Sunday, August 30, 2009

How to Burn Wii Games

This topic about burning Wii games is almost covered in my step by step guide on how to mod your Wii from www.howtomodyourwii.com, but it has come to my attention that a lot of people still don’t burn Wii games the right way. This can result in various error codes when running the burned Wii games and people might think that they did something wrong when they softmodded their Wii, although this is not the case.

There are three major things that you should be aware of when you burn a Wii game. The first thing is the media brand (Lumatron, Sony, Verbatim…), the second thing is the bookmarking type (dvd-r, dvd+r, dvd-rw…) and the third thing is the burning speed. Through my own personal experience and reading a lot of forum posts around the internet I can tell you this: Use Verbatim dvd-r and burn at 4x speed! You might get lucky getting a Lumatron dvd-r or a verbatim dvd+r to work (or something like that...), but it is very unlikely and I wouldn’t recommend it.

Also I recommend that you use a good and simple burning software like the free ImgBurn that you can get from www.imgburn.com. Just install and launch the program and choose “Write image file to disk”, then find the .iso file (the Wii game) that you want to burn, set the burning speed to 4x and start the burning process.

If you have done everything the right way and your Wii games still don’t work you might want to try a new burning hardware on another computer, or write me an email and I’ll look into the problem :) Another solution would be to use the cool application “Coverflow”, that can launch Wii games directly from a harddisk – then you don’t have to go through the trouble of burning Wii games :) I’ll write a blog post about that application sometime soon – until then you can read a little about it in my guide on www.howtomodyourwii.com.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

What is the Homebrew Channel?


Maybe you already know this from my guide, but I still get a lot of emails asking "What is the homebrew Channel", so I though a blog post would be appropriate :)

The Homebrew Channel is an unofficial Wii channel, which lets you run unofficial software (applications - like apps on an Iphone) from a SD or SDHC card. Once installed it will appear as a normal Wii Channel on the Wii Menu, and it will update itself if you are connected to the internet. The Homebrew Channel can also be removed like any other Wii channel. When the Homebrew Channel was created a lot of people started making applications for it. Some made applications that made the Homebrew Channel able to play burned games; some made applications that added a dvd-player feature to the Wii; some made their own small games... and so on. Today there are hundreds of applications for the Homebrew Channel.

The Homebrew Channel does not only read SD cards - it is also able to use a USB Gecko or TCP/IP with the Wii WiFi or ethernet if you have a Wii LAN-adaptor. You will need a SD card to INSTALL the Homebrew Channel though.

Hope you learned just a little from this :) If you don't have the Homebrew Channel already you can install it by using my guide on www.howtomodyourwii.com :)