Like Deathcape said, the real limit is the developer's ingenuity. A grand total of three Nintendo 64 games were greater than 40mb in size. Before that, not a single game on ANY Nintendo system was that large. And yet you still had long, epic games, like the Mario platformers, the Final Fantasies, the Zeldas--all the good stuff.

Also, I stopped believing storage size limits were an issue when I found out that they compressed a two-disc Playstation game onto a 64mb N64 cart (Resident Evil 2) with minimal quality loss.

i'm in the minority that would have favored a game like final fantasy crystal chronicals: my life as a king to not have mp3 music, and instead go midi. it it means they'd have more than 6 tracks to make me sick of, that's much more valuable to me than having a game with very precious little (even if it's amazing) music.

the world of goo devs (or should i say dev?) kinda got around that problem by having a couple dozen music tracks, with a lot of them being less than a minute long.

No, no. Actually VC games are bigger than the original games, here are some examples:

Title---------------------------Original--------VC

Super Smash Bros......... [11.94 MB]---[45.95MB]

Legend of Zelda OOT..... [25.34 MB]---[44.79MB]

Star Fox 64........................ [10.13 MB]---[25.86MB]

Paper Mario....................... [21.60 MB]---[40.28MB]

The biggest Wiiware tittle is Final Fantasy My life as a King which requires for me, a 128KB user, to wait atleast 45 min to download its 42.91MB. So yes download speed is an issue. As i said not all the ppl has +1MB in boardband.  Also making a bigger game would require more space of your internal memory.

I believe that every VC game comes packaged with an emulator, which you don't need for a new title running on Wii hardware. So that would account for some, or possibly most of the extra size. Some extra size would be for DRM. If those two don't account for all the extra size, then who knows what else they stuck in there.

Wow.  Why would Nintendo not use a shared emulator?  An advantage would be custom emulator to fix bugs in a generic emulator, but the same could be done with plugins to a generic emulator.  Pre-installed emulators obviously wastes space if you don't have any VC games, but having 2 or 3 N64 games would use up even more space than all of the emulators combined.  Also if Nintendo's upcoming SD card fix allows games to be played from the SD card (or automatically swapped to main memory) then it would be beneficial if only the game content needed to be copied and the main emulator could remain in the Wii's internal memory.

Do you have a link for this?  I am really curious why this would have been done.

The SD card fix is okay... but the limit is still 2 gb... i would really love a hard drive add-on using de usb ports... it could easilly be done and a 50 gb hd would cost $20 - $30...

@Blappo: The emulator is included into every download, but only the first one installs itself into the system. Also, the same case could be with DRM.
In N64:s case this could be different, due to the number of microcodes used. The only N64 titles currently available, are titles that use the original 1st party microcode.

@bdbdbd - That sounds better.  This would mean there is no way to remove an emulator from a Wii or backing up a game to a SD card also backups the emulator (otherwise you could backup your games, delete all of the games for a system and then restore them with no emulator).

@Blappo: I did some quick research and there appears to be a number of different emulators.

These are file sizes of a few Virtual Console games, where the first value is the size of the file in system memory and second value the size of the downloadable file in Shop Channel:

SMB 3: 3,875/3,875 MB
DKC: 8,125/17,255 MB
Metroid: 3,125/12,125 MB
Yoshi's Story: 20/20 MB
Pokemon Snap: 19,875/19,875 MB
Paper Mario: 33,75/42,75 MB
Ice Climber: 3/11,875 MB

Maybe the file size seen in shop channel is the size of the original download and emulator comes only with the first download. Paper Mario was my first N64 purchase and SMB 3 runs with the emulator in Metroid/Ice Climber/Wario's Woods. DKC is my only SNES download.

IMHO, I think it has to do with storage space, once Nintendo irons out that wrinkle, I think we might see bigger d/ls, maybe some games with added online play (we can dream cant we)