"Official" Wii specs supposedly leaked

[A Black Falcon]

I'm a little surprised at a lot of these because Nintendo did make it clear they only intended on including "the most popular games" on the system. Hopefully that translates to EVERY SINGLE GAME THAT ISN'T ARSE.

No, they said more than just "the most popular ones"... I'd expect most all of the games developed by Nintendo itsself. Third party ones have no gaurantees though, of course... and as for TurboGrafx and Genesis, I think that Sega and Hudson said that they'd be putting pretty much everything they could on it... though that could turn out to be wrong, I hope not. :)

Also, 512 MB is nice but downloadable content can get pretty big. Map packs alone tend to take up 10's of MB each. The SD card is also nice, but the real issue is how fast these things can be accessed and the cost. Hmm... If at any point a 20 GB SD card with speeds comparable to a 5200 RPM hard disk is made affordable, this becomes great, but the issue is I doubt that'll happen during this upcoming generation.

I'd assume that you could just put the game into RAM... and I would think that SD card access times, while not HDD fast, are probably reasonable. As for size though, you won't be getting a 20GB SD card anytime soon, not for any price most people can afford... :) I wonder if Nintendo will sell any Nintendo-branded cards or something, and if they do what sizes they'll suggest... (and if the rumors of being able to link a USB HDD to the Wii come true) we'll see. But for the purposes of these games, unless/until they start getting into CD titles (the eventual appearance of CD-based games from the TurboCD/TurboDuo, Sega CD, Saturn, and maybe even PC-FX (the successor to the PC Engine (TurboGrafx) in Japan, not released here) consoles on the Virtual Console are all reasonable guesses when compared to the current list), SD cards will be just fine. And if they do start doing CDs, not even a HDD would cope with it if you tried to download EVERYTHING, unless it's a really big HDD...