Will VC games be playable from SD cards?

[BrandonMcAuslan]

What happens when you fill the internal memory with VC games?
Will you be able to save them to SD card and run them from there?
Right now you can't load vc games from the SD!? (At least so I hear - could be wrong as I've not tested it myself)...

 

[hiredgoonz]

For now, you're right, they have to be in the internal memory.

It shouldn't be impossible to load them from SD and my only guess as to why the don't support it has to do with the way the channel information is stored and accessed.

What happens if you have a channel stored on SD one time and then boot the system up without the card inserted? As it stands, channels are the programs stored on internal memory which is much faster than a lot of the SD cards floating around out there.

If the system had to access channel information from an SD card of whatever speed, every time it booted, it could slow you down quite a bit...

If you run out of space on the internal memory, you can store the VC games on SD and swap them back and forth (which saves you from needing an internet connection to redownload from Nintendo)...

 

[BrandonMcAuslan]

Better idea would be that there is info on the internal memory to show the channel exists - but the game info is actually stored on the SD card.
The wii only searches for the game when you try boot up the channel. If the card isn't inserted then a "game not found" message appears. - This would solve loading time issues...

 

[hiredgoonz]

Agreed, that seems like a workable solution. I think it's kind of strange that you can't access directly from SD...for now it might not be a big deal, but a year down the road a lot of people will have filled the internal memory...

I would imagine that Nintendo will either enable this functionality or allow the addition of a USB hard drive so that you won't have to constantly swap stuff from internal to SD and vice-versa...