If the WiiU RAM Memory, if the 512MB requirement is indeed real, therefore I suspect nintendo may unlock some of that reserved memory, it is still very unlikely that the whole OS and all other features would take this massive amount of memory, and I expect nintendo's software to be well polished therefore optimized to be more efficient in resources, I do not expect any big problems by trivial software mistakes because of development negligence. My personal experience shows me that stability was often not an issue in nintendo's devices.
Unless these 512MB of "restricted memory" is a simple mistake of misquoting the storage memory, 512MB of storage reserved for OS is nothing to be concerned of, but 512MB RAM is a heck of a lot for a console. The fact remains, at most they may reach 200-250 MB of RAM if they pack in all the stuff they can think and what we know, except there is only one thing, the web browsing, if you are able to activate home menu from a suspended game, therefore
I have constructed a solution for that, quite easy, the suspended game could easily be saved onto the harddrive or flash memory into a specific file that stores raw data from memory, similarly to how hiberfil.sys works on Windows, therefore your suspended game is not taking any RAM at all while you can browse the menus and web, it will just take more time to get it suspended, and revived because all the memory would take time to write on flash or HDD. I hope nintendo have though of this. I have not yet though practical uses for this but I have thought of this idea some months ago I may have forgotten every details, I was not able to post on neogaf for over 1 year, I am unable to write down responses for everything that has passed these 6 months, but i do have a ton load of bookmarks from the speculation threads, this is another story i continued below.
For nintendo they must evaluate the real circumstances, until they will build their online systems finally, their extended features and the finalization with the OS, the final + reserve RAM requirements will be estimated, from there they will be able to evaluate how much can be okay to unlock.
As this is one of my first posts on Neogaf, I have choosed to present my self on this occasion, as I am primarly a hardware discussion enthusiast, I don't think about stuff like Price, Release Date, Software Lineup prior release. I shall cross that bridge when I come to it.
It is also unlikely that I will personally buy the WiiU device on launch, firstly, there may not be any games for me as I only play the high-end first-party AAAs and althought ZombieU is impressive it, alone it cannot sustain me, I have zero interest for western 3rd-parties on an nintendo system in general, unless they are good enough, I wish Soul Calibur to return, I also wish to see something from ID Software on the system, to show the industry what's possible, to shut down some big mouths.
Through-out this year I have been heavily following WiiU news on all fronts including neogaf. As the poet writer IdeaMan posed, he was actually correct in a capacity, however his ideas thought are not toally technologically correct in some areas, some of the theorizing and speculation wrapped around the actual small amount of information is inaccurate, admittingly as it seems most of the extended text was some form of suggestive analysis, opinion influcening , which is not a good thing factually therefore poetry, but it keept the people busy at least. Not to mention the fact some of the stuff may have been outdated, as well as the negative press, those were all outdated rumors, bs and april fools.
So, yes for the last 4 months I have been actively gathering the info, didn't had a clue before that, it was a pain in the butt, had to look all back to know what's going on, a lot of analysis, a month passed I finally understood this whole thing to be well enough for posting so I settled at
http://thewiiu.com forums and posted there extensively for some time, It's very technical so can't mention all of it all at once don't even recall my self right now.
I just will summarize that I do agree with the GPU temporary add-in idea, and that the specs they are reporting are dev kits, it may be different in retail, devkits may change after release as well.
Second, the RAM was our most unknown variable and most important one, most of my efforts were on this, it is the most important factor that decides longevity of the device, all of the other components are good enough either way under than expected or above, they will be much more powerful than Wii and enable much greater first-party experience that I seek, however the lack or RAM may have cause great wastage of resources if it's bottlenecking the gaming experience.
Third, the specs leak has been purposelly constructed to conceal estimation of the device's performance, technically it is not very detailed, it may indicate some things, however it is practically useless. Most of the discussion is pointless on this, yet many of them do it, they are wasting time.
Fourth, not technical this time, .... excuse the writting, that is when i get overly excited, my grammar and english crumble down as i type fast, I want my
F-Zero UX.
