maandag 9 november 2009

Mod'ing for fun and pleasure

The PSP's the PS the Wii: all can be moded to allow for 'distributed backups' of your [owned OFC] games to be run. One of my daughters participated and won a contest last weekend and came home with a fresh Wii. Our first Wii we got from Austria via friends when it was just released 3 years ago and unobtainable here in Holland. The kids liked it alright, but after a couple of weeks the novelty was off and the Wii turned into a dust collector. We made someone very happy by selling it complete with the controllers, accessories & games right before new years eve.

So now, 3 years later we are the happy owners of a Wii again. It came with the usual Wii Sports game, but nothing more. Blast: the box comes with only one controller, and what is more exciting then beating someone in a heads on? So lets run out and get a second controller FAST.

Configuring & connecting the device is a brease although it is a pity there is no HDMI connectivity. After entering the 'WEP' password [riiiight] a whole Wii world opened up like a deja vu: the Wii shop & Wii credits! How could I have forgotten? Let's open the box of pandora and soft mod it first to be able to test drive some of these distributed backups first.

It takes the better part of an hour to finally get to the source of the homebrew scene. Just like most moding software, be it for the iPhone or Wii or any other device, there is people who are scamming their arses off and want to make you pay for download links and instructions. Somehow these dudes are such experts on SOE that they manage to basically p0wn the first page of google and make you navigate through all sorts of blogs, affiliation links and what not. After glancing over a page or 10 you get the idea of the gist of the basic requirements & tools like BannerBomb BootMii WiiKey and what have you not.

All pieces fall together when you find instructions in simple documents called README-HBC.txt and the like. The process is fairly simple:
Have & format your SD card, download and copy a couple of files, start the Wii, install the HomeBrew channel: done!

All in all it took longer to find the 'I accept all legal mumbo jumbo' agreement in the Wii menu to be able to access the online content of the original Wii channels then it took to mod the box. Now that Linux is running on the box, the kids can relax and spend their time breaking records & battling out competitions with friends for bragging rights.