Unofficial Homebrew Channel For the Wii

marcan writes "The Homebrew Channel is a tool that can be installed on any Wii (no hardware mods required) that lets you run unsigned homebrew software from an SD card, or upload executables via WiFi or a USBGecko. We've tried to make it friendly for users with a simple GUI, and powerful for developers with direct upload features and reloading which we hope will make testing less painful. The channel can be installed using a DVD if you have a modchip, or using an exploit in Zelda: Twilight Princess which only requires an SD card (or any future hack or booting method). Once installed, it simply shows up as a Channel on the Wii Menu, just like any official channel. Hopefully, this and other recent developments (such as the upcoming devkitPPC r15 toolchain, much improved and with many bugs fixed) will help make the Wii an appealing platform for DIY software. And yes, it also runs Linux."

Re:This combined with 20G memory expansion is grea

[marcansoft]

That's just an SD Gecko. It has no internal memory, it's just a way of plugging in an SD card into a memory card slot - the description is a lie. It was rather useful in the GC days, but was superseded by the internal SD slot on the Wii once we added support for it. The internal memory is not "expandable" like this.

Emulation on the Wii Already Came a Long Way

[Croakyvoice]

Already the Nintendo Wii is home to emulators for Snes, GBA, GBC, Nintendo 64, MAME, Nes, Genesis, Master System, Game Gear and more With the homebrew channel it makes the system even better. Lets hope piracy doesnt ruin a great homebrew scene. For those interested in emulators be sure to check out Wii News http://wii-news.dcemu.co.uk/ [dcemu.co.uk]

Except Nintendo is well-positioned to avoid this

[patio11]

I would hate as much as the next guy to see pirates (yeah, yeah, I know there are folks out there who just want to code 2D Tetris to work on your Wii... and there are about 10,000 pirates for every one of you, who want to play first-party Nintendo games for free) take down an IP producer I liked.

That being said, it isn't going to happen to Nintendo: they are largely pitching the console at folks who both don't pirate games and wouldn't know how to if they did (targetting customers who enjoy paying money for your product -- a novel concept!). They've sold a bazillion units -- and every one at a profit, thank you very much. They can update the firmware to remove this channel and the exploit any time you put in a first-party disk, and with the Nintendo model they can be reasonably certain that any console which is turned on in 2008 will play one of the next three Big Series releases from Nintendo. They have caused a resurgence in interest in alternate peripherals (credit also to Guitar Hero), which means that just stealing the game itself doesn't get you all of the fun. They have a very friendly online purchasing experience for many old games, which makes it less appealing to use the system as an SNES emulator (a very popular "homebrew" application in my experience).

So I'm not worried about Nintendo. Good thing, too, as I own stock in them.