(Aren’t I the clever one!)
Last year, a hack was released that allowed gamers to connect USB hard drives to their Nintendo Wiis, allowing them to store copies of their games (and play them) from the hard drive. While this sounded really cool, the last time I looked at it the instructions were fairly complicated, and I didn’t have any real incentive to get it working. Fast forward to this past weekend, when I found my copy of Rock Band had been chewed beyond repair by either the dog or the five-year-old (surprisingly similar bite patterns). After finding that, I decided to set aside a couple of hours over the weekend to finally get this hack working.
When finished, this hack allows you to (A) backup your Wii game discs to an external USB hard drive, and (B) play those backed up games directly from the hard drive, alleviating the need for the original discs. While warranty voiding, both of those actions are legal. The hack also allows you to (C) illegally download Wii games from the Internet, copy them to the USB drive, and play them on your Wii. With great power comes great responsibility.
There are several sets of instructions floating around for performing this hack. I chose to use the one on Lifehacker.com, simply because I’ve used some of their tutorials before, and they tend to be easy to follow.
Hardware-wise, all you need is a USB hard drive, an SD card, and a modded Wii (hard or soft, doesn’t matter) to pull off this hack. That being said, it should be noted that the “Wii USB HD Hack” is not a single hack at all — it’s series of hacks. You’ll also need the Homebrew Channel installed on your Wii, which I didn’t have. Each step of the tutorial seemed to send me on a 5-10 minute digital goose chase across the Internet. To get the Homebrew Channel, I had to install BannerBomb. With the Homebrew channel installed, I had to run DOP-Mii v12 to exploit the Trucha Bug. With that installed, I was able to add the cIOS Installer. With that, I was able to install both USB Loader GX and the forwarder (so USB Loader GX appears as a channel when you first turn on your Wii).
The Lifehacker tutorial says that the whole process should take “5-10 minutes”. It took me around two hours. One reason for this was I (foolishly) was using the computer in my office to download everything, but the Wii is located in our living room. I’d estimate half of my two hours was spent walking back and forth between rooms. Also, I may have moved slower than the average person because each step I previously mentioned could, if performed incorrectly, brick your console. (For those of you not familiar with the term, that means permanently destroying a device to the point where it effectively becomes an expensive “brick”.) So yeah, I read each step very carefully.
And believe me, I was plenty nervous. Many of the steps and programs involved connect to the Internet from your Wii to download exploit code to run. Setting aside the whole “I am running code from people I don’t trust or even know” angle, there are so many things that could go wrong along the way that my palms were sweaty the entire time. Each time I attempt something like this, I just assume whatever I’m working on will end up irrevocably broken. That way, if things don’t work out, I’m not too disappointed.
In this case however, things did work out. After two hours of work, I now have a “USB Loader GX” channel on my Wii that allows the kids to pick their games from a menu and play them without ever touching my original games. USB Loader downloads cover images from the Internet, so even Morgan (who is just learning to read) can easily find the games she wants to play. The USB Loader GX front in is faily configurable. You can sort games alphabetically, by “most played”, or even by rank (you can rate each game from 1-5 stars).
If you want to access your external HD from your PC, you’ll need one additional program: WBFS Manager. With it, you can extract your dumped games back into burnable ISO images. What’s amazing to me is, each Wii ISO image is 4.3 gig, but when stored on the hard drive, many of them are less than a gig in size (one was less than 200 meg!). This isn’t compression — this is the actual size of the code stored on the disc.
This hack isn’t for everybody. (In fact, it won’t even work for everybody — those with the latest 4.3 update can’t play. Sorry.) If, however, you have lost games due to the scratches and smudges from pets or children, this may be something you should look into. Installation is fairly simple if you follow the guide. Like all mods and hacks this voids your warranty and could potentially get you banned from online play someday in the future, so you’ll have to decide whether or not the benefits outweigh the risks for you personally.
Like Yakko from Animaniacs yelled “Spoil your dinner”, we can yell “Void your warranty!”. But yes, gameconsoles should be kid-proof, especially when part of the audience turns out to be quite young (I always thought most game consoles ended up in frat houses, but I recently visited a family where I saw a really nice WII game played and enjoyed by a 3-year old. I never guessed ;)).
Your reason for setting this up (protecting the original discs) is clever. When I read that it occurred to me that my Wii’s optical drive is dying, it reads discs less reliably and sounds like a souped up RC car engine when spinning! This sounds like a great alternative to replacing the optical drive in mine. Hmm. Now to find (or wait for) a hack for 4.3.
Ah, here’s one: http://www.wiinintendo.net/2010/10/13/modmii-4-3-2/
Thanks for lighting a fire under me to get this done. I successfully used ModMii 4.3.4 to hack my Wii with System 4.3 installed! I am currently in the process ripping the game discs. I finally found a good use for my old Mac Hard drive. :)
Now I just need to figure out how to boot to the either the Wii Menu or the Hard Drive menu on startup, instead of the silly BootMii menu.
Sweet, my son is now playing Warioland Shake It, whose disc was too scratched to play previously! And I edited the BootMii config to auto start the system menu with a 0 second delay. :) It looks like it wasn’t ever hacked, except for my new USB game channel. :)