Dual-layer discs in a single-layered world
The original premise struck me as one without much credibility. Someone had released a game for the Wii that was on double-sided media, and since the console had single-sided support, then you could send your console back and the company would upgrade things, free of charge. I mean, Nintendo might have deep pockets, but the sheer logistics of having umpteen million crazed owners shipping their beloved boxes back to the warehouse for individualized hardware changes seemed fantastic, in every sense of the word.
My son assured me that it would be so, because the guy at the rental shop (a few years older and much more experienced in the way of the gamer) had sworn that he knew of at least sixty cases. Since we were already in the car, on our way to rent a copy of Super Smash Brawl, I couldn’t go for any substantiation. Besides, a father knows that such an argument can never be won.
As the game loaded for the first time, I waited. When the screen announced that we should NOT turn off the power until the operation was complete, things made more sense. The mechanism chosen by Nintendo to improve the hardware involved a simple firmware upgrade. There’s always the chance of “bricking the box”, but at least we wouldn’t be doing any parcelpost to China. Things booted up normally, and the game remained “interesting” for about twenty-five minutes.
Give credit where it is due: the Nintendo corporation actually has a bilingual Canadian website with instructions on what to do if you absolutely need to have your console surgically modified. Here’s a link. I wonder if you can buy a Guitar Hero controller from the same place.
On other fronts, I’ve been busily trying to reformat and reinstall XP on a laptop, along with Mint Linux. It almost worked this afternoon, but Windows refused to restart. Turns out that inserting a partition between two active NTFS blocks doesn’t work well. I’m now transferring some important files to an external drive before I flush and repartition in a more “logical manner”. There goes the evening.
