Homebrew Channel For Wii

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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.

[via everywhere]

29 thoughts on “Homebrew Channel For Wii

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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?

  5. Nintendo of America released Wii system update 4.2 on Tuesday, a patch that reportedly had the intention of shutting down Wii hacking solutions. The popular Wii Homebrew Channel is removed by the update, and several known exploits (both hardware and software) are eliminated along with the ability to use USB loaders or downgrade your Wii firmware. The Wii Shop Channel was also updated to reflect the new firmware.

    posted on nintendo.com

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