Twilight Princess exploit leads to explosion of Wii hacks

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!

Still no public announcement from Nintendo in reaction to the exploit, though given their recent aggressive pursuit of game pirates, you can expect a PSP-style battle of the firmwares to start any day now.
[Thanks to reader Craig for many of these links]

Reader Comments (62)

Hack I'm most looking forward to is the ability to run TurboGrafx CD games off their original discs. Still got perfectly good Gate of Thunder and Lords of Thunder discs sitting around collecting dust. Playing 'em on Magic Engine just isn't the same.

I'm actually installing a Wiikey on my system later this week. I can't wait to get all this homebrew good-ness running.

SNES emulator link is bad. Working link anyone?

lol, steal roms? You're stealing the content, sure, but the roms are free data.

Interesting

For everyone's clarification since Kyle's skim-copypasta has created some confusion. There is no Wii-mode SNES emulator in existence right now, just the "GC-mode" stuff that requires a modchip.

You can get SD Geckos @ www.gameparts.biz

As for the CD/cartridge debate, none of you realize that SD cards ARE CARTRIDGES. They are the new smaller, faster cartridge technology. Now that we have cartridges that hold more info than DVD9 and are faster and offer as many writes as a CD-RW, they are the future. They can be encrytped and write-protected or have a portion that is writeable and another that is not. This way a game can be "patched" in the future.

I wouldn't be suprised if games came on SD card next gen at all. By then, they'll be storing 128GB on a "cartridge" where as Blu-Ray would be too expensive to go past 75GB.

Um, so you are saying using the tp save game exploit all you need is a sd card launcher w/o the action replay software to get the snes emu to work?

At least your right about one thing. SD cards and the like can be thought of as the "new cartridge". But a cart that has the space compared to any disc media is EXPENSIVE! This includes HD and CD,DVD, HD-DVD, Blue-Ray ect. A solid state HD (yes they make them, look at the new Apple Air MacBook has one, Not sure but been told the drive is fast) for 8 GB costs $90US. That does not include the game. In the Apple MacBook Air, its $1000 for a 64GB drive! You can buy a 1TB SATA 2 drive for under $300. DVDs are as cheap as CDs are. A 25GB Blue-Ray disk cost less then $14. Simple math problem, take the size of the drive (I go by GB) and divide by the cost of the storage media and get in my case price per GB. 40GB/$40= $1 per GB. (outch!) As hard drives go I see 20 to 25 cents isn't bad and above that,... say unless its a networked or external drive of some sort, 30 cents and above your being ripped off badly.
Sorry, I came here from google looking for info on the 3.2 update, when I read about this TP hack and then googled that. I am just hungry for information.
Back to topic, ss far as this hack goes, it can go along way... just look at how the dongle pass key worked for the NDS to now having things like the R4. We are just seeing the beginning....

Maybe it'll get them to release a decent MP3 player, video player and speed up the releases of the VC games.

THey have had a much bigger success with the VC than I expected. I assumed that the preponderance of emulators on every other system (and the fact 90% of old games are rather unplayable now) would mean no one would pay, but i was wrong.

If nintendo provides all the features people want then they won't need to hack it. I modded my xbox so i could play videos, mp3s and retro games. If my xbox already did that then i wouldn't ahve gone to the trouble...

SD cards and the like can be thought of as the "new cartridge". But a cart that has the space compared to any disc media is EXPENSIVE! This includes HD and CD,DVD, HD-DVD, Blue-Ray ect. A solid state HD (yes they make them, look at the new Apple Air MacBook has one, Not sure but been told the drive is fast) for 8 GB costs $90US. That does not include the game. In the Apple MacBook Air, its $1000 for a 64GB drive! You can buy a 1TB SATA 2 drive for under $300. DVDs are as cheap as CDs are. A 25GB Blue-Ray disk cost less then $14. Simple math problem, take the size of the drive (I go by GB) and divide by the cost of the storage media and get in my case price per GB. 40GB/$40= $1 per GB. (outch!) As hard drives go I see 20 to 25 cents isn't bad and above that,... say unless its a networked or external drive of some sort, 30 cents and above your being ripped off badly.
Sorry, I came here from google looking for info on the 3.2 update, when I read about this TP hack and then googled that. I am just hungry for information.
Back to topic, ss far as this hack goes, it can go along way... just look at how the dongle pass key worked for the NDS to now having things like the R4. We are just seeing the beginning....

@NoHitHair

- Did you attend DeVry?

Twilight Princess exploit leads to explosion of Wii hacks

Reader Comments (62)

Posted: Feb 25th 2008 8:36PM arex said

Posted: Feb 25th 2008 10:28PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 25th 2008 10:15PM Zorink said

Posted: Feb 26th 2008 1:07AM Demaar said

Posted: Feb 26th 2008 1:33AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 26th 2008 3:54AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 26th 2008 7:43AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 26th 2008 11:55AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 26th 2008 11:25AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 26th 2008 9:17AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 26th 2008 12:10PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 26th 2008 1:39PM (Unverified) said

Info

Description

MSRP

Release Date

Genre

Developer

Publisher

Rating

Breaking News

WB conjures up Harry Potter for Kinect this fall

Featured Stories

Silver Lining: I Am Alive's unfeeling world

Game Of Thrones and the paradoxes of adaptation

Super Joystiq Podcast 004: 38 Studios meltdown, Gravity Rush, Civilization 5: Gods & Kings, Dragon's Dogma

Engadget

TUAW

Massively

WoW