News Flash!!!!!
The Nintendo Wii now has a soft-mod which allows you to play "back up" games off of an external hard drive. It is no longer necessary to solder in a mod chip to play "homebrew" games. In general you can find many nice websites that show you how to mod your Wii. I think the best one is www.Wiihacks.com . You should register at that site and it will allow you to see the hyperlinks and is a great way to get the necessary files to download. In general I will explain how this modification is done.
1. First of all you have to have a Wii and know which firmware is has. It tells you on the management screen.
2. From the root of your SD card in the management screen you install the homebrew channel onto your Wii.
3. Using the homebrew channel you have to install a wad manager, a usb loader ( I prefer USB Loader GX, because it has an option to correct the 002 error which you will get if you dont bypass the firmware on a lot of the newer games. You also have to install a custom IOS (cIOS). This allows you to play the games without upgrading the firmware. It is the bypass. (USB Loader GX also has the ability to select your cIOS as well).
4. You will also need a program to format your hard drive and to "scrub" your games.. WBFS manager is probably the best one. It formats your external hard drive to allow you to put "back up" games onto your hard drive. What the scrubber does is removes the un necessary data from the game and really shrinks the size of the game. In some instances it removes about 3 gb of garbage and unnecessary data from the games. You can stuff a 500gb hard drive with 200 plus Wii games. Now how incredible is that?
5. Another reason I like the USB Loader GX is that it allows you to change the region of the Wii. This allows you the ability to play import games from other regions. No longer is PAL or NTSC -J off your horizons from playing. It truely is a nice mod and is an incredible resource for homebrew projects.
It can get a little confusing at first trying to modify your Wii. Everyone is afraid of BRICKING their Wii. It gets tricky when you have to down grade your firmware if you have a certain firmware. (3.4). There is a lot of information about banana bomb, zelda exploits, ect . If you have half a brain, you can trouble shoot and figure out what is going on. Now with www.google.com and www.youtube.com there is no reason not to be able to do this shovel ready project. You will learn a lot by doing it yourself and have a greater appreciation of those who are diligently working on these exploits.
