I wrote a bit back about my increasing loss of faith in the Wii. The games slated to come out through the rest of the year and into 2009 are quite, shall we say, “weak” and include many uber-family friendly games. I have nothing against family friendly, but you can only have so many pet and puzzle games before a system starts to lose its appeal. However, a recent investigation into a well known hack for the Wii has me singing a different tune.
Reading Wii news as regularly as I do, quite some time ago I read about a thing called the Twilight Hack, which exploits a bug in the Wii Zelda game that let hackers into the core system. I typically try not to bother with console hacks because I’ve spent way to much on the deck to possibly ruin it by hacking. But over the weekend I found and read more about the Twilight Hack that sold me on the idea.
But why hack the Wii in the first place? Well, hacking in this case means you can load homebrew games (indie games) on the Wii. The hack actually adds the “Homebrew Channel” to your standard Wii menu (in English). Along with standalone indie games, you can also load emulators with the channel. As is well documented, I am an emulator junkie, especially for the classic decks like the NES, SNES, and PC Engine. With the promise of emulators on the Wii, I couldn’t not try the hack.
The Twilight Hack was stupidly simple to install. The only thing you need is an SD memory card and the Zelda game disc. Fortunately friend-of-the-Toast, Thee, had the Zelda game and once I had it in my hand I gave the hack a go. I held my breath and watched the DOS-like screen fly by, doing something to my Wii, and just hoped I wasn’t bricking my Wii. Bang! Zoom! The Homebrew Channel is ready to go!
And much (very much) to my surprise the NES emulator ran just fine and I was able to load all the NES ROMs I’ve had for years. Then I tried the TurboGrafix16 emulator…worked. Then the SNES emulator…worked. How awesome is this?! And all the emulators have multi-player support. So now I can play my old NES and other games just about everywhere: on my original NES deck, my PC, my DS portable, and now my Wii. Wherever I go, the NES will follow. Nuts? Yes. Fun? You betcha.
I’ve spent a lot of time and money on my NES PowerPak so I could play ROMs on my actual NES console, and nothing beats that experience, but having the NES games on my Wii is just way too convenient. Then toss on the SNES, Genesis and PCE games that I never had elsewhere other than my computer…you can’t beat it. I’m still playing around with the emulators and homebrew games, but so far the so good shy of a few ROMs that just haven’t loaded. But I don’t know if that means it’s a bad ROM, which is highly likely, or the emulator…time will tell. I’ve also found I now have a really good reason to buy a classic Wii controller.
But wait…can’t you download all the old games with the Wii Virtual Console? Why yes, you can…for anywhere from $5 - $10 a pop. We all have our favorite classic games. Even with over 500 NES games, I play the same dozen over and over. Same will go with PCE, SNES, and Genesis…but if I can get them easily for free, why do the whole download thing? Plus, now I can play the games I never played before but wanted to without the risk. It’s just nice.
Having this homebrew option opens up the Wii to a whole new realm of games even beyond old emulators. Now you can also play games made by indie developers that you won’t find in retail. One such game I found is called GuitarFun and is a clone of clone…it’s a clone of Frets on Fire, the PC Guitar Hero clone. I have yet to get GuitarFun to load and play on the Wii Homebrew, but when/if it does, it means I can play custom songs (real songs) with the actual guitar controller. Now that’ll be spiffy! I’ll post up a note when I get it working…but there are YouTubes of the game working.
All in all, I don’t see any reason you wouldn’t want to use the Twilight Hack and install the Homebrew Channel. It doesn’t hurt and the manual claims you can even uninstall it all. This isn’t a hardware-level hack, it’s just software, so there shouldn’t ever be any permanent damage. If you’re after some classic console gaming and don’t want go crazy like I did with my NES, this Wii hack is the sweet spot that turns your console into the perfect (and free) retro game machine. And since you’re saving on VC downloads, you can justify more retail Wii games and accessories.
If you’re wanting to setup the Homebrew Channel on your Wii, hit up WiiBrew.com and look for their WiiPack Generator. Use it to download all the parts you want and need, including the Twilight Hack. And to see just how easy the hack is to install, there’s a handy video…which I watched like five times before doing it myself (it just made me feel better).
Now pardon me while I go run through some Excite Bike, F-Zero, Keith Courage, and maybe a little Street Fighter II.
Ya, you’re going to have to set-up my Wii with this thing you have it do.
Also, how much memory does all of the emulators and games take up?
Make sure Thee brings Zelda up with him and we will do this to my machine too.
I have a 2GB SD card and so far it has the emulators for NES, SNES, Genesis, TG16, and a MAME emulator. I put *all* the NES games I have (500+) on it, and about a dozen games each for the others…and no problems.
The great thing about the retro games is they’re typically really small. Maybe a few megs each depending. So you can put a bunch of stuff on there without worry about space — and then still having space for “real” save game info, etc.
I got a Classic controller last night and it is totally necessary for playing the Genesis/SNES games. You just can’t use the setup on the Wiimote alone or with the nunchuck.
Oh…if you have any specific game requests for a console other than NES, start a list in the forum and I’ll put all this stuff on a CD so you guys can borrow and load easily. Far easier than downloading all over again.
I need to do some serious ROM organizing, actually…my collection is getting out of hand. Fun.
This may sound horrible coming from a long time gamer, but I’m really enjoying the SNES games. I didn’t own an SNES when I was younger so I skipped that whole era of games and I’m finding they’re pretty awesome. I played them at friends’ house, but never long enough to get invested in a game.
Since I’m sort of stuck in going forwards with gaming, it’s kind of nice that I can go backward and discover “new” games. The classics are filling my need for arcade-style games I’m not getting otherwise.
I still haven’t gotten the GH clone to work, but I haven’t really tried. I’ve been wasting too much time with the emulators.