Nintendo Wii Fanboy

As of right now, homebrewers have the upper hand against Nintendo, and it is possible to run whatever you feel like running on the Wii you own -- even on a recently updated Wii. Now would be a good time to go try some of the stuff that people have come up with. But maybe you feel like you don't know where to start, or don't have whatever technical skills are required to make Wii Quake happen.

Much like we did on DS Fanboy for homebrew on that system, WiiHD has created a step-by-step guide to Wii homebrew, starting with the Twilight Hack. Follow these instructions, and you'll have the Homebrew Channel, ready and waiting to run your programs. If following three pages of instructions is too much for your fast-paced lifestyle, they've even put together a Starter Kit containing all the software you'll need, including the Twilight Hack and Homebrew Channel files, Quake, and an Amstrad emulator with public-domain games.

[Via Engadget]

Having just gone through Homebrew Week over at DS Fanboy, we thought it might be a good time to ask our Wii audience: do you homebrew? Have you considered dabbling in any of the Wii's community-driven content? Note that we're not talking about piracy here, considering we're clearly big supports of gaming companies (look what we do all day!), but we're big fans of armchair developers. Are you?

This weekend saw the release of the "semi-official" Homebrew Channel, created by hard-working members of the Wii's homebrew community. The release, which is available to the public, lets you run homebrew on your console without having to perform the Twilight Hack. Also, you're no longer restricted to a ten-minute demo.

The release comes with a few applications, like Tetris, a Nintendo 64 Emulator, Wii Linux, ScummVM, and Gecko Region Free. Just remember: keep it legal, kids.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Team Twiizers have released a publically available version of the "Wii Homebrew Channel," which installs a Twilight Hack-enabled software loader as a channel on the Wii Menu. You still need to perform the Twilight Hack once in order to get the Homebrew Channel software into the menu in the first place, but after that, you're free from Twilight Princess. This is a totally huge step toward simple, everyday homebrew on the Wii!

At least, it will be, eventually. Unfortunately, the version that has been released is a ten-minute demo. After the allotted time, the software stops working and cannot be reinstalled. So much for unrestricted access to the Wii hardware.

[Via DCEmu; thanks, craig!]

It takes almost two minutes to get to the "good stuff" in this video, so, while you wait for that to play, here's a quick summary of what you're watching -- Team Twiizers, the group behind the Twilight Hack that allows users to run their own code on an unmodded Wii, have developed a way to expand on that exploit and install a "Homebrew Channel" onto the Wii Menu.

The channel doesn't do much yet, but just seeing that it's possible has us excited about other possible applications in our near future! Of course, that's assuming Nintendo doesn't put out some sort of firmware update that blocks the exploit, killing homebrew progress before anyone has a chance to release a "Pirated Games Channel."

[Thanks, Craig!]