Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 13 years and 11 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

I dabbled in Wii homebrew last year but didn’t do much beyond getting the Homebrew Channel working and messing around with a few apps. Then last week I saw this post on Lifehacker and thought, I have got to try this. The Lifehacker tutorial is pretty straightforward … the Wii hacking community has done some amazing work to make the soft modding process easy and (almost) risk-free. At least I haven’t bricked my own Wii, which is running the latest 4.2 firmware, yet.

I already had the HBC installed and working, but the first problem I encountered was during the DOP-Mii step. For some reason my Wii wasn’t able to download the IOS updates/patches from NUS (Nintendo’s Update Servers), the same issue as described here (even though wireless connection was working). I wasn’t able to figure out how to get the required WADs onto my SD card for a local install, and trying to re-run the DOP-Mii step was now causing scary crash messages, so I gave up. I noticed that after attempting this, when my daughter went to play Wii Sports Resort, the Wii re-downloaded a system update, so luckily that seemed to reverse whatever the failed DOP-Mii patcher had done to the IOS.

A few days later I found another guide at WiiHacks.com and decided to give this another shot. This time I had the required WAD patches downloaded locally on my SD card so the DOP-Mii step worked as expected. But then I ran into a problem trying to install the cIOS. After some more Google searching I figured out I had to use the AnyTitle Deleter to clear out IOS249 before the new custom IOS would load properly (it’s possible that this was something left over from my last experiment with homebrew). After getting past all of that, though, I was able to complete the rest of the Lifehacker guide as documented.

For my initial testing, I used an old 40gb laptop hard drive I had laying around connected to a barebones USB adapter (pictured to the left) but I’ve since switched to a 320gb WD Elements drive split into two 160gb partitions (one WBFS, one exFAT).

Using the amazing USB Loader GX app, I backed up all of my games to the hard drive and then had it download the various box and CD cover art. It looks fantastic:

I tested running a few games from the hard drive and they worked just fine (even the online ones like Mario Kart). Sweet! Check out this little video I made to see it in action.

A helpful note: I kept having problems where the USB Loader would crash. It turned out that while moving the SD card back and forth between my PC and Wii, at some point the lock switch moved down slightly so the card was effectively read-only. Fixing the switch resolved the crashes. Just something to keep an eye out for!