Successfully modded my Wii
There’s something incredibly appealing about giving hardware extra features just by loading some code. Now my Wii joins my Xbox and PSP in being opened up to the homebrew community.
There are tons of guides on Wii modding online. After reading through most of the current ones and comparing/contrasting them, I settled on a relatively straightforward guide at afterdawn. The process was relatively straightforward; the only stumbling block I ran into was when I received a cryptic error while trying to install the homebrew channel. Turns out I was using a bad/incompatible SD card, using a different card worked fine.
My biggest unexpected surprise came from the Homebrew Browser. This ingenious app acts just like the Shopping channel, but hosts free homebrew games and utilities. You simply click the app you want, and it automatically downloads and ‘installs’ to your SD card. It’s amazing that the homebrew scene can put together a more cohesive experience than some commercial platforms.
Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found a way to run commercial games off of an external USB hard drive. I’m not interested in piracy, but my Wii quite frequenty has problems reading game discs. I already spent $60 to get it ‘repaired’ by Nintendo, but the problems started again a month or so later.
Looking forward to whatever else the homebrew scene has in store…
