Coming back to the Wii homebrew scene after a long time and what a great thing to talk about – BootMii. The awesome guys at hackmii have released (initial beta) the much awaited homebrew that has the potential to bring back your Wii from almost any brick.

A little background for those who haven’t heard of this before. The system boots through many stages and for all practical purposes, the very first stage after which it’s possible to brick the Wii, from bad firmware update to wrong region firmware etc, is now going to be protected.

This nifty hack into the system provides users with an option to boot directly into the Homebrew Channel, Backup / Restore your Nand without booting into the System Menu! What this means is if you brick your Wii in future with a bad firmware update (For eg) resulting in the error page directly on bootup, then this will come in handy, assuming you installed it beforehand

Backup your Nand (which, it seems can be done in under 3 minutes!) and keep it safe. If the firmware update goes back, all you gotta do is restore it using bootmii. Or you could use it to boot into the homebrew channel and use other homebrew utilities to restore your firmware. All the details are available on the homepage.

Although it’s in beta right now and can cause a brick itself due to some unforeseen bug, it’s a big step in the right direction as it holds the potential of giving users something nintendo couldn’t – possibility to restore things in the worst case scenario! If you’re confident about playing around you could do the testing and help out the developers. If not, just wait out the beta testing and then install away the awesome BootMii, for you might just need it on some rainy day!

Nintendo seem to have quietly released the Wii speak channel. From the description it’s basically a chat client with support for upto 4 connections.

All nice and cool! The catch however is that you need to buy the Wii Speak Microphone (seems to be a regular USB mic with high sensitivity) and enter the code that comes along to download the channel.

Interesting update I must say. They keep adding fun things every once in a while. But forcing people to buy their mic is not so much of a nice thing to do!

So nintendo came back and released another firmware update for the Wii, v3.4. The good things being as below:

• USB keyboard support in Mii Channel

• Enhanced parental controls

• Improved SD card read/write speed

• Improved disc reading

The good features aside, they also managed to kill the Twilight hack. Or so they thought anyways. The good guys at hackmii managed to exploit more bugs and have given us a new savefile for the Twilight hack (beta2 now). The procedure for Twilight Hack remains the same and the good old method to run homebrew still lives on!

Also changed is the policy of updates. If you update to 3.4, nintendo will be able to update your firmware online without asking for your permission. That is a loss of lot of control. This is bad news especially given the fact that the modchips now support update blocking from the discs, which were not preventable earlier. The recommendation is to not update to this firmware, unless absolutely essential!

The much talked about recovery dongle for the Wii is here!! And it has been appropriately been named SaveMii. As per the article, this is not the complete solution but should help unbrick Wiis that can reach the System Menu stage. This plugs into the gamecube slot and boots the Wii into a recovery mode. Aftet this, using an update disc you can unbrick your Wii. As simple as that! At this point I am not really sure if this fixes the bootup white page scenario, but it’s an awesome release nonetheless.

Further in the article, they’ve talked about a BootMii release for the future, which will be a complete solution for the bricked Wiis of any kind. However, if SaveMii fixes your Wii, that should be more than enough. A big advantage that BootMii will come with though, is a safeguard against bricks. This means, you will not be able to brick your Wii (software-wise ofcourse ) using the ‘softpatching’ that the dongle will provide.

These are pretty much the details available right now. If you have a bricked Wii that you’ve been unable to fix via the solutions that have been posted by me and others, then this should worth a try and you should consider buying one! Keep reading for more updates on this!

UPDATE:- It does seem to fix the famous Whitepage error (otherwise known as fullbrick)! Considering that it is only $30 with shipping, it’s definitely something worth buying, even if you’ve not yet bricked your Wii yet! I am definitely ordering mine!

Been a long time since the last post on the Wii scene, mostly because I am too lazy to type. However, this long a time has brought about a lot of things on the scene. The most important of them being the recent recovery dongle for the Wii.

Before you get too excited, let me just say that it is not really ‘out’ right now. From what I understood from marcan’s post (one of the lead developers on the homebrew, hacking the Wii scene, like Bushing) is that it’s still in it’s preliminary stages and that the release plans for the dongle as such are not there. So it’s still a little waiting before things get handy. Nonetheless, it’s a really nice update for people who bricked their Wiis. There are three cases of bricked Wiis that can be recovered, one of which includes the famous white screen brick. When the dongle is out, it will be as simple as (as per my understanding) plug in the dongle, boot the Wii, pop in a disc with firmware update and your Wii is back!

Moving on to the other things, the next most important thing was the development of the DVDX library. With this the much awaited DVD playback is now available on the Wii! Thanks to the guys over at hackmii, this helps developers read DVDs making homebrew softwares. A version of mplayer for the Wii is already out which supports the DVD playback. Also supported by the updated mplayer is USB playback, which means you can now play your favourite media on the Wii using a USB drive / stick! So much for the lack of media capabilities built-in on the Wii !!

Next on scene is the awesome menuloader. This is an application released by marcan (the same guy as above) which loads a patched version of the system menu (read custom firmware) withouth making any changes permanent. This is just too awesome given the fact that installing custom firmwares (permanently) can lead to a bricked Wii. With this, if the custom firmware doesn’t work out, you just reboot and the Wii is back in it’s original form! Though, the uses for this are now limited, given the fact that the most required features of custom firmwares are already out in homebrew software form. The usage of this is rather simple. Install it in the homebrew channel, select the ‘patches’ via this and it’s all set. Couldn’t have been more easier than this!

One of the most interesting post apps released on the homebrew scene is the AnyRegion changer. This lets your change the region of your Wii (permanently). After you change your region, you have to install a firmware of the same region. However, this is rather risky as you can brick your Wii rather easily. But if you bought a Wii when it was available somewhere and it wasn’t of your region, then this app can come in rather handy. Change the region of the Wii to yours, and you’re all set to go!

Also released was this app by Waninkoko, the custom IOS DVD dumper. With this custom firmware, you can dump your DVD to an SD card so that you can keep a backup in case your original DVD goes bad. Much easier than having to download the whole DVD from internet just for the sake of backup.

On the modding scene, new Wiis came out with D2E chpsets (D2C, D2C2 and now these, phew, nintendo sure doesn’t give up!). And as usual, all the major modchips released their versions of D2E compliant chips. D2pro and Wasabi are the two chips which are out there and working with these latest boards.

Also released was this app called Title uninstaller. Unlike the Wad uninstaller released a while back, this does not require you to have the original Wad files to uninstall the Titles installed on the Wii. Much useful incase you installed some title and don’t know which Wad file was used for it.

And this pretty much sums up all the important stuff having happened on the Wii scene (from my point of view anyways). Happy Wiing!