New Nintendo Direct 11.14.12 per neogaf

[Crono141]

Viper1 said:

Train wreck said:
Not to be an ass, since im getting the system anyway Sunday, but a lot of this information should have been given out months ago. They are kinda big.

The external harddrive that you use takes up two USB slots on the system.
The OS out the box is half the size for the Basic system
No USB flash drives

Only the external units that are powered via USB but this is often the case with these type of USB hard drives regardless of the system it's plugged into.   External units that plug into the wall will only need 1 USB port.

Crono141 said:
It seems we'll have to rely on the hacker community again to get features working that Nintendo was unable or unwilling to include in the system themselves.

There is no good reason you can't use WiiWare/VC titles on the second screen other than "Nintendo didn't want you to." Maybe it stems from how they decided to do Wii B/C (similar to how they did GC bc on the Wii), but if that was the case, then they should have changed how they handled BC so that they could deliver on what seems to the average end user as a no brainer.

This is correct.  The "Wii" system inside, as it were, is sandboxed or isolated away from the higher Wii U functionality to prevent a lot of the Wii exploits from working on the Wii U.

It's possible that the Wii U Virtual Console may allow you to link any Wii Virtual Console games you already own so that you may be able to download for free the updated Wii U version which would have GamePad functionality.

Remeber that Virtual Console is actually an emulator system and those emulators on Wii were not developed with Wii U functionality in mind.

Thing is, even if that is the case, there isn't a good reason they could not have written a compatibility layer to allow the old hardware to access higher functions.  The same sort of thing is actually being accomplished right now by hackers on the Wii.  Gamecube b/c on the wii now has access to USB (for usb loading) and the wifi connection for modem and BBA compatibility, as well as virual memory cards.  Planned updates include using wiimotes and classic controllers in place of gamecube controllers.  This is all accomplished through a virtualization technique.

Even if Nintendo has a wii built into the WiiU, the only reason you can't do things like upscale the resolutions or play on the gamepad is because Nintendo doesn't want you to.  I even heard the Wii software on the WiiU won't be able to access WiiConnect24, meaning no more multiplayer brawl or mariokart.  And why? Because Nintendo engineers can't be assed to make it work themselves.

Here's to hoping WiiMode will be as hackable as DS mode on 3DS.  If so, it might be possible to break out of the overly restrictive box Nintendo decided to arbitrarily place the end user into.