About the Wii U units and software brought at E3 2011 (system "history" infos, leading to new tidbits about the storage situation)
- Apparently, the titles & demos present at E3 2011 (maybe not all) were brought to the show on SD cards
- The port was made accessible for studios to run their content.
- There's also a possibility that real dev kits (i think lherre talked a little about this in the first thread) were hidden behind, and directly plugged to the TV's, with the software brought & stored through digital means (storage, flash, Host PC linked to the dev kits containing the content, emulating a normal drive, perhaps the hypothetic access times, etc.)
- It seems no optical storage was involved at E3 2011. Wii U pseudo bluray weren't there at all. Some people could have thought, for certain demos, with the little LED lightened, etc. that such discs were present in the drives and that these were working, loaded the data & all, but it probably wasn't the case.
- With the latter information, it's plausible that Wii U brought didn't contained an optical drive. They certainly were just the dev kits (basically, all the hardware removed from the big development boxes ? i doubt it as dev kits are bigger than those units. A condensed version deprived of all the development stuff then ? A prototype of the retail board + components ?) with the activated at the time SD cards port.
- About the optical drives, in the less likely scenario (see the last point + the following message in some days) that they were inside, they could have been not-yet-working-models, placeholders. This could indicate an optical storage situation still in flux at the time, still in the fabrication process.
- This could reinforce the hypothesis that the Wii U cases were just "mock-up", boxes rather quickly built to contain the hardware they intended to bring at E3. It's a clear hint toward a possible change of the system appearance come E3 2012.
- Obviously, the situation has evolved since then, but not quickly after. This point will be made clearer in a following message about the optical storage of the Wii U.
I've heard that from two different sources but still grain of salt because it could only be relevant for some E3 2011 demos, not all. And i don't know if the SD cards bit is implying that this content worked directly from this media, or transfered from it to the flash memory or other storage to be run from those.