Be Excellent To Each Other

I just published a beginners guide to Wii Homebrew on SavyGamer, and thought it might be good to have a Wii homebrew thread here too, since it is one of the popular adwords that attracted people to the forums.

I hope you all are using the USB Loaders. It is shit hot.

i installed Stafall on mine to have free region channels, but there are many NTSC virtual console games that give me a black screen, and i can't seem to fix it. And N64 games get very very slow with strange sounds.

And anyone got to put the NTSC version of Madworld running? The Pal is bordered and has only 25fps (true!).

By installing this, would it allow me to use my 'merican copy of Harvest Moon Magical Melody GC disc again. Cos I'm fed up of buying Freeloaders to play it maybe once.
.

Yes.

most certainly yes. The only american game i had problems playing until now was Madworld, and i have some NTSC GC games

Will I be able to backup my games to keep them safe? And will I be able to back them up from the Internet, too?

[edit] It appears that I can. And an arcade emulator, too

Yeah, games average around 2gb, and have either negligible, or significantly sped up load times.

Bah, it looks like the MAME stuff isn't there yet:
No keyboard or Wii joystick support? What do you do, shout at it?

Shame. I hear the Snes and mega drive emulators are good.

So, the PS3 is a brilliant home media centre and the Wii is an excellent homebrew machine. Is the 360 the only console of this generation to be bloody good at its primary function - playing games?

The PS3 is now also quite handy at playing games. Not so sure about the online aspect, mind.

FTFY... I won't hear a good word said about the PS3!

But anyway, back on topic... My original Xbox is a fantastic emulator for the SNES and Megadrive so, even though I would love to mod my Wii, I might stick with my Xbox.

I am sorely tempted though.. I like messing with things like that.

And the Wii is quite good at playing Wii games.

Yep, but it's just a shame there's only a handful of them worth playing. All imo, of course.

rf playing GC-ntsc on my wii,

WE6FE works nicely, as does jungle beat, but MLB05 doesn't for some reason, haven't tried midway arcade treasureS

Hmm. So, that USB loader thing here.
What files do I need? And what the hell do I rename them? And why, why is it so hard for websites like this to have instructions?

Because if you are not intelligent enough to work it out yourself, you don't deserve to have it.









I do not have it.

at the pub atm, but will walk you through it later if you like.

Wii bricked. Yay homebrew!

Ach! I wish I'd gotten here sooner! You can install a program called BootMii, with which you can create a backup of your current 'system menu' for storage elsewhere, so that if you brick your Wii, you can just pop in an SD card or USB stick containing the relevant files, and revert back to your old settings. BootMii appears before the menu itself, y'see.

Fortunately, that's what I did. The restore seems to have gone well. I shall await step-by-step instructions.

95% of my Wii use is playing emulators - consoles up to and including SNES level are 100% (with CPU room to spare, as they have turbo features to skip through intros/cutscenes) - and using the media player that happily runs any avi/mpeg/divx/xvid file I throw at it.

With my old modded xbox I had to faff about with FTP to put stuff on it, with the Wii I just stick my SD card in the PC and copy across!

I can see why an SD card would be easier in copying files across but i've put i bigger hard drive in my xbox and my pc is right next to it so FTPing the files across isn't such a pain.. I think I'm just scared of breaking my wii!

Surely FTP is easier than manually inserting cards? You don't have to get out of your chair, for starters.

The media centre capabailities do these include streaming from a PC at all?

I've installed the Homebrew Channel, but foolishly upgraded to System Menu 4.0... can I still use a USB loader or have I messed up?

For me, with the home setup I had back at the time, definitely not!

Taking SD card out of Wii, into PC, drag and drop files, back into Wii - two minutes. Easy peasy for someone with no knowledge of networks and FTPing. And I am teh stoopidz when it comes to that sort of thing.

Should be fine, mate. You should also be fine running applications saved to SD cards or USB sticks via the Homebrew Channel, but if you're looking to install pirated Virtual Console and WiiWare games as well, you could be out of luck unless you follow a security-downgrading guide.

I've got a USB loader working, and copying games from my Wii to the HDD is working well. However, the HDD is formatted to 'Wii' style, and the software I have for reading it doesn't seem to work. I've tried two HDD with the same results.
What software are people using to read the drives (and, more importantly, to 'save' the games to and from my PC)?

Aha, the software I had didn't work with Vista. WBFSManager does, so hurrah!

Is there a mac version?

I gone done a mega-simple guide, with all the files you need in all the right folders with the right names and everything.
I hope.

Mucho thanks for the guide. As mine is now completely dead I might try and get it fixed to give this a go - sounds worth it. Would iso's work now if i had 'lost' my disc, but knew i still possessed it somewhere?

Yes, if you could find somewhere to get them from.

Excellent, cannot imagine anywhere would have things like that though..... sunday afternoon project coming up!

UPDATE: I found a mac app that lets you access the Wii Formatted hard drive. I linked to it in the comments of Grim...'s guide but I've not used it myself so BE CAREFUL..

If that works I'm tempted to just use a USB memory sticks and back up all my games to that. That way to save re-ripping them I can just copy them back over from my mac formatted hard drive.

The Wii's gurning as it reads disks is quite tiresome on some games so it would be nice to bypass it. Same reason I install games on my 360.

I've taken the guide offline again as it seems to be missing a step in the middle (you might have to install CIOS before you can run USB loaders) but I can't remember now, and I'm waiting on someone to try it out.

Hello!
Bits and Bobs fans may have noticed me muttering about soft modding my wii over the last few weeks and, finally, the project has come to some sort of fruition.
However, I have merely followed a guide and have absolutely no idea what I've done or what I'm doing, so whenever I have a problem I have to come crawling to the internet for help. Unfortunately, I'm either doing something really stupid, or nobody else in the world is having my problems, so I thought I'd bump this thread and see if I can't offer/get some advice about everyone's wii-related needs.

I'm running my programs from a 16GB PNY Optima SDHC card, which, if I'd bothered to check, I'd have found isn't amazingly compatible with Wii homebrew. I also have a 250GB hard drive stuck in the back, approximately 30 gig is formatted as FAT32 and the rest is whatever filesystem the Wii likes to use.
I've got a few problems with programs not wanting to read the SD card, but I've managed to get round most of them by using the FAT partition on the hard drive, however, I still have problems with GenesisPlus, SMSPlus, Hugo-Wii & WiiEngine (the first three are all by the same guy, so I'd have thought that they're all the same issue). Basically, I can load them from the SD card, but none of them detect my roms (although they all claim to support USB devices). I managed to get hold of a later version of GenesisPlus than the last official compiled version, which is supposed to have been compiled with a newer version of lib-something or other which should give it better support for usb devices with more than one partition, but it still didn't work. I've also managed to find some wads and tried installing these emulators as channels, but only GenesisPlus works, the rest still refuse to see the USB device. Incidentally, the snes, gba, nes and N64 emulators I've tried all work fine through the homebrew channel.

Anyone a little more wii-savvy able to tell me what I need to do/shouldn't have done?

A few things here :

1) A lot of the homebrew stuff *wont* see your USB hard disk , it expects to be launched from the SD card (whereas ISO's can be launched from either happily)
2) Roms not showing might be them in the wrong format , wrong extension , or wrong directory
3) The fact your SD card is 16GB might be a problem (although shouldnt be - if you had a smaller one i'd suggest trying that)



This can be quite hit and miss depending on what CIOS type stuff you have , i tend to have a single USB loader channel + a homebrew channel and load the rest from within there.

1) True, but from what I've read the emulators I'm trying *should* see my USB hard disk, they just don't. Whether that's because they don't like this particular hard disk, or because it has two partitions, or because I'm doing something stupid, or something else, I don't know.
2) Admittedly, I haven't tested any of these roms on anything else (and in fact I don't have any master system ones to test at the moment), but I'm pretty sure I'm putting them in the right place. Also, the Genesis emulator worked fine once I ran it as a channel rather than through the homebrew channel (although it's most likely a different version to the .dol I was trying to run, although that was compiled from one of the latest source releases, way after USB support was supposed to have been included).
3) Yeah, I originally "borrowed" my 2GB card to do all the modding and then just bought the biggest/cheapest card I could find to fill with goodies. Seeing as how homebrew had SDHC card support ages before the actual Wii, I was stupid enough to assume that any old card would work, but once I swapped to the new card there was a fair bit of stuff that didn't work which I'm trying to work around. I don't think I've actually tried to run these emulators from my old card. I'll give them a go, but if they work, I'll be slightly bemused



Yeah, I really don't know what I'm doing here and there doesn't seem to be any sort of source of wad files, so I'm reduced to downloading them from megaupload or whatever. Of the 4 I've tried, the genesis emu worked fine, the SMS one still failed to read my usb (although that may be because there aren't any roms on there, but that seems unlikely), one of the PC engine ones couldn't see any roms (either on my usb drive or my sd card) and the other PC Engine emulator just crashed the wii.

I'll rescue the 2GB card and try them on there, but my aim is to not need the 2GB card again and to not have to buy another SD card.

Edit - Just in case I was being an idiot, I copied the roms for these emulators onto my SDHC card, but none of them want to read from the SD slot or the USB. Nor will they read from the SDHC card plugged into the usb slot (which is the trick I have to use to install wads, but I think that works because it doesn't mount the USB ports until I tell it to). I'm too lazy to go upstairs and get my 2gig card, so I'll try it tomorrow.

Ok, so I got a bit less lazy and got my 2 gig card.
Each of those emulators worked fine, but would only read roms from the SD card, not from the usb drive (choosing usb would just take me to the files on the sd card).
So, I'm not really sure of a solution at the moment. Any ideas?

Play all those games you borrowed from me instead

Me want new Mario 2D platformer (FUCK YEAH!)

But it will update my Wii.

Any way around that in idiot proof guide?

Run the horribly named "pimp my wii"

It updates everything, except for bad Nintendo things that try to block homebrew (well, it just patches everything).

Your Wii will need to be online.

Link

Awesome thanks. Just looking at the link now. Hope it lets me buy things from the shop. I want the new Lost Wind game.

EDIT: It does! Woo!

One other thing i've been reading up on is that the Wii can be picky over which USB connector in the back your using - so its worth checking that.

My external drive is just a single partition and in the Wii format (WBFS or whatever it is) - i have read a link from another forum which describes an updated one which allows things to be run from just a straight windows file system but havent given it a go , the guide is here in case you can find anything else from it :

http://gwht.wikidot.com/usb-loader

Right, that's better. I couldn't post last night, but I only noticed just as I was going to bed so I didn't do anything about it.

1. DM, that's not how it works. I borrow the games, install them, make sure they load then never play them again. That reminds me, I might want to start raiding your Gamecube collection as well.
Oh, you can rest assured that Animal Crossing is getting played though.

2. Zaphod, the hard drive is always plugged into the outer usb port (because one of the usb loader programs shouted at me when it was in the other one), but I have tested it (and the sd card usb adaptor) in both of them and had no luck. I've had a read of that site, but to be honest with most things up and running successfully, I'm not sure I can be bothered to backup, repartition and restore my hard drive just so I can play a handful of old games that I have a million and one other ways to play anyway. Thanks for your help though.

I'll have to lend you Samba de Amigo too, purely for comedy value.

Well i've upgraded all the other bits on mine now and tried new super mario bros and its just as you'd expect.

Its mario , cute graphics , hidden stuff , new power ups , some neat 3d type things to jump around on and Yoshi to ride.

If you liked previous mario stuff and want another then go get it 1 and a bit worlds in and its fun :-)

I'll need to get more popcorn.




When I first saw it I was a bit disappointed it was more like the DS game rather than Super Mario Galaxy 2, but it's really good fun.