Confirmed: Wii .ISOs Full of Junk Data
Mar. 13What's 100 MB to you? Maybe an episode of a favorite television series, encoded to .mp4 format (to .avi, probably one-third to one-half of an episode). It's about an album's worth of MP3s, or perhaps a single data library in a PC or Xbox 360 title. It's roughly 1/40th of the size of a Blu-Ray disc.
It's also the total size of the operating data on a copy of Wii Sports. Yes, that's right, Wii Sports could fit comfortably on the average audio CD... seven times.
It was discussed in a comments thread a long time ago on this blog, but all Wii games discs carry at least 4 GB of data, regardless of how complex the games themselves are. Turns out retail Wiis won't boot anything less than 4GBs in size.
Hackers, of course, can modify Wiis to get around that, and someone finally built a utility to scrub the junk data out of Wii .isos. It's called WiiScrubb 1.0, and is pretty old news by now.
WiiScrubb was probably developed for nefarious purposes, but it's interesting in its own right. it seems like a lot of Wii titles (the massive Brawl excepted) are clocking in with disc sizes less than half that of the average PS2 game... despite costing about $20 more.
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