Some Wii news

I’ve been away for some days, so I’m trying to catch up.

Super Mario Bros. on Virtual Console will now work OK with component cables. According to the Norwegian Nintendo website, Nintendo is working on fix for other VC releases released before April 2007.

The Norwegian Nintendo site also have Impossible Mission (Commodore 64) listed as April release on VC. So this will probably mean that more C64 games will come to the Virtual Console soon.

I’ve read on N-philes.net that an external harddrive for the Wii may be in the works. The reason for this is that eSOL have sendt out a pressrelease saying:
“(Tokyo, Japan – April 4, 2007) eSOL Co., Ltd. announced today that their leading embedded middleware products, “PrFILE2” FAT file system and “PrUSB/Host” USB host stack, were selected for the “WiiTM”, from Nintendo Co.;.

Both software products constitute fundamental functionalities in the Wii console – managing and transferring data and files with external media. In particular, PrFILE2 provides file management functions which read and write data of theSD memory card, as well as other media;. PrUSB/Host functions are used in Wii, to provide USB host functions.“

“PrFILE2 is a FAT file system supporting FAT12/16/32 and VFAT. It has an architecture that can support application specific customization requests flexibly and quickly.“

“PrUSB/Host is a USB host stack compliant to USB1.1 and 2.0 (Full Speed/High Speed) specifications to implement USB host functions in an embedded system. By embedding PrUSB/Host, direct communication with USB devices is supported without using PC. Optional Mass Storage class driver enables using USB flash memory, other mass storage device and digital camera as the external storage.“

I hope this will mean we can, when a new update for the Wii’s firmware comes out, use external USB drives like memorysticks and USB harddrives as storage mediums and that we can download Wii demos from the Wii Shop Channel.

Nintendo’s Q2 PAL releases for Wii, DS and GBA can be read at Eurogamer.net. There is no European release date for Super Paper Mario yet, but it’s already out in US.