If that could be done, then there wouldn't be a cause for concern. You can't exactly replace a Wii with new NAND once Not64 wears it out at a rapid rate. And yet, every time this has been asked, the developers (extrems) has blatantly refused to answer it.
Given that you have the social manners of a three year old and your schizophrenic diatribes have managed to piss off the developers of every project you've ever shown an interest in, I think you're mistaken - he's not dodging the question, he just doesn't want to deal with you (and nobody can fault him for that).
You've been told several times that there is no risk of damage due to the VM system but refuse to believe it. Since there's a slim possibility that any noobs stumbling upon your posts may not recognize them as the ravings of an individual who refuses to accept reality, here's some cold hard facts (based partly on information from the
datasheet for the wii's NAND):
- The reason for implementing virtual memory is simple - due to the limited amount of contiguous physical RAM in the wii, it's impossible to fully load large ROMs such as Conker's Bad Fur Day or Resident Evil 2. Virtual memory allows a small window of physical RAM to act as a larger window of virtual RAM. It's a lot simpler (and faster) than doing on-demand loading since much of the access bookkeeping is handled by the CPU.
- Reading from the NAND does not harm or reduce its lifespan in any way. It's actually helpful, since over a long period of time (10 years according to the specifications) the data held within a page will degrade if it isn't accessed. Only writing (which implies erasing) affects durability.
- Not64's VM implementation actually behaves closer to a memory mapped file rather than true virtual memory - each page is only written to
once (when the ROM is loaded) so there is no repeated erasing/writing while playing.
- Each NAND page is guaranteed by the manufacturer to support
at least 100,000 program/erase cycles. That doesn't mean the NAND will stop working after 100,000 writes - that's for
each individual page. Meaning if you used Not64 every day to play 10 games (assuming the pagefile always used the same area of the NAND, which it wouldn't) it would last
over 27 years before wearing out a single page of NAND. Given that all Nintendo's date/calender related code will only work up until the year 2038 before overflowing, I don't think 27 years is much of an issue.
- In addition to the number of guaranteed erase cycles there is also wear-levelling and error correction codes in use. So even if a bit decides to fail it can be corrected without any issues.
- Several Wii games use temporary files on the NAND as secondary storage, most notably SSBB - but unlike Not64 which only writes once, it constantly updates the temp file with new information causing repeated erase/write cycles and hence wear. Where are all the reports of SSBB causing NAND failures?
- There are also games that use DLC from SD cards such as Guitar Hero or Rock Band: every time a DLC song is played it gets copied to the NAND and deleted when the song is finished. Most of the songs are between 20MB and 30MB and last around 3 minutes so during just one hour of gameplay using only DLC songs, roughly 500MB would be copied to/erased from the NAND which is substantially more than the 64MB written by Not64.
- Loading WiiWare/VC from an SD card behaves almost identically as other people have already pointed out - again, this is a method implemented by
the people who made the system. If that itself wasn't enough to placate your concerns, consider there haven't been any mass reports of NANDs failing due to WW/VC overuse either.
- Even if you did somehow manage to expend all the usable erase cycles of an individual NAND page, it would not stop your wii booting or cause any loss of data. Pages are erased during writing; IOS would notice the erase cycle failed, mark the page as bad then store the data to a different free page. In the worst case scenario the new data wouldn't get stored but all existing data would still be perfectly readable.
- There are other parts of the wii with shorter expected lifespans. One small section of the SEEPROM for example gets reprogrammed every time any IOS is loaded... The WiiU's virtual wii doesn't feature the same behaviour, draw your own conclusions from that if you really want an excuse to run around claiming that the sky is falling.
