10. Loading your SDcard Drag boot.elf onto your sd card Drag the “private” folder to the card Only two things you should see on your card’s root directory
Intro – General Ed – no real interesting presentations – so I went with videogamesIvemodded all my game consoles since the first playstationGame consoles average around 200 – 300$ and have the power of a modest desktop computer system, but they are very closed systems, only licensed developers are given access to run code, leaving lots of potential untapped.Unless you mod them.
Not all mods are equal in terms of the access they give, nor the ease of their installation.Some, like the PS2 were only moddable for much of their lifespan via a chip, soldered to 22 insanely small points using very thin gauge wiringOthers, like the 360 required no soldering, but you still had to crack it open to get at the dvd drive. Once in, you could wire the 360 drive into your home pc and simply boot off a disc that would rewrite the drive’s firmware.Differences between shown mods, firmware flash, mod chip install, allow for homebrew.These are examples of “hard mods”, because they require hardware access and are more physical in nature. The Wii mod doesn’t even require you to unplug the system from the tv.
Unable to compete with the wallets of larger corporations like Sony and Microsoft in horsepower, Nintendo opted to reissue their previous console with a new motion based control scheme, yet they released it at roughly the same price as the competition.For any other company this wouldn’t be likely to succeed, but unfortunately for nerd parents, there are two fact you cant avoid
Nintendo doesn’t feel the need to cut the parents a break on their ghetto hardware because they know we have to buy it. But with just a few clicks and a little reading you can make that Wii a lot more useful as a tool to ignore your children
because it almost always allows for the playing of pirated software from the internet, Some people have an issue with hacking, mostly nintendo and capitalists.So, Imnot allowed to talk about it, instead I will focus on homebrew software, which is almost as cool as stealing.But before that a warning, so no one can take me to court after this..
There are plenty of reasons to not hack your wiiSometimes, very rarely, something can go wrong in the exploiting process that results in a bad write to the system memory and there is no way to recover, leaving you with essentially a brick, hence the term. Happens to everyone once ina while, not me mind you, but to a lot of people.This mod will void your warranty, so nintendo wont replace your new brick with a new wii, they don’t appreciate you very much right nowEven if all goes well you can never update your system memory again via offical channels, as nintendo will be constantly trying to patch these security holes as they are found. So you have to dig around the seedy back alleys of the internet to find your system updates if you need them. And some you will need.Last and least you might run into compatibility issues with some games. Its rare, and fixes are almost always available.
You will need to check into your firmware version, which is just a simple process of clicking “wii” in the lower left hand corner of the main menu, then choosing “settings” from there to see what version you are running in the upper left hand corner of the system settings screen.There is a bannerbomb for 4.2, but Ive not done it so I cant be sure it wont blow your wii up
As I said before the wii is exceedingly simple to mod, no tools needed, just an SD card and a computer capable of writing to itThis is no big hurdle to jump, if you don’t already have one you can score one for all of 10$ online, and most come with the usb adapter to connect it to your computer. 2 gigs is fineBanner bomb channel is the exploit itself, which needs to be loaded onto your prepped sd card
TheWii can only read the fat16 or 32 file system, so format accordingly.Right click, pick format, choose fat32 if it isnt already chosen, and go with a quick format while leaving everything else as it.Now that your sd card is blank and ready for the exploit files.
I don’t want to distribute any files because I don’t want to be responsible for any dead wii’s, but Ill provide you with links to these files if anyone is actually interested.The files needed are called Bannerbomb and HackMii. HackMii is a small executeable file called “boot.elf” which needs to be directly on the root of your SD card. The “root” means the file cant be in any folders.Bannerbomb is a folder called “private” that needs to be place on the root of the sd card as well.The last arrow points to what your card should look like if everything went rightNow comes the hardest part of all
All you need to do it put the card in, power on the wii, then press wii, data management, then the SD card tab. After pressing the tab, if everything is right in the world, youll see the pop pictured here, at which point you of course say yes.The installer will find a loophole in the verification process, and use it to basically rewrite all permissions, then it will install the Homebrew Channel.
Homebrew is a term used to talk about software that is programmed by guys with too much free time and not Nintendo, be it applications or games.Homebrew is perfectly legal and can add a lot more functionality to your wiiThe Homebrew channel serves as your gateway to these programs. The best app of all is easily USB loader GX
What really should be a standard feature in all game systems a USB loader lets you take advantage of the higher transfer speeds of the USB port over the much slower speeds dvd loading offers.Not all external drives are compatible, but I know firsthand the cirago drive pictured here is. They sell for about 40$ for 80 gigs, which is more than enough space, and it requires no external power as it draws all the necessary voltage from the Wii’s USB ports.
Once installed via the homebrew channel, USB Loader GX can be launched from the main Wii channel selection screen, once launched loading is a simple matter of plopping a disc in the drive and pressing the plus pictures under the box art.The program keeps a running tally of the space you have left, and space will rarely be an issue because wii games use nowhere close to the full 8 gigs offered by dvd, lots are barely big enough to fill a cd.
The wii is old and slow, so it cant emulate much in the way of newer systems. However it is great for emulating even older slower systems, it excels at 8 and 16 bit games, and start to chug a little when it gets into the 32-64 bit range. Systems with more complex controllers like the snes and Playstaion will require a different controller as the wiimote only has a few buttons. Your old gamecube controllers might work, or you can go buy an official wii classic controller
