Hacking Possible SDXC support?

[Elliander]

Its great that this works, its just a shame SDXC cards are still so expensive. Ah well, in 5 years when my external hard drive starts dying, maybe I'll look at a large SDXC card (1 or 2 TB), see if they've gone down in price, I bet they will have. Plus the best part of this, is you could have all your games, homebrew, etc. right in your little sd card that hides away right inside the wii. You could have a beast of a wii without anything curious looking coming out the back and resting on the side of the wii. would truly be beautiful.

That's what I was thinking. I only have a few dozen Gamecube games, but the discs clutter so much up that I was thinking of hard modding for the Wode, but don't really like the way it would permanently be on that stand. If it works at 128 GB that would confirm that there is no real upward limit, but more importantly I could fit all my Gamecube games on it for SD loading.

There are 646 Gamecube games, and of those 23 are two disc games so with a total of 669 discs each at a maximum of 1.5 GB (assuming you don't scrub them) you will require a total of 1003.5 GB, or just over a Terabyte to store those games. Assuming you wanted to buy that many games you would still have more than enough room on a 2 TB SDXC card for all the Wii Ware games they will likely ever make, and could still fit backup emulators of every old school gaming console from Coleco vision through the Nintendo 64 with plenty of room to spare.

The 256 GB SDXC card was released in September 2012 at a cost of $900.00 USD. At that time the price of all older cuts cut in half, so at a rate of double capacity and half price every year we can expect that next year the 64 GB will cost around 30.00 on the high end, with 128 GB around 50.00 on the high end, and 256 GB at around 400.00 on the high end when the 512 GB comes out for closer to a thousand, depending of course on production costs. At that rate we can assume that that in about 3 years we should see 2 TB cards on the market, and that in about 5 years they should cost no more than a 2 TB USB hard drive costs today.

 

[wiimanofthenorth]

And in 5 years time, they'll be some other machine we'll want to hack so we can put all that on it anyways!

 

[the_randomizer]

DML was the intention

HDDs have faster read/write speeds and don't degrade nearly as fast as flash does.

 

[Elliander]

HDDs have faster read/write speeds and don't degrade nearly as fast as flash does.

I disagree. Less moving parts generally means longer life span. I have never had a single SD card fail on me - ever - but I have had multiple hard drives fail over the years for one reason or another. Flash memory does have a limited number of read/writes though so worse case scenario you just maintain a backed up copy SD card of everything intact so that if it does fail it's a simple matter to swap out. SD card speeds might be lower than some hard drives, but technically as long as they are at least as fast as physical disc read/write speeds I would be happy.

And in 5 years time, they'll be some other machine we'll want to hack so we can put all that on it anyways!

Unfortunately, I doubt it would be the Wii-U. Without Gamecube controller support you'd have trouble playing them even if you could emulate with zero slow down. There also hasn't been much luck on other consoles from what I hear so I'd wager that it would take at least 10 years before there is a console that might work for it.

 

[McHaggis]

I disagree. Less moving parts generally means longer life span. I have never had a single SD card fail on me - ever - but I have had multiple hard drives fail over the years for one reason or another. Flash memory does have a limited number of read/writes though so worse case scenario you just maintain a backed up copy SD card of everything intact so that if it does fail it's a simple matter to swap out. SD card speeds might be lower than some hard drives, but technically as long as they are at least as fast as physical disc read/write speeds I would be happy.

Current technology flash memory has a limited number of writes, but not reads. Even when the card can no longer be written, data can still be read. No backup required, but I'm sure a better solution (phase change memory, if my own serves correctly) will be available by the time you have to worry about it. If not, it will be cheap enough to replace.

 

[Elliander]

Current technology flash memory has a limited number of writes, but not reads. Even when the card can no longer be written, data can still be read. No backup required, but I'm sure a better solution (phase change memory, if my own serves correctly) will be available by the time you have to worry about it. If not, it will be cheap enough to replace.

Thanks, I stand corrected. You are right. The issue is how many times it can be overwritten before going bad (which is why you should never Defragment flash memory). Assuming that you use the SD card exclusively for loading games it will outlive the hard drive by years, and if you buy a second one as a "backup" kept in a safe place it will never go bad even if you dropped it. The hard drive, on the other hand, might last longer in cases of repetitive writes, but can fail even in storage. Then there is the issue of travel to consider. It would be much simpler to transport the Wii with all your games stored internally than externally.

In any case now that USB Loader GX can finally load Gamecube Games from both a USB drive and an SD card, along with EmuNAND for Virtual Console games I imagine there will be less attention placed on SD card use regardless. Even so, I am still motivated to see if the 128 GB SDXC card would work.

 

[wiimanofthenorth]

Unfortunately, I doubt it would be the Wii-U. Without Gamecube controller support you'd have trouble playing them even if you could emulate with zero slow down. There also hasn't been much luck on other consoles from what I hear so I'd wager that it would take at least 10 years before there is a console that might work for it.

I too doubt it will be a Wii U. What I'm guessing at, is the sort of people who like to hit, smack and tweak hardware into something it's not really meant to do, will more than likely have hooked up to their over-sized TVs a very nice Emulator running whatever console they grew up with in the next 5 years. For non-geeky families they'll stick to their game consoles to stream their movies. But the families where their is a geek in family that has some say on what's hooked up to the TV, they'll have a powerful HTPC in 5 years. Most likely because it's their current good PC, and in 5 years time it still be very good at emulating Wii, GC, PS2s, SNES etc. Who knows, someone might figure out a PS3 (more than just HB) or XBOX 360 and they'll be emulated as well - by top notch PCs of the future.

 

[Elliander]

While I don't doubt that emulation will happen on the PC, I do doubt it would be so fast. Emulation always takes more than running it on the console, and the processing power of consoles are typically better than computers of the same era.

 

[lwiz]

Consoles processing power is actually inferior or at most somewhere bit above the median compared to computers, but the systems are more tightly coupled and integrated. If the processors and graphics chips in emulating and emulated system were similar, the speeds should be nearly equal, or could be even faster on well written emulator. For example Amiga had in it's heyday a Macintosh emulator that could run mac software faster than a real mac.

 

[wiimanofthenorth]

Without Gamecube controller support you'd have trouble playing them even if you could emulate with zero slow down.

I knew I'd seen something somewhere... GC through wiimote

While I don't doubt that emulation will happen on the PC, I do doubt it would be so fast. Emulation always takes more than running it on the console, and the processing power of consoles are typically better than computers of the same era.

Well that's just not true. Wii U being the latest console, is said to run at about 50 GFLOPS. Which is 2 times faster than a PS3 and 2.5 faster than a 360. An Intel Core i7 980 XE which came out two/three years ago, runs at around 109 GFLOPS, and that's before you throw in a top of the range GFX card.

And just to go back a bit in years. The Snes was slower than an Intel 80386. The Snes came out in 1990 and the 80386 in 1985.

To my knowledge, consoles have never been faster than the latest PCs. It's just that for the price, in a console you get more bang for your buck. But as time goes on, this is becoming less and less true if first RRP are used!

 

[Elliander]

That is a very interesting product. I suppose with that it would be possible to emulate Gamecube on the Wii, and it wouldn't be that difficult of a hard mod especially if mass produced the way the WODE was.

As far as processing power goes I half agree with you. I disagree with the assertion that "consoles have never been faster than the latest PCs", but I agree that the gap is slowing down. On the other hand, "latest PC" is fairly subjective of a statement to begin with. On the high end for tens of thousands of dollars you could likely Emulate multiple new consoles at once, but that doesn't make it realistic to soft mod for.

 

[Elliander]

The 256 GB SDXC card was released in September 2012 at a cost of $900.00 USD. At that time the price of all older cuts cut in half, so at a rate of double capacity and half price every year we can expect that next year the 64 GB will cost around 30.00 on the high end, with 128 GB around 50.00 on the high end, and 256 GB at around 400.00 on the high end when the 512 GB comes out for closer to a thousand, depending of course on production costs. At that rate we can assume that that in about 3 years we should see 2 TB cards on the market, and that in about 5 years they should cost no more than a 2 TB USB hard drive costs today.

The prices are dropping even faster than I expected. I am definitely going to get a 128 GB SDXC to try during or after spring break.

128 GB SDXC: $84.99
64 GB SDXC: $41.99
32 GB SDHC: $19.99

In contest, my 32 GB cost me more last year than a 64 GB currently costs. It is very reasonable to assume that by this time next year a 256 GB SDXC will cost less than $100.00, with 512 GB costing the same the year after that, and 1 TB the year after that. From there is is more likely they will go to 1.5 TB the year after that, so in 3 years will will have 1 TB SDXC for around a hundred. Not bad.

 

[Elliander]

I performed a test showing that a 64 GB microSD will work on the Wii. Yes, that's right. A MICRO SD. I wanted to test 128 GB, but I wanted to instead test to see if I could get 128 GB working on the PSP so that will have to wait.

 

[Nemesis90]

I performed a test showing that a 64 GB microSD will work on the Wii. Yes, that's right. A MICRO SD. I wanted to test 128 GB, but I wanted to instead test to see if I could get 128 GB working on the PSP so that will have to wait.

I actually just recently got a 128 GB myself and was gonna chime in on this thread, but it seems you've already started testing for yourself. It's a Sandisk brand (i don't trust anything less for SD data storage) and i can confirm it works with just about every homebrew app, it just needed the proper format mentioned in this thread and it was ready to go!

 

[trumpet-205]

SDXC will work on Wii so long as you format it to FAT32. Do you need that much space? Doubtful, unless you plan to cram GameCube games on SD card.

As for the price drop, it mainly has to do with SSD. The widespread of SSD (which also uses flash memory) has really drive NAND price down, hence cheaper flashdrive/memory card.

 

[Elliander]

I actually just recently got a 128 GB myself and was gonna chime in on this thread, but it seems you've already started testing for yourself. It's a Sandisk brand (i don't trust anything less for SD data storage) and i can confirm it works with just about every homebrew app, it just needed the proper format mentioned in this thread and it was ready to go!

Thanks for that confirmation! In that case I will wait until the 256 GB drops price to test for the Wii again!

SDXC will work on Wii so long as you format it to FAT32.

Oh, I am well aware that any SDXC will work on the Wii, but there were people who insisted on multiple threads that it could never work. I myself wasn't sure if it would work out of the box or if it would need a softmod of some sort, but I after looking at the way SDXC works I was certain that it could work in some way. If you read a few pages back even after someone said they got 64 GB SD to work someone else claimed they were wrong and it required video proof from a poster. If I just said "Hey guys, microSD works!" there will be people doubting it. That is why I will likely continue to post here with each generation of SDXC, although at this point I am absolutely certain that any SDXC card will work.

That same logic applies to the Sony PSP as well!

Do you need that much space? Doubtful, unless you plan to cram GameCube games on SD card.

There are other reasons to do this. One is the use of EmuNAND. Although I got that working from the hard drive, loading times were affected by lack of extra space. Having it load from an SD card might (I hope) give me an increase in load times if there is plenty of free space after. Also, in emulating really old obsolete systems the data can really build up. It is actually not possible to fit everything on one 32 GB SD card, but it is possible on a 64 GB SD card.

When cards get up to 2 TB that is when I would want to keep my Gamecube Games on the SD card. When that happen I would hope that it will be possible to load Wii games from SD as well because then I won't need to have an external hard drive to play them, and people who have all the games won't need anything more than a thin USB powered external hard drive to go along with it.

As for the price drop, it mainly has to do with SSD. The widespread of SSD (which also uses flash memory) has really drive NAND price down, hence cheaper flashdrive/memory card.

Oh, I agree, but this is big news regardless. If you look at the history of storage the price per MB of hard drives (magnetic) storage dropped faster in the last 10 years than it has in the 50 years before. (probably because of the internet boom and the need for more storage space) Flash memory has always been more expensive per GB though. In 1978 a 1 GB flash memory device cost a million dollars while in 1980 a 1 GB magnetic storage device cost 400k. What exciting is that the price per GB is closing fast. I predict that before long solid state memory will be the preferred for internal devices (hard drives, SD, etc.), and magnetic storage will be used exclusively in USB hard drives and servers due to the lower cost per MB. When that happens though the solid state drives will pick up steam due to an increased market share and will eventually overcome magnetic storage driving them into extinction.

 

[Fishaman P]

I don't really see the point; my 2GB SD card is more than enough, and I have 20 homebrew apps, Project M, and a NAND backup stored on it.

 

[huniper]

I don't really see the point; my 2GB SD card is more than enough, and I have 20 homebrew apps, Project M, and a NAND backup stored on it.

Bill Gates in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC's 640KB usable RAM limit: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

The point is people never want to stay stagnant, especially when it comes to storage.

I say good job, keep testing. If one person sees benefit from this there's your 'point'

 

[nl255]

While I don't doubt that emulation will happen on the PC, I do doubt it would be so fast. Emulation always takes more than running it on the console, and the processing power of consoles are typically better than computers of the same era.

That's not as true as it used to be as there are lots of high level tricks that can be used such as translating graphics calls to directx/opengl on the fly rather than actually emulating the graphics hardware. Remember, most games are built with SDK libraries and very few if any are handcoded anymore. Think back to UltraHLE and how well that worked as long as the game was made with Nintendo's SDK.

 

[Fishaman P]

Bill Gates in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC's 640KB usable RAM limit: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

The point is people never want to stay stagnant, especially when it comes to storage.

I say good job, keep testing. If one person sees benefit from this there's your 'point'

One huge difference between PCs and the Wii: The Wii hardware will never change. It'll never get a new OS with higher system requirements.