This is something that a lot of people who have semi-bricked their Wiis are just going to love. Bushing has released an unbricking tool for people who have bricked their NTSC (USA) Wii’s. I’ll go into full detail explaining this to make it very simple to understand the problem and the solution.Also almost out is the homebrew channel. The release video can be seen here.

First the unbricking – Or rather the bricking (in simple terms “dead” console”). In the modding your Wii post that I wrote earlier, I had described the reason you can brick your Wii. The most important thing you need to understand here is that bricking happens ONLY because of the modchip in your console which allows games of other regions to play on your Wii. If you were unlucky enough, i.e. you didn’t have your Wii updated to the latest firmware and a game from other region updated your Wii, then chances are you’ve bricked your Wii. Your only upside in this situation can be a semi-bricked Wii (this video shows what a bricked Wii would be like). Since you modded your console you’ve voided your warranty and the chances are that the nintendo service guys won’t repair it for you. If they do it then you must thank god for that. If they did not repair it, read on. In this shit of a situation, your relief might be in the fact that you didn’t completely ruin your console by landing it somewhere in between. If your Wii is semi-bricked, then it will boot fine but you won’t be able to go into settings (you’ll get an error which looks something like a webpage).

The recent games that have allowed people to brick their Wii include the ‘Mario Kart’, ‘Super Smash Bros Brawl’ and ‘Super Mario Galaxy’. All these discs had the mandatory firmware update in them and if the disc was from another region (if you have a US (NTSC) Wii and the disc was a European one (PAL)) then in a modded console, it would result in an update inappropriate for your system leading to a dead piece. Practically.

What Bushing has done in his work is basically made a disc (available for all the regions – put the one corresponding to your region) which includes the latest update from nintendo. So if you semi-bricked your Wii, then all you need to do is download the disc from here(JAP), here(PAL) or here(US) and pop it into the console and let it update. Viola! You should now have a normal working Wii!! You can read up more on it here and here.

If you have completely bricked your Wii (you get a Webpage when the Wii boots up) there is still no respite, but the work is on and you should see some bubbles of joy very soon indeed.

Coming on to the homebrew channel. This is just a superb, marvellous piece of homebrew that has come into development for the Wii. With this you’ll be able to play your old games (NES, SNES etc) and homebrew games from a channel on the Wii!! It also has support for the TCP socket launcher for the Wii. With this tool, you can launch your .elf files on the Wii just by using the software from your computer and sending the file to the Wii. You can read up more on this here. The display is extremely beautiful and rather simple at the same time. This should eliminate the need for you to clutter up your Wii channels. Just load all your games via this channel (that you own, ofcourse).

Get back your Wii up and running with the unbrick tool if it was semi-bricked. If it wasn’t then just wait to rock with the homebrew channel and I hope this post was atleast informative / potentially helpful.

The trip did happen afterall. Sooner than expected. After a heated session at the Egypt-Air office the day after we “missed” the flight, we were given “first priority” waiting for tickets for the day’s flight. Not giving up on our luck, we gave it a try and reached the airport full 4 hours prior to departure. The person who had sold our tickets the day before was friendlier today and assured us of the tickets, if they became available. Luckily for us, they did. During the flight, our vegetarian meals (as ordered in the ticket at the time of booking) were not available and the cabin crew claimed that putting information on the website is not enough, we need to confirm things at the counter again. So much for the website.

Not everything was bad though. They were very helpful at that point and provided us with more salad and fruits instead of the regular meal, which as we realized on the way back was nothing but rice with boiled vegetables. To think salad would be a better choice than “proper food”.

The trip however ended up being worth it all. Even though we had to cut short our trip by one full day (meaning no Luxor, Aswan), the two days of Egyptian fantasy in the form of Alexandria and Cairo was simply mind blowing awesome. Detailed information about the trip will be available shortly, most probably in a guide like form on a completely separate page of its own. Egypt definitely deserves its own separate place!

Edit: Find attached the image of the Vegetarian “Meal” offered by Egypt-Air

Days in the land of pharaohs. This is what the plan was. Until today, the day of departure. An excellent day to travel, nice and sunny. All upbeat and smiling we (Me, Jha and Ashish) set out for destination Egypt. All nice and good, till we reached the airport 1 hour prior to the departure (45 minutes required as per the ticket).

The first shocker came in the form of a burly guard, who asked where we wanted to go. The moment we said Egypt. He said pack up and go back. We were left stunned and blank. First we though he must have mis-understood or something. We tried again, this time he replied even strongly with the same set of words and some hand gesture suggesting pack-up. For a moment we didn’t realize what had happened. How could a guard tell us we were supposed to go back ?? We tried one or two more times but all in vain.

Plan B (even though there was no Plan A as such) set into action immediately. We went to other gates and tried to enter. One of the two tries paid off and we were all set again. Until we reached the airline counter that is. The guy sitting on the other side very promptly told us the same thing which the guard had told us earlier. Pack-up and go back. With just one addition. Try again tomorrow. This was beyond any of our comprehension. The conversation took place as follows, EAR refers to Egypt Air Representative and Us, well, us.

Us: “But why can’t we fly, it’s still checking-in status and we have our tickets with us!!!

EAR: “Your seats have been sold to other passengers and the flight is full. I am sorry, I can’t help you”.
What in the name of ??!!!

Us: “What do you mean our tickets have been sold. Our tickets are confirmed!!”

EAR: “You didn’t report 3 hours prior to departure time, so we assumed you were not coming and sold your tickets to people who were waiting”.

Us: “But we received no call from the airline and the ticket says 45 minutes!!”.

EAR: “I don’t care what your ticket says. The policy is 3 hours. What we can allow maximum is 1 hour, but that’s it. 45 minutes doesn’t work. It’s your own responsibility to reach here on time. Now the tickets are sold and there is nothing I can do”.

Us: “But……………….”.

On time he said. We were there during the checking-in. But the policy it seems was to make double profit. Sell the ticket and tell the passenger, if he does happen to come, that he is late and just leave him be. Good job Egypt Air!! It was beyond our wildest imagination that an airline could just sell our tickets to some nobodies who had no tickets or anything and not even inform us.

Then ensued some heating arguments with the airline reps on the phone, which too resulted in nothing, except that his claim was that we should’ve been there 1:15 hours prior to departure. Different from what his rep in person was claiming. Rather stupid for an airline operating for a country which pretty much thrives on tourism (well, not really but I don’t care right now)

Maybe we should’ve been there earlier, maybe tried phone check-in (web check-in wasn’t available, so I highly doubt if the former would’ve been, but whatever) or something else. What ended up happening was our decision to cancel with Egypt-Air, not to fly with it ever again if possible and going with the Air-Arabia option, which though was cheaper, was a little inconvenient as the flights depart from Sharjah. But in any case scenario, a much more trustworthy airline in the experience of people who had already flown with it.

We’re still coming Egypt! Albeit a little late.

After having lost my last blog to IIT policy of data deletion, I hardly found any reason to come out of my lazy world and start a new blog. Thanks to one-click install on dreamhost, it’s now a reality and up and running. To kick off, I’m now in Abu Dhabi, living a fantastic life. I’ve put up a Gallery, where you can find the latest photos (and the old ones from the previous blog which I thankfully still have). I’ll be going to egypt on the 19th so keep looking for updates!