Homebrew channel for Wii
Had enough Nintendo homebrew action yet? We haven't either. Especially not now that the doors to the homebrew scene have been blown open by The Homebrew Channel. Up to this point, the only way you could run homebrew on an unmodded Wii was the Twilight Hack, which leveraged a flaw in Twilight Princess save games. The Homebrew Channel lets you launch various homebrew apps with a useful GUI instead of performing the hack every time you want to run them. It can access apps stored on an SD card, a computer on the same network, and even USB Gecko. There is no USB flash drive or DVD support at the moment.
The Homebrew Channel can be loaded onto the Wii by running the Twilight Hack (don't worry, it'll probably be for the last time) with the Homebrew Channel Files in the root of your SD card. The Wii will reboot and then the channel will appear in the list. We tested it ourselves, and found that everything loaded properly from the SD card (we didn't try the other sources). We did run into a problem where it failed to load any of our homebrew apps or even reboot properly if a Gamecube memory card was in the slot, but it's an easy fix, just pull it out.
The devteam behind this release wanted to make things as easy and accessible as possible, so they included download links to the Twilight Hack, The Homebrew Channel, and even a homebrew software bundle to get you started. If you want more homebrew apps, head to Wiibrew.
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Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. I was waiting for the time when I could code for my Wii, w00t!
Now all they need to do is make it SD card bootable!!!!
Posted at 1:27AM on May 27th 2008 by tjhow
5. just a matter of time b4 Nintendo makes an update that puts a stop to it
Posted at 5:07AM on May 27th 2008 by Alex McCown
6. I'm not sure about that, #5. They've already sniffed the key necessary to sign Wii applications, so the only issue was getting the software onto the Wii in the first place. Once that's done, it's pretty much indistinguishable from a normal program. The best they could do is somehow revoke the vulnerable copy of Twilight Princess, but that would be like swatting a fly with a cannon.
Posted at 11:26AM on May 27th 2008 by doomstalk
7. a very nice library to code easily on wii ;)
http://wiibrew.org/index.php?title=Homebrew_apps/GRRLIB
Posted at 4:56PM on May 27th 2008 by equator
8. what do you suppose the chances of nintendo releasing a firmware update that bricks wii with this channel?
I would very much like to install it but its not worth buying a new wii.
Posted at 9:49PM on May 27th 2008 by quezlar
9. Very cool. Looking forward to playing Lemmings via the scummVM on the Wii!
Posted at 8:02AM on May 28th 2008 by Kacela
10. Actually, I'm curious -- this has been out for a while, right? I think there's been at least one firmware update since it happened... will doing this risk a bricking on the next update? Is it fully reversible?
I'm really not that excited about hacking my Wii -- I can use the Wiimote with GlovePIE if I want to develop waggle/pointer apps, and otherwise the hardware is pretty old. But if I *did* want to try, I definitely don't want to risk hosing my system.
Posted at 4:07PM on May 28th 2008 by James
12. lalnez, you need the new twilight hack, as a wii system update fixed the old bug. get it at wiibrew.org
Posted at 9:36PM on Jul 7th 2008 by rocky
13. The Homebrew Channel... I've been waiting for this for a while but considering that I've already updated my Wii Menu to 3.3 and that I don't have an SD card, the Twilight Hack thing is usesless for me. Is there any way to completely reverse an Wii Menu update?
Posted at 11:56PM on Aug 19th 2008 by Sonic-Z
1. Yay! Finally some nice good homebrew for the Wii instead of the old homebrew for the GameCube. Can't wait to see the new homebrew apps!
Posted at 9:39PM on May 26th 2008 by Jordan Horwich