Wii Homebrew

[jonny72]

Thought I'd give hacking my Wii to run homebrew stuff a go. Amazed by how quick and simply it was, all done with an SD card and a couple of programmes - no need to fuck about with a mod chip, so no permanent damage.

Already got Mame and ScummVM up and running, now just got to sort out the roms for all the old skool consoles and computers. Which unfortunately is a pain in the arse for most of them.

Well worth doing if you're in to old skool gaming, all you need is an SD card (I got a 16Gb Sandisk from Amazon for £18) and a bit of time. If anyone wants some help with it, or game / rom sets, let me know.

[flammableBen]

yeah that bit's easy. Getting downloaded pirate games to run off a spare harddisk is a bit more tricky I think though, or has that got easier aswell? Last time I looked you had to partition things off in a strange wiihd format. I keep meaning to give it a try but haven't got round to it.

I've mainly been using mine to stream films off a usb harddrive, and playing Snes games. I didn't have a lot of luck with MAME, everything took hours to load. That was a while ago though, so don't know if things have improved?

[jonny72]

Everything runs of the SD card, haven't bothered trying a USB hard drive as a 16Gb SD card is more than enough.

After adding the homebrew channel, I added the homebrew browser and have been downloading and installing all the emulators through that. Then just copying the roms over to the SD card on my laptop. No special formatting needed, just standard FAT.

The games I've tried in Mame have all loaded quickly, but I've only tried the older and smaller games. There is a new version of Mame I'm using, written for the Wii rather than the older version which was ran through Linux - I'd imagine this has helped speed things up a bit.

[flammableBen]

Everything runs of the SD card, haven't bothered trying a USB hard drive as a 16Gb SD card is more than enough.

After adding the homebrew channel, I added the homebrew browser and have been downloading and installing all the emulators through that. Then just copying the roms over to the SD card on my laptop. No special formatting needed, just standard FAT.

Oh yeah, emulators work fine from an sd card, but have you tried playing getting it to play iso's of actual wii games?

The games I've tried in Mame have all loaded quickly, but I've only tried the older and smaller games. There is a new version of Mame I'm using, written for the Wii rather than the older version which was ran through Linux - I'd imagine this has helped speed things up a bit.

Cool. I'll have to give the new one a try.

[Nomoreheroes]

Which software did you put on?

[jonny72]

Which software did you put on?

What do you mean?

The software hack to enable you to install homebrew software?

Or the emulators and other stuff?

[Barry Scott]

I've got an old copy of MAME (32 i think it is) and it has the GUI and fucking hundreds of games. I want a newer version with thousands of games. Can anyone point me in the direction of getting mame with loads of games please?

[flammableBen]

I just get the roms as I want to play something, and that hasn't been for ages. There must be torrents for complete sets though?

[jonny72]

Best site I've found for Mame torrents is: http://www.pleasuredome.org.uk/

You have to register and if you don't keep up a decent ratio they'll ban you pretty quickly. But on the plus side, they've got all the various Mame torrents and a lot of other good bits and pieces and downloads are very quick due to the high number of seeders.

Bear in mind that a complete Mame rom set is currently 23Gb, and another 105Gb for the CHDs if you want them. Mame has over 9,000 games in it now, though a lot of them are clones of other games.

[flammableBen]

Best site I've found for Mame torrents is: http://www.pleasuredome.org.uk/

Ooh nice one. I'll have to check that out at some point.

http://www.underground-gamer.com/ probably has one too, although you sometimes have to be patient when registering as they are often closed to new members. Same rules with them for having to keep a good ratio.

[Barry Scott]

23GB, 9000 games? Fuck me, the last mame i had was about 650 games and could fit on a cd rom. I imagined 1000-2000 games and around 2GB... I'll have to check out those sites at some point now, cheers.

[flammableBen]

The latest mame version is .135, there's probably torrents out there on public sites, I'm not sure which ones are good now that mininova's apparently vanished over the last few days.

[jonny72]

Fuck me, the last mame i had was about 650 games and could fit on a cd rom.

The first Mame rom set I downloaded was tiny compared to that. Did them all in an evening or two via a dialup connection, there can't have been that many as they were all listed on a single website page which was updated manually with each new release.

But as I said before, some games need the relevant CHD files as well which total 105Gb at present. Though I'm pretty certain a good few of them can't be run as PC's aren't powerful enough to emulate the original hardware (yet).

The latest mame version is .135, there's probably torrents out there on public sites, I'm not sure which ones are good now that mininova's apparently vanished over the last few days.

The Pleasuredome site is fine. You'll be able to download the complete Mame 23Gb rom set without problem. But if you want to continue downloading after that, or download other stuff you'll need to get a decent upload ratio.

[flammableBen]

Yeah, I just signed up and noticed it's one of the free ones. I might grab the lot even though I've probably got most the roms I'm bothered about playing. Tempting. 20gb isn't that much even on my shitty internet.

I tend to try and contain such urges, otherwise I end up with gb's of stuff just for the sake of it.