A... PlayStation 1 game... compressed by nearly an eight of the original size? Oh dear god it would melt the eyes in action.

The reason that the only stuff that goes on WiiWare is basic puzzlers or flash games is simple - that's all that developers can afford to waste their time with. WiiWare has absolutely terrible sales - partly because only 10 per cent or thereabouts of Wii owners use it, and partly because unlike PSN and XBLA, it's tightly restricted.

A developer doesn't have unlimited resources. They can either make a game where they have to factor in size limits for WiiWare, or they can do whatever they like for a much larger audience on PSN/ XBLA. Which do you think they're going to go for?

The occasional developer/ publisher will try and take advantage of WiiWare's minimal internal competition - but those guys are never going to have the capabilities or means to make much more than a simple puzzle game.

Nintendo has to do a whole lot of thinking. While there wasn't much choice with the Wii (because internal storage was too small), a 40 MB download limit when placed up against the PSN where you're free to produce 2GB games for download, is not competitive.

I'm glad we don't get 2GB downloads on the Wii. It would take a whole day to download just one game with the low speed of Nintendo's servers. 40MB really is quite a lot, but a lot of developers aren't used to that kind of restriction these days. It's not just about compression, it's also about making smart decisions like reusing textures, reducing the amount of colors used, reusing bits of music here and there instead of using large seperate music files, using static images or ingame models instead of video for cutscenes.
In the old days of computer gaming it was really important to be as efficient as possible, but it seems to be a bit of a lost art these days.

@Olorin - agree, 2GB would have taken forever. The thing is we don't really know how many Wii's are connected to the internet, or how many sales are, although some developers do complain. We do know, on the other hand, that developing for the Wiiware is much cheaper and easier than developing for XBLA/PSN. Developers said that a development kit for the Wii is 2-4 times cheaper.

The great games on the Wiiware service usually stay exclusive (Rage of the Gladiator, Dive, Lostwinds 1 and 2) or are ported (or vice versa) to iOS/Windows/Mac (some of the Bit trips, World of Goo, Nyxquest) and not to the other consoles, possibly also because of the controls. It's only Super Meat Boy and the recent HVS game that left Wiiware after developing for it supposedly... Random City Rampage will appear on all 3 consoles.

The 43 MB size limit is just an excuse of course. Games like the Chariots Greek racing game and that Cocoto platformer jumper were ported from the PS2. That says it all. Of course when you make a multiplatform game it's unlikely to be on the service, just like with retail, but when you make an indie game in mind, or develop exclusively, you can do just about anything and it's not a problem at all.

Cave Story and La Mulana came/come from the pc only to the Wiiware for a reason, and that should continue.

Game files can also be more efficiently compressed now than they could have been in the NeoGeo age. A game that's 330 MB NOW would have taken a lot more space had it been made back in the day, because the tech has gotten more efficient. That's why it's so easy to compress the retro games, but difficult for larger new games to squeeze into the limit.

yes it could... but Bad programing prevented it from hapening... why they choose to make pre-rendered cutscenes? everyore knows that videos takes more space than the game engine.
With creativity you can make huge and deep games with little space...

Agreed. That's the main reason why they can take a game like Rondo of Blood that's over 400 MB's and compress it down to less than 40. That's why I still believe Sega CD games can come to the VC, FMV or not.

Only true for certain assets. Audio and video compression has improved a lot over the past 10-20 years. These are lossy compression methods that work well when very minor artifacts introduced by the compression algorithm are acceptable

However, compressing things like the actual code of the game or 3D models haven't improved by much. This requires lossless compression, and the exact amount of compression depends on the properties of data, but a good rule of thumb is to expect only about 50% compression for typical data. Make a ZIP file out of typical data on your computer and you can see it for yourself. Note that if you try to ZIP a JPEG or MP3 you won't see much if any reduction in size because the file is already compressed about as much as it can go.

The idea that developers can compress a 300 MB game down to 40 MB is almost pure nonsense. The only way it could be done is if the game started out with really poorly compressed or uncompressed audio, video, and maybe texture assets to begin with. And I can tell you that although video game devs will not use excessive compression on most textures, on older systems especially we always try to pick efficient formats to start with. It's not an issue of developer time or effort, it's simply the limitations of compression technology.

When a game is ported down to a system that only supports smaller files, most likely what is done is replacing or removing assets: removing cutscenes, reducing audio or video quality, and reducing texture resolution are all techniques that can cut down a game's size dramatically, but not without an impact on asset quality.

Wait there... the main reason why rondo of blood was so big was the CD-Audio, wich was not compressed at all (if you remember, you could put your game disc on a stereo to listem the songs)... nowadays we have Mp3 and other good audio compression, but FMV still takes lots of space, so no FMV games would fit 40mb.
Still, virtual console could easly handle Sonic CD, Shining Force CD and other, but I think the VC momentum is gone and no new plataform will be ported

Didn't think it would be hard to compress Sega CD FMV but I guess I was wrong. But yeah games like Sonic CD which didn't have much FMV would probably be possible on the VC and I definitely know Shining Force CD would be possible (unless it has a lot of FMV somewhere which I'm not aware of).

Actually, modern video compression gets better compression ratios than modern audio compression. So old games with a lot video might actually the BEST candidates for squeezing down into a modern download format, while games with a lot of audio are also good formats, but probably can't be squeezed down quite as much.

Think about that fact that a two hour movie can fit into a 700 MB file (the size of a CD) using MPEG4, where on a DVD that same moving might take close to 4 GB, and that's already compressed using MPEG2. I don't know what format Sega CD games used, but it was probably something closer to MPEG1, an older and simpler format that didn't offer nearly as much compression.

The difference is that while most people cant distinguish an 128kbps MP3 from an audio CD, compressed video looks really bad, pixeladed, with low framerate and will not be full screen... A 2hour movie compressed to 700mb looks nothing near as good as the original DVD, even if it keeps the same resolution

Not true. At least not true that you can't reduce size while maintaining quality. A 700 MB video may be only 20% of the size of the original DVD data, so if you can maintain quality only with larger file sizes you can still achieve significant savings. If you take a video and compress it to a smaller size using the same codec, then the results will almost always be worse. However newer, better codecs fit more content into a smaller data size. A 700 MB H.264 encoded video will almost certainly look better than the same movie encoded in 1GB with MPEG2.

Here is a website that shows some comparisons. All of the still images are taken from the same high quality source video, encoded at ht same bitrates (i.e., the resulting files are the same size) with different codecs. The differences are clear, and it follows that if you want to keep the quality the same instead of the size, then using a better codec will allow you to achieve much smaller file sizes.

http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/website/compare.html

@Arkaein
yeahm, but we are talking about 40mb -emulator data, that takes nearly 10mb if you consider NES VC files..

If rondo of blood can be on the vc service than sega cd should be able to be on the service if sega wanted to go through the trouble of making an emulator and wanted to be careful about the compression of those games.

With original games there is only so much that developers can do without compromising quality. Heavy compression can also lead to slowdown and long loading times which people have complained about with some wiiware games. Its better for developers to make their games with wiiware in mind than try to port over. There have been some great wiiware games that worked well with the file limit it just seems there are less and less new wiiware games to be excited about these days.

If wiiware stayed the primary platform for super meat boy they might have been able to do it but once they got courted by microsoft they mainly developed for that platform and couldn't go back. It seems even some well developed games for wiiware don't always sell well so hard to blame the developers too much for not wanting to put that effort to put it on wiiware.

If you read the piosts above, you'll see the only the music had to be compressed, which is why Rondo of Blood was able to come to VC. Other assets are harder to compress.

I fully understand the previous posts. Not every sega cd game had fmv and so all that would be needed for them is compress the audio just like rondo of blood to get it under the file limit. Its definitely possible for at least some sega cd games its more a matter of if anyone is interested in doing so.

"With compression comes lower quality"

Yeah, I can see that happening. But I can also imagine that developers don't want to be bothered by this. On xbox360 and PS3 this is not a issue.

There are a lot of reasons for the 40mb limit... keep in mind that the Wii has very little internal storage; I can't remember how much but it only takes 5 or so 40mb games to fill it up. Imagine if the games were 100+! You'd need an SD card after your first one.

The 40mb limit I think is also designed to limit the scope of WiiWare titles so that they are more 'experimental'. And there is another, 16mb limit that is recommended too. It's more about scope than compression.

The resolution the Wii runs at is lower, too, and so you don't need as much room for textures; its all going to look like crap anyway at 640x480. That saves a lot of room. Music takes up a lot of room; in Liight, music is like 80% of the size of the game, compared to about 5% for art (granted it has very little art). Your options for crunching sound are more limited, unless you want to work with MIDI (or similar like a lot of the old games do).

The Wii only has 512 MB (4096 Blocks) of internal memory with 1 block = 128KB of data. The DSi only has 256 meg of internal memory. The 3DS 2GB of internal memory

What's wrong with that?