Wii Homebrew Dash!

12:56 am Game Development, Gaming, Modding

Beer + Wii?I feel bad. I have a Wii, but barely use it. For the first few months of owning a Wii, I played Zelda: Twilight Princess, Wii Sports, and eventually Resident Evil 4 (which is better on the Wii than the PS2 or Gamecube, but that’s a different post). I tried to get into the Wii, I really did. I checked out the news and participated in polls, but with long stretches of time with no decent games coming out, I lost interest and took solace in my 360. Plus, the Wii doesn’t give achievements.

A few months ago, I saw that the Wii had been hacked, and the hackers had a video to prove it. Fast forward to today, where Wii homebrew is alive and well, with no mod-chipping required. The Wii homebrew community has matured to the point where tons of documentation is available and it appears very easy to get say, an NES emulator running on the Wii. In fact some crafty coders created something called the “Homebrew Channel” which makes running homebrew apps a piece of cake. After doing a bit of research, I decided to see how long it would take me to get some homebrew apps up and running on my Wii.

I’ll explain all the details in a bit. For now, here are the required supplies:

Why is Zelda: Twilight Princess required? The linchpin for this whole operation requires that you load a hacked Zelda: Twilight Princess save game, and you can’t do that without the game.

What is the “Twilight Hack?” It’s essentially a modified Twilight Princess save game that allows people to run their own code on the Wii. Although Nintendo recently updated the Wii which blocks the Twilight hack, that block only lasted for a few hours. The Twilight Hack has already been fixed up and is good to go, even on the 3.3 system update.

Why do you want the Homebrew Channel? It creates a channel on your Wii that easily allows would-be homebrewers to run their apps from a shell with a nice UI. It’s not a necessity, but if you’d rather load a Twilight Princess save game every time you want to run some homebrew, be my guest.

And We’re Off!

The SD card and reader

8:20 pm: I rip open the packing and get at the meat of the SD card and reader.

8:24 pm: Drive hooked up to the PC, SD is in the reader.

8:31 pm: PC drivers installed for the card reader, computer restarted .

8:40 pm: Screen grab app downloaded, because hey, I might want need to take some pics and I have an apple keyboard (no printscreen button).

Wii Update 3.3

8:42 pm: Grabbed fresh batteries for the Wiimote because I haven’t turned it on in months. 3.3 Update started installing on the Wii.

8:47 pm: Screen capture tool installed, still waiting for the Wii update.

8:50 pm: Wii is fully Updated to 3.3.

Twilight Hack on the Wii

8:57 pm: The Twilight Hack requires you to remove any Twilight Princess save game you might have had. I didn’t want to get rid of my save game (I’m like, 7/8 done) so I copied it to my SD card, then onto my PC. After deleting everything on the SD card, I copied over the “private” directory from the Twilight hack download onto the root of the SD card. After putting the SD card and Twilight Princes into the Wii, I then went to the memory management options on the Wii and copied the Twilight Hack over to the Wii’s main memory.

Homebrew Channel Installed

9:08 pm: I put the SD card back into my card reader on the PC, deleted the hack (it’s on the Wii now!) and copied over the “Wii Load” directory and “boot.elf” from the Homebrew channel download over to the root of the SD card. Putting the SD card back into the Wii, this time loaded with sweet homebrew, I ran Zelda and loaded the hacked save game, but nothing seemed to install. After going back online and finding out that you have to load the Zelda save and then go talk to the guy in front of you (in game), the Homebrew Channel install started.

Homebrew Channel

9:15 pm: Install complete, homebrew channel up and running!

Homebrew Channel Menu

Between picture taking, downloading screen grab utilities (which I ended up not needing), finding batteries, updating the Wii and only a few minor snags, I’d say that’s not half bad. In just under an hour, I had ScummVM (SCUMM Game emulator) and FCE Ultra (NES emulator) running smoothly. Now, I gotta buy one of those Wii Gamepads. Sadly, the Wiimote doesn’t work with the NES emulator. The Wiimote is fine for ScummVM though.

FCU Ultra on the Wii

One Response

  1. DarkTrick Says:

    Scumm on the Wii?

    Holy hell – does that mean Day of the Tentacle hotness is only a modicum-of-inconvenience away?

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