Hacking your Wii to play Pong is one thing, but the recently-revealed Twilight Princess exploit allows all sorts of unsigned code to run natively on the Wii. Homebrew developers are already starting to take advantage, releasing a bunch of interesting and/or useful unauthorized programs for Nintendo's little white box. Among them:- Linux for Wii - Coming next: Linux on your toaster
- MP3 player - Just in case you don't like the crappy one included in the Photo Channel.
- SNES emulator - Who needs the Virtual Console when you can just steal ROMs of your fave SNES games?
- Wii Tetris - So much cooler than Pong. No, you shut up!
[Thanks to reader Craig for many of these links]













(Page 1) Reader Comments
So everybody go out and buy TP NOW before they have a chance to fix the glitch.
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I want to try the SNES Emulator... I want Mario RPG in my TV =p
Call me back when it allows you to play backup's/iso's
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Maybe they can release games in high capacity memory cards (like 20GB memory cards) allowing a more smaller console without a disc drive, and eliminating loading times.
Anyone remember? The one with built-in save features? No loading time? Expandable memory?
Oh, that's right. CDs were just SO much better because they granted such an amazing amount of space. Thank god for higher resolution graphics, CG, FMVs and all the things that have very little to do with content or gameplay. And who needs skilled programmers when, since they had such an enormous amount of space, they could just toss out whatever the hell code they felt like?
I had hoped and prayed that the disc medium would enable developers to put even more content in their games. Instead, CD/DVDs were the ultimate excuse for developers to ignore content in favor of pretty pictures. Depth and content have hardly changed from 10-20 years ago (in fact, I'd argue they've declined). But at least everything's aesthetically pleasant.
Whine, whine, whine... games did need more space and they still need more space than what is affordable for games. I've never bought the sloppy code excuse. The bulk of the space is going toward textures and audio. And, yes, I appreciate having nice graphics. OH NO!
You forgot to add: "Get off my lawn!"
Also, the "graphics" all of you seem so obsessed with are easily condensed and far less system intensive were they programmed in the correct coding (i.e., some C++ but mainly Assembly), thus requiring minimal space. These gigabytes of games could easily be reduced far more than they are. In the mid-nineties everyone was obsessed with a new medium, i.e., CDs. Several companies tried (remember 3D0? CD-i?) but it was the low cost and availability of the PS that brought it into the mainstream. That doesn't make it right or necessary, all it does is illustrate our obsession with newer and better, regardless of the content or the need.
We have extremely lazy and highly unskilled programmers making our games. They've learned the intracices of "copy and paste" rather than the artform of actual programming.
All of your ignorance is startling. It's very sad and it's indicative of the industry as a whole. Research really isn't that difficult. Try it some time.
If you think that copying and pasting 10,100, hell, 10,000 lines of code is what takes up the space, you've obviously never programmed anything of substance.
N64 cartridge was 32MB, you want a decent sounding soundtrack? good luck. Unless you enjoying seeing the same (and shitty too) textures over and over and over again, the jump to CD 20x the space was needed.
All you've done is bitch and complain.
I do think it unfair of me to label an entire industry as having lackluster programmers, however, I do believe the industry has substantially ignored the programming side (and this is especially evident in several titles ['Temple of Elemental Evil' immediately springs to mind]).
The point is: games can be dramatically reduced in size, enough to the point that the same game could easily fit on a cartridge. As far as music, our current compression technologies easily remove the need for enormous space.
The other night I was playing the original Final Fantasy on the NES and a friend demanded I stop because "the graphics suck too much and so the game is worthless." The attitudes of the responders on Joystiq seem to share this opinion. I must admit I'm surprised pop-up books aren't hot sellers.
See, you have no clue. Straight code takes up some space, but it's tiny compared to assets like textures and audio. The example you give would chew up processing time, but have very little impact on storage space.
Okay, lets see Oblivion fit on a cartridge.
Also, I seriously doubt that happen. A lot.
But anyway your forgetting about everything. Models, music, sound files, textures, etc. I really doubt all the high quality of them could all fit on a cartridge.
Oh also lets see Brawl fit on a Cartridge. As it's using a Dual-Layered DVD, I doubt it.
Also Halo 3, Half-Life 2, etc. The list goes on.
What do you think gets the audio and textures to work in the game? How do you think the program recognizes whether or not to reuse, overlap or generate new textures? A talented programmer is one who is able to use existing code to the benefit of new concepts thus reducing the need for extensive coding. All you have to do is look at the code for most games nowadays - every time anything new needs to be done, they just add code. That muddling forces the processing to take longer because instead of reusing existing code, it's forced to take a burden of additional code.
Absolutely everything in a game is tied together with the programming, including graphics AND audio. Compression technology isn't magic, mp3s didn't simply appear out of thin air. They were programmed.
did you SERIOUSLY just say that graphics need to be programmed in C++?
you really have no idea, do you?
Hey, plenty of N64 games had great soundtracks. All the fanboy cries about this make it pretty fucking funny too that most of the soundtracks that were lauded on the PS1 (like FF) were actually the very same synth music found on N64 games, with most of the space on the disk actually going towards FMV and nothing else.
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In short, in a week this comment will be null and void.
Hahaha, oh wow. What's next coming from Joystiq, "Go grab a gun and rob banks!"?
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Need I say more?
[.sm0ke.]: "Chrono Trigger. Need I say more."
Fixed that for you. There is an infinitely small chance of Earthbound on VC, it's just damn unlikely. Square games are never coming.
Let me know when I am able to watch a DVD on my Wii through this exploit. Then I will be happy.
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They compensate whatever the latter is lacking at.
Do you need anything special for this? Or just a Wii, an SD card and a copy of TP?
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I'll check back in on the HBrew scene in 6 months to a year. It might be worth the common joe's (read: me) time by then.
We needs a custom firmware.
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Maybe one day.
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eke-eke wrote: "ok, have a look at the first post date, this is completely outdated
look like somebody has revived an old thread and some others thought it was new and using zelda's hack while it didn't even exist"
Drack wrote: "unholyfire has not posted anything since May 2007. The misleading title plus the (first) reply to this post yesterday fooled Brakken who posted this on the frontpage, where I assume most of us got wind of this. I'm not insulting Brakken here, I know I was fooled too, as were most of us in this thread.
However, I burned the .dol as an elf onto the SD card and got some interesting results.
-The wiimote did NOT power off as it does when I boot a GC game/homebrew disc.
-The dol actually booted the emulator menu, with the animated mario kart and everything, but no button input worked. My standard gc controller didn't work in the menu."
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Favorite part: "I had to move the 2 files to my c:/documents and settings/billy folder because when i opened up the Command Prompt that is the folder it started in."
Brilliant.
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