Wiiware games will be compressed when not played, expanded when played.

Link.

"Also, WiiWare titles will be compressed. When you start a game it will then expand."

Wiiware games won't take so much space after all. Yeah the memory is still small but it's way less worse than expected. Now I wonder how much a compressed wiiware game takes.

I care. It's just that it's so obvious that the Wiiware would use the same system as the VC uses. chris3116

Hmm, that still means then that it is limited by the amount of RAM in the Wii. Well, unless the decompression is dynamic (read: noticeable load times).ThePlothole

This thread is getting complicated, or at least for me. I'm not such an expert in technology. But, it sounds good.Thiago26792

Hmm so let's say you had 200 free blocks of memory left on your Wii and you then downloaded a compressed game which then took up all of those 200 blocks. How would you be able to play the game when it's still compressed and there is no room left on your Wii ? Popadophalis

In the scenario i don't think you would be able to play it. But hypothetically lets say you have 500 free blocks. And also that the games are 100 blocks when compressed and 200 blocks when not. Without the compression system you would only have space for 2 games on your Wii. But with the compression system you can have 4 games stored. (3x100 + 200 for the one you run).

Hmm so let's say you had 200 free blocks of memory left on your Wii and you then downloaded a compressed game which then took up all of those 200 blocks. How would you be able to play the game when it's still compressed and there is no room left on your Wii ? Popadophalis

[QUOTE="ThePlothole"]Hmm, that still means then that it is limited by the amount of RAM in the Wii. Well, unless the decompression is dynamic (read: noticeable load times).m_machine024

If the games decompress completely before they are able to run, then you're restricted by the amount of space available to store that game in it's uncompressed form. Since the Wii doesn't have a Hard Drive to cache the game onto (caching to the flash drive would be too impractical), the only place for this uncompressed data to go is into RAM.

On the other hand, if compressed data is extracted only as needed, then this won't be an issue. However decompression does introduce a certain amount of lag between when the data is accessed and when it's available.

[QUOTE="m_machine024"][QUOTE="ThePlothole"]Hmm, that still means then that it is limited by the amount of RAM in the Wii. Well, unless the decompression is dynamic (read: noticeable load times).ThePlothole

If the games decompress completely before they are able to run, then you're restricted by the amount of space available to store that game in it's uncompressed form. Since the Wii doesn't have a Hard Drive to cache the game onto (caching to the flash drive would be too impractical), the only place for this uncompressed data to go is into RAM.

On the other hand, if compressed data is extracted only as needed, then this won't be an issue. However decompression does introduce a certain amount of lag between when the data is accessed and when it's available.

[QUOTE="ThePlothole"]

[QUOTE="m_machine024"][QUOTE="ThePlothole"]Hmm, that still means then that it is limited by the amount of RAM in the Wii. Well, unless the decompression is dynamic (read: noticeable load times).m_machine024

If the games decompress completely before they are able to run, then you're restricted by the amount of space available to store that game in it's uncompressed form. Since the Wii doesn't have a Hard Drive to cache the game onto (caching to the flash drive would be too impractical), the only place for this uncompressed data to go is into RAM.

On the other hand, if compressed data is extracted only as needed, then this won't be an issue. However decompression does introduce a certain amount of lag between when the data is accessed and when it's available.

Actually no it doesn't.... The flash drive is often confused for RAM, which it's not.

The Wii has 88MB of RAM total (24MB 1T-SRAM... same as the GCN... plus an additional 64MB of DDR3 RAM). Now whether this is enough really depends on the game's complexity.