Wii Updates – Part 3
June has arrived upon us and it’s a new month with a lot of updates for our beloved console. I’ll go from the modding scene to the homebrew stuff to some exciting updates from Nintendo.
On with the modding scene, the update is HUGE! In an earlier post I had mentioned the arrival of the new unmoddable Wiis. Well, they’re history (i.e. not unmoddable anymore) now with D2Pro and Wasabi team having both launched their chips which support the new D2C2 consoles, maintaining the 9-wire solution. The Wasabi team also claim to have included a method to see if the console is the new generation D2C or the older one. That will not be an advantage for the people buying chips at personal level, but should be extremely useful for the professional modders out there. So if an older generation chip is not working, you can be sure if it’s the installation problem or just that you need a new generation chip. The method of checking consoles by their numbers is currently not functional as Nintendo have been smart enough to mix out the whole scheme, thus rendering our favourite tracker useless for identifying the newer generation consoles.
On the side, Nuxil released a method of converting the old D2CKey to D2Pro with the help of some soldering and some extra hardware. This method has been found to be working by a lot of people. So all the people who are stuck with the old D2CKeys can give this a try and make their modchips truly updateable and 9-wire from the tiring 31-wire. Basically, turn them into the supercool D2Pro. The information on the additional parts is available in the thread itself.
Next up, is the homebrew scene. The homebrew channel being the top of the league has seen the light of the day. And not just that, it even has been given an update already! The list of features is immense, so I’ll just direct you to the details here. A very significant update after the channel has been the release of the updated libraries for developing homebrew games. With these tools handy, people with good skills will hopefully soon overwhelm us with their games, with full support for the WiiMote and the front SD card. Also worthy of being noted is the exiciting development on the USB Mass storage scene. When this comes out as a final release, we’ll hopefully be able to watch our movies with the Media Playback capabilities of our Wii with the removable storage devices.
Now considering the fact that a lot of people semi-bricked their modded consoles by playing games from another region and that the unbrick tool by Bushing was extremely successful; this update by Waninkoko will be the next big thing here. This tool is able to downgrade your Wii to a lower firmware. Now what I am writing isn’t official but just my interpretation of one of the uses of this release. The sure and obvious use would be in future case scenarios of Nintendo updates. If you update your console and find that the modchip is not working anymore (like what happened with Wiikey when SMG was released) then this tool will really come in handy. You just run it and downgrade your firmware and viola! The chip is back on!
The other more interesting use could be in the semi-bricked Wii cases. Now I am not a 100% sure if the downgrade WILL result in the settings menu coming back. If it does, you’re all set and back with unbricked Wii. But if it does not come back up, then you can just use one of the previous updates that came with your games (now that your console is of lower firmwares, those updates will come in action when you pop a game disc with update back in). If this does happen, then we wouldn’t have to wait for an update from Nintendo to unbrick the console with an updated firmware! Could be extremely useful indeed, but all is just speculation here until the tool gets out in the open.
On this front, there is a post by Bushing highlighting the potential issues with this kind of a downgrade. He also talks about potential alternatives to the same end. A very interesting read though it’s quite technical.
Now for the updates the mighty N has sent down upon us in the form of The Nintendo Channel and WiiWare. Both of these are the most exciting for any Wii owner. The Nintendo Channel has the previews to the games that are going to be released. This way you can get a good idea about a game that is going to be released by the video which can have trailer / gameplay for the to be released game.
WiiWare on the other hand is going to be something like the VC games that we’ve seen, only these games will be released specifically for the Wii! This means, not only do you get to enjoy the plethora of homebrew games that have started rolling in, but also other games which will be develpoed by independent developers. According to nintendo, more than 100 titles are lined up for release and are completed at various stages of release.
Now if only we can get that USB mass storage support on the Wii, so that downloading games to the small 512MB internal memory won’t be exhausting.