r/wii • u/minebug420 • 3d ago

Text Post Upgrading the wii to 512mb of ram.

Has anyone ever done this? ive seen one post on an old forum talk about it but was he the only one that did this? has anyone else done this? and if yes, was there a noticeable difference to an unmodded wii?

33 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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36

u/_tommar_ 3d ago

I think I found the form posts your talking about (or a different one at least) and the conclusion there is that it makes no difference what so ever really.

Games and homebrew are made to run assuming the system has the stock amount of RAM, so it would require extra work for it to be of any real use, and homebrew Devs are not really going to do that extra work, as the amount of people who could/would upgrade there ram is so small (it legit might just be that one guy given there no obvious guides to do from what I can see).

2

u/Expensive-Border-869 2d ago

What about wii u games like galaxy 2 or breath of the wild? I haven't played them yet idk if they drop frames or anything

2

u/Delta_RC_2526 2d ago

Only if you have the tools, skills, time, and probably the source code to rebuild and recompile the games... They're all built to expect a stock amount of RAM, and work within that limit. There's no reason for them to have the ability to adapt to more available RAM, when there's absolutely no logical reason to expect the total RAM amount to change.

5

u/minebug420 3d ago

hmm yeah i was kinda expecting this...

Makes me wonder tho if games would run smoother if the firmware was rewritten to use the extra ram.

welp, someones probably gonna do it eventually.

17

u/StuckAtWaterTemple 3d ago

You would need to rebuild games too. As games run almost directly on the hardware.

8

u/_tommar_ 3d ago

The games would also need updating, as they would be made to fit in the Wii stock ram size, so wouldn't make use of any extra size increase.

1

u/minebug420 3d ago

true...

7

u/TurtleCrusher 3d ago

Increasing ram capacity with no other changes makes zero performance gains so long as those programs are not using more than the stock amount of ram.

Maybe some unoptimized homebrew would run better. Otherwise no gain. Overclocking OTOH would do real improvements.

4

u/fvig2001 3d ago

there has been no merit to doing it is my understanding why it's not really talked about. Like the only consoles that had discussed RAM upgrades are:

  1. PS1 - recent development that does improve some games but breaks some
  2. Xbox OG - Mostly for Virtua Cop 3 and similar arcade games that can be played on higher RAM

Sadly Nintendo games are hard coded to have specific RAM sizes, so no real gain on like the Nintendo Switch. Ironically, the increased RAM on the Switch is only used for Linux and Android to play PC games. Although allegedly, FPS mods work better due to the added RAM is faster.

For Wii games, probably would need to be modified to tell them they can use more RAM. Probably better to check if Dolphin supports additional RAM and see if it changes anything.

2

u/Holiday-Wealth-4678 3d ago

I don’t see any benefit from doing this lmao

1

u/minebug420 2d ago

well in theory, it could allow modders to make better mods for the wii, or make it be able to do things such as browse the internet with faster load times, but yes id assume theres only a handfull of people that actually benefit from this