So I haven't turned on my wii for months, it just sits there collecting dust. I was reading up on how people are "hacking" their wiis so I decided to look into it. Apparently Nintendo killed all Homebrew software running on the wii with the last system update (4.3) but since I haven't turned it on for months I was still on version 4.2 which I could still work with.
I must say, the homebrew channel is insane. You can customize it till the cows come home. I have an external 1TB USB hard drive that can hold Wii game ISOs, all my games play through that so its actually much faster loading time then a DVD. I can send over game ISOs from my PC OR rip wii games directly from the console to the USB drive.
I'm working on getting emulation running on it (NES, SNES, GEN, GBA, PS1, Dreamcast, etc) now and we will see how that goes. Also looking into it briefly there is a way to play DVDs and other video files from a USB drive (MP4, AVI, etc), but I did not set that part up yet. There also many many more apps you can download and install and I have barely scratched the surface.
I would say this takes some techie knowledge, mixed in with a little trial and error, but after about 2 hours of playing with it, I was able to get this part to work flawlessly. I thought I'd share for those out there who may have been thinking about it for months like myself, just make sure u don't update your wii to 4.3 because as far as I know its uncrackable atm (I'm sure that wont last long)
