What can the SD card slot be used for again? Nintendo state not for downloads but what can it be used for? Before Nintendo made that announcement many were planning to just bung in a cheap 32GB SD card to supplement system memory. I dont understand why nintendo has restricted the sdcard slot unless they are also preventing use of usb memory sticks. Surely if you save games to a hard drive that hard drive can be connected to a pc and hackers can attempt to crack the format and read the files. Just don't see the point of restricting the sd card slot.
Well. Surely you can put ISOs/homebrew on your harddrive, but the actual modding/hacking is done via SD card on the Wii. (IIRC it works on SD only) If you don't have an SD card, you can't play those ISOs. At most you'll get save data hacks this way, unless people find some way to hack the system via USB. Even so, there will always be hardmodding, but making softmodding harder will prevent a lot of loss from pirating, as you don't need to buy anything to softmod the system.
Edit: I just realized that perhaps reading of the USB harddrive can lead to cracking the game's anti piracy protection which was probably what you meant. But as Nintendo stated that it can't be used with a PC if it's formatted for Wii U. The whole drive will probably be a "unique" format to prevent PCs from reading it to begin with... But there's already tools for WBFS. Even still, downloads may require checking with the eshop's account data at least once to verify it as purchased, which is the only way I can see anti piracy really working assuming an unmodded Wii U. It'd have to be modded to stop the verification. Hmmm...
Edited by Ixchel, 16 November 2012 - 10:33 AM.
