have a low spec, but you would only be able to make so many parts interchangeable.

You would need to solve a problem of making it possible for everyone to upgrade it without much user error. I guess, since it is all embedded, they could put the system on a tray, or in one spot, but in that sense, you are just keeping the shell. Otherwise, you have all of the problems already mentioned, and experienced first hand, by Sega.

I've solved it. Have a cartage like device that plugs in from the back. And that device is the motherboard with all the parts. And it would physically go into the console. Would need some sort of high speed port.

Problem solved. But it will never happen because it kind of defeats the purpose of a console.

[NintendoReport]

I've solved it. Have a cartage like device that plugs in from the back. And that device is the motherboard with all the parts. And it would physically go into the console. Would need some sort of high speed port.

Problem solved. But it will never happen because it kind of defeats the purpose of a console.

 

Nah, just convert an SD card into working RAM and ship that with a game, sell very cheaply, or giveaway to all Wii U owners. 

 

This will never happen, but they could add an option to allow the OS to use the SD card memory as RAM.

http://www.ehow.com/...ram-memory.html

 

Windows already allows this.

Edited by Sorceror12, 09 July 2013 - 06:04 AM.

[MorbidGod]

Nah, just convert an SD card into working RAM and ship that with a game, sell very cheaply, or giveaway to all Wii U owners.

This will never happen, but they could add an option to allow the OS to use the SD card memory as RAM.
http://www.ehow.com/...ram-memory.html

Windows already allows this.

Yes, to upgrade RAM to the Wii U that would be the best option.

Bare in mind I don't think the Wii U really needs a RAM upgrade. It has plunty of RAM.

[NintendoReport]

Yes, to upgrade RAM to the Wii U that would be the best option.

Bare in mind I don't think the Wii U really needs a RAM upgrade. It has plunty of RAM.

 

Oh, I agree. 

[MorbidGod]

Oh, I agree.