Definitely the simplest platform for archiving/emulation if you have an old Wii. I got my entire Wii/Gamecube library backed up recently, and it barely took any longer than the time to scan the discs (9min GCN, 24min/45min Wii single/dual layer). PC disc drives are NOT recommended, I had two not work for me, but the Wii worked immediately…

My test disc, in one of many failed PC drive rip attempts. It is claimed that certain PC drives can rip GCN/Wii games. On Windows 7, I have tried one of these drives (a SATA drive, GH20NS15) and had it fail repeatedly with multiple pieces of software (Rawdump 2.1, 2.0, and friidump 0.5.3). On Windows XP, I have tried an IDE equivalent (also on confirmed lists), and it failed with all software as well.

A successful rip in progress!

So softmodding a Wii is actually really easy by comparison. It makes no hardware modifications, and basically just takes an older SD card firmware tweak (very easy, just sending the Wii a reset message from the LetterBomb website, then opening a file on the Wii) and having CleanRip on the SD card as well. That’s it! Took less than 30min to setup. Then you can rip any Wii or GCN game to the SD card using Homebrew Channel + CleanRip, and you have your fair use backup in case of fire/earthquakes.

Extra deets:

LetterBomb is at http://please.hackmii.com/ and just needs your Wii MAC address, easily found in the Wii network settings.



I used hackmii_installer_v1.2, which comes with both Homebrew Channel and BootMii too (don’t remember what I used BootMii for, but my notes say it was useful).



You probably have System Software 4.3 on the Wii, the latest update - from a number of years ago (2010). The homebrew firmware update for this is the LetterBomb.

8GB SDHC card did not work for installation! Required 1GB SD card instead. Both worked for actual ripping (and Homebrew/CleanRip can be moved onto the Wii itself to make room for game files)



Old Wiis are good because this breaks your warranty. Warranty only lasts 1yr anyways though.

Sometimes the games have to be split into parts, but you can merge them back together on Windows with command “copy /b file.part1 file.part2 file.part3 fileFinal.iso” where file is the file name, and fileFinal is where you want them merged. If requested, I have a batch file I can upload that does this in bulk, but unless you rip your whole library at once, doing this by hand isn’t so bad.

And that’s it! If you have any other questions, Google first! This stuff is really well documented on http://wiibrew.org/ for everything I mentioned here. Any questions about my post specifically (and not Wii game ripping, which is all on wiibrew.org) you can reach me on gmail as BlinksTale.

