"My face melted," said the Head Robot in an email where he forwarded along this tip about a Wii mod that allows the storage and booting of Wii game backups via a USB hard drive. And now I'm trying to hold my face together as I stumble about the office looking for my portable USB drive.
The mod process, detailed by Mike, doesn't look too difficult. In fact, it just may be the perfect project for a rain Memorial Day afternoon. You need only the Homebrew Channel, a few free files, and a USB hard disk. A video of the loader (after the jump) shows how sexy and elegant this whole mod is.
How great would it be to boot up your games from a simple menu and not have to mess with discs? Of course, there's less savory uses, too.
[via Lifehacker]
Dale North is Destructoid's Editor-In-Chief, a founding editor, and specialist in Japanese gaming. An accomplished musician, Dale was reporting from Japan during the earthquakes of 2011. Luckily, he got the fuck out alive and is home in America now with his wife and beloved corgi, Einstein. Dale is also a co-founder of Destructoid's sister anime site
Japanator. Likes Corgis, Sega Saturn, PSP, iPhone, Photographic tools.
Meet the rest of the team
| BBcode help |
| [b]Bold text[/b] |
Bold text |
| [i]Italic text[/i] |
Italic text |
| [url]http://www.dtoid.com/[/url] |
http://www.dtoid.com |
| [url=http://www.dtoid.com/]Web link[/url] |
Web link |
|
| [img]http://www.example.com/robot.jpg[/img] |
 |
Post a comment! You can also post a photo below:
Comment with Facebook
Click connect and comment instantly!
|
Comment with Dtoid
New? SIGN UP - it takes 5 seconds
|
56 comments | showing # 1 to 50
|
Comment with Facebook
Click connect and comment instantly!
|
Comment with Dtoid
New? SIGN UP - it takes 5 seconds
|
Comments policy
Destructoid is an open discussion community. You don't need to "audition" to post a comment - just speak your mind. We respect differing opinions on the site, so have at it. Be smart, funny, insightful, clueless, or cute -- but back it up with substance. Keep your cool, keep it fun. We only ask that you act respectfully and above all: don't be a troll and ruin it for everyone else. Don't bring down gamers or we'll, you know, gently shoot you in the face and stuff you into a flaming mailbox. Each comment is your opportuntity to make this community awesomer. Is that even a word?
Avoiding the banhammer only requires common sense: spamming, trolling, racism, NSFW stuff, and other forms of sucking will not be tolerated. If anyone is griefing please report abuse. Be good. Don't suck!
Contest:
8:00 PM on 05.25.2009
| 
Wait ...w h at?!
@ Magnalon,
The psp is this generation of easy piracy, but yeah it does seem like the wii is an easy target for piracy.
I was also talking about the DS :-D
Are you sure about making them load faster? I'm pretty sure that if a system reads from both the game disc and hardrive it makes them run faster. But I'm not too sure about reading soley from a hard drive.
Because it's working under the assumption that people on Dtoid don't use this for piracy purposes. It does however prove that sometimes pirated games are superior to their real counterparts.
Definitely loads faster for most games. It's pretty apparent, since you can copy your own games and put them directly from the Wii to the hdd. Like he said, Brawl is great, so is MP3, and other larger games.
Anyway, although you can just rent a game and pop it right on the hard drive in about 10 minutes, I would strongly encourage buying the games. The Wii has 99% shit games as it is, we don't need another reason for developers to drop good support for it.
They clearly don't know their readers.
And even if they do, they can't be sure, unless people have a strong moral code they will more likely use this knowledge to pirate, it is a better service and FREE. Its like saying DS cards exist to help the nice homebrew guys, all those factories in China pumping them out aren't giving them away.
@Narashima
For obvious reasons.
old news, but still pretty fuckin cool.
LINK: http://www.tehskeen.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9658&highlight=guide
That is all.
I'd agree with you, but anyone who wanted to do this to pirate would be doing it already. The didn't need the cutting edge uber-pirate that is Dale North to tell them about it.
BAN THIS SICK FILTH!
Right? Grow up.
This mod was made necessary by the fact that Nintendo has no plans to make a Wii hard drive and thousands of people have full SD cards worth of games.
Sure, this CAN be used for piracy, but it can also be used to load games faster and actually have a single space for all of your Wii games.
The information is out there for anyone to easily find. What you are calling for is essentially censorship of information. It should ultimately be up to the person to interpret and use information in the manor they see fit. Banning all talk that can be related back to piracy is simply absurd.
The irony in this is that I will be using my old PS3 hard drive
And as people already said above Brawl plays a million times better on this loader since it's almost inatant for everything. Many games play great. However is not perfect yet. The newest version craps anything WiiConnect24, so no extra levels on any game, no animal crossing, no ghosts on mario kart and excite bots...
Games do work online thought, but no feature that uses WC24 works. Also, it's the perfect solution for importers, since enabling this thing lets me play captain rainbow, tatsunoko VS capcom and dissaster without any hassle. (There was already a region free soft mod solution, but this way everything is on one place.
i'm sure there are quite a few people who f***ed their Wii's in the early days with soddering guns.
I fail to see anywhere in this article that is promoting piracy. What I see is an article about backing up your legally owned wii games to a usb hard drive and playing them all from one convenient location. The only people talking about using this for piracy is you and CocoJambo, so effectively it's your fault if people read your comments and proceed to use this for pirating.
I've done it. It's not terribly hard even with WSM 4.0, but there are a few extra steps, and I didn't add the fancy-pants channel or anything to it.
It'll be nice to be able to bring my Wii to a friend's house without having to schlep around 20-someodd discs as well. Just the Wii and an HD and I'm golden. Games do load quicker off of the drive, and the games interface with the Wii memory, so any saves from games that are loaded onto the HD will be available if you choose to use the disc at a later date instead of the HD. Clearly this has other more nefarious uses, but I doubt it'll hurt the whole scene as a whole.
Finally my white WD Passport has a permanent home. :-)
I also want to note that I have nothing specifically against Dale North and he has a lovely voice.
@chronoswing
I've replied to comments you made were you admitted you pirated, so stop being an hypocrite. And the ones that bother reading the comments (a very small part of the site visitors) would have already seen piracy comments before mine. Not that it matters, anyone with the ability to read can reach that conclusion alone.
Of course people CAN use this for piracy, but you know what? I can use a car to kill someone. Or maybe help me rob a bank. Or you know, as a bomb. Should we ban cars? Of course! Now everyone's gotta walk to work and you just pissed off a whole mess of people. But hey, there aren't any accidents anymore and people don't rob banks as quickly as they have to run. Man, I wonder how you can sleep at night having completely finished off the entire auto industry. And we thought the economy was bad now!
Do any of you have a PSP? You're all filthy pirates and I hope you all burn in Hell forever (and I hate you too)! What's that you say? You've never downloaded an ISO in your entire lifetime? Well too bad, screw you, I'm tossing you in with the lot of the dirty bunch! Sorry, but the only victims here are the people you claim not to be stealing from!
Are people gonna use this for piracy? Of course. But is that the intended use? I don't think so. It has legal uses (though that's a big grey area with Ninty). And there's a big potential illegal use, but hey, think of it this way. You can use a spoon in a number of legal ways, but can't you use it to liquefy a crack rock so you can put it in a syringe to inject yourself?
Almost everything can have an intended and unintended use. Safe and unsafe. Legal and illegal. Etc.
Just shut up please, you are by far the biggest moron on this website. You come in every one of these types of articles on your white horse and and start damning everyone for even talking about it as if your the cleanest person on the planet and have never stolen, borrowed, or lent out something in your life. But please keep fighting the good fight, I'm sure in your little mind you feel your making a difference somewhere.
Don't forget the unfettered Wii-fanboyism.
Ok mate, you win. Your name calling and lack of reasoning capabilities truly have made me see how wrong I was. I now realise I am the biggest moron on a website, and I will proceed to punish myself, maybe even pirate some games, and try to justify somewhere that I am but a human, flawed and incapable of logical thought.
How about responding to the legitimate posters, like Dinnertimeninja, who shoot down your notion that this article is "inappropriate"? Personally I disagree with your opinion, but I mainly just find it funny that the above is your best response.
Because chronoswing really made an argument with that last post, specially when he insults me for being against piracy.
About Dinnertimeninja's post, I did agree that having all your games directly accessible from a HDD is a better service than currently available on any console. I don't however, agree that people have SD cards full of games (assuming its WiiWare/VC), when the limit is around 40MB.
Is that enough?
Two wrongs don't make a right is my point. If you want to post a satire to Chrono's insults, at least make it funny.
My question is this: What difference does it make if it's on an SD Card or a HDD. What if I don't have a 32GB SD card, and I already have a few external HDDs on hand? (Which is true in my case).