Datel's Freeloader swap disc initially opened the way for import gaming on the Wii, but rumors are already swirling that Nintendo next major firmware update is going to break it, leaving your Freeloader DVD as little more than a coaster.
With the Twilight Hack giving every homebrew coder in the world access to the Wii's internal architecture, the emergence of a program like Gecko Region Free was inevitable. Load the software up on whatever you use to implement the Twilight Hack and enjoy yourself some region-free gaming. If you happen to use a USB Gecko as your chainloader, you also get a screenshot and debugging tools.
Right now the program is very new and hasn't been tested for all games yet, but it's already believed to be resistant to breakage since it uses hardware to decrypt. With the Twilight Hack getting easier and easier to run, a beautiful Wii import community may be about to blossom - although Nintendo can't be happy about this. Can you imagine what the Brawl scene would've been like if this release two months ago?
Did you ever play The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures in full co-op? Seriously, leave a comment or something if you did. I'm not convinced there's many of you out there. Playing with four GBAs was a real pain, a lot of people didn't bother.
Retro guru Racketboy and buddy fastbilly1 have worked out a devious scheme that takes the GBAs entirely out of the equation. Sure, it involves getting together five TVs and five GameCubes, but it also means that every player gets a nice big screen to look at and a controller of his/her own. Spectators get to view one of the utterly awesome LAN-like game parties ever hosted. Video follows, and full instructions for setting it up yourself are at the link. I am so doing this soon.
The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures
Dropped at 50mph, thown from a story high onto tile, destroyed on a second story drop, split in half when thrown against a wall then ripped to pieces on camera. The DS Lite is sadly no longer with us. The extreme testing got the better of it just before we threw it into a sink of water.
The Korg MS-20 is a retro sound synthesizer with quite a cult following among musicians. It's a favorite of Aphex Twin, and produces very distinct sounds. The MS-20 had two oscillators, and a single-oscillator counterpart called the Korg MS-10.
AQ Interactive is a company that ordinarily spends its time publishing terrible Xbox 360 titles. It turns out AQ Interactive is also working on an awesome Nintendo DS project: the Korg DS-10, an attempt to use the Nintendo DS to completely duplicate the sounds and functions of the old Korg MS-10. The sample up on the project's English homepage is pretty convincing.
What's 100 MB to you? Maybe an episode of a favorite television series, encoded to .mp4 format (to .avi, probably one-third to one-half of an episode). It's about an album's worth of MP3s, or perhaps a single data library in a PC or Xbox 360 title. It's roughly 1/40th of the size of a Blu-Ray disc.
It's also the total size of the operating data on a copy of Wii Sports. Yes, that's right, Wii Sports could fit comfortably on the average audio CD... seven times.
It was discussed in a comments thread a long time ago on this blog, but all Wii games discs carry at least 4 GB of data, regardless of how complex the games themselves are. Turns out retail Wiis won't boot anything less than 4GBs in size.
Hackers, of course, can modify Wiis to get around that, and someone finally built a utility to scrub the junk data out of Wii .isos. It's called WiiScrubb 1.0, and is pretty old news by now.
WiiScrubb was probably developed for nefarious purposes, but it's interesting in its own right. it seems like a lot of Wii titles (the massive Brawl excepted) are clocking in with disc sizes less than half that of the average PS2 game... despite costing about $20 more.
Wii Sports
If you're one of those types who likes to use a memory card to pimp your DS out into a sort of ghetto PDA, then this may be something you'd like to mess with. DSVideo is a homebrew app designed to get the DS to run video encodes that have been specially transcoded to the otherwise weird 256 x 192 screen size. The site proudly proclaims that a DS transcode of a movie can be squeezed down to 400 MB.
This isn't going to please anyone super-serious about watching video on the go, to be honest, but I bet it could be something fun to play around with in terms of "can I make my DS do that?" You can download everything you need here, but be sure to read the install and transcode directions very carefully. Instructions for use and downloads are all on the site. Have fun with it! If you're not curious enough to try DSVideo, at least check out this demo of the program in action.
At this point the loader is primitive and, frankly, it may not do anything you want it to... but it's significant progress over the previous state of the 'Twilight Princess' hack. If you want to try and run it yourself, it's here, but remember you take your Wii's firmware into your own hands when you mess with it like this. If you'd just like to see a video of the hack in action... well, here you go!
This is a really interesting exercise in terms of pushing the hardware boundaries of the Nintendo DS. The fans at Drunken Coders have at long-last gotten a complete homebrew version of Quake II's single-player to run on the Nintendo DS. The catch is that running it basically requires a very particular selection of flash carts, since the sheer size and complexity of the software is way beyond anything the DS was designed to be able to do.
Unlike Quake 1, there is simply no way of fitting Quake II into the memory configuration of a stock DS. To play the game you must have a supported slot-2 flash card that contains a minimum of 16 megabytes of RAM.
Supported cards: 'Proper' SuperCards, eg the Lite, SD, MiniSD, and CF. The SuperCard Rumble and SuperCard One are not compatible. 'Perfect' M3s, eg the Lite Perfect, the Mini SD Perfect, and the SD Perfect. The Mini SD Pro, SD Pro, and Lite Pro are not compatible.EZ-Flash cards which have a slot-2 component and can play GBA games over 32MBit, eg EZ 3-in-1, EZ 4, EZ 5. G6 Flash.
I love the modding community, I really do. Only a guy like Cyberpyrot at the great Acidmods website could come up with something like this: a way to play Wii light gun games using an original, modified NES Zapper. Full instructions for doing the mod yourself are here, but be warned that this isn't for the faint of heart. You can easily destroy both a Wii Remote and a Zapper if you botch it. Anyway, check out this video of the Wii Remote Hack in action, complete with inexplicable R&B soundtrack!
Okay. First, watch this video, which is by itself an impressive vid of a run through the first level of the famous Kaizo Mario World hack. It introduces some new tools for recording all of the attempts that go into the creation of a tool-assisted speedrun and having them play out simultaneously.
It's when you get into the creator's discussion of quantum physics that things get kind of freaky.
At each moment of the playthrough theres a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulators save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists.
