Atkins Meyer

** This is old news. With the release of Wiigator’s Backup Launcher 0.3 beta, it is now much, much easier to setup and run backups on your Wii. Please see my update to this tutorial.

With the recent leak of Waninkoko’s backup iso loader and an improved loader made by Wiigator, it’s now possible to softmod a Nintendo Wii to load burned backup discs created from iso files. I got this working on my Wii a couple of days ago and had to look all over the web to find the correct and most up-to-date directions. I’m going to post what I did and what tools I used in this blog so that everything can be found in one place. While this process is far from difficult, I’m hoping someone comes up with a homebrew package that does the following hacks in an easy, run once format. Anyhow, lets get started.

First, you need to find a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for Wii so that you can run the twilight hack and install the Homebrew Channel. I’m not going to cover that part, since it’s already well documented. Even if you’re not interested in the backup loader, I highly recommend installing the Homebrew Channel to everyone out there. It’s fun, legal and very safe.

Now the fun part. Fire up some Dio or Foreigner and get ready to rock.

Add the following apps to your SD card in the \apps\ folder so you can run them from the homebrew channel. Note that you will need to make a folder for each app (ex. \apps\dvdx) and put the .elf or .dol file in that folder and rename it to boot.elf or boot.dol. Do this with the following apps:

• DVDx – download
• WAD Manager – download
• Wiigator’s GeckoOS – download

Now download CIOS36_rev5-64-v1042.wad and place it on your SD card in the \wad folder. Now stick your SD card in your Wii and do the following

• start the homebrew channel
• run the WAD Manager and install the CIOS36_rev5-64-v1042.wad file and return to the homebrew channel
• run DVDx, select advanced install and install CIOS249
• shutdown your Wii and restart it

Your Wii is now ready to run burned dvd-r discs. You can run them by inserting the dvd-r, starting up the homebrew channel and launching Wiigator’s GeckoOS. From there just select Launch Game. Wiigator’s GeckoOS will launch both PAL and NTSC originals and burned dvd-r games. I believe that it will also launch all kinds of Gamecube discs too but I haven’t tried that.

Finally, to make a Wii iso compatible with the loader you need to do the following. You need a Wii iso file which you can rip yourself or download. There is a tutorial at wiiisos.com on how to create an iso from your original Wii disc. Please note that downloading Wii iso files is illegal.

Now download backup-creator-v1.zip and place your iso and the contents of the zip in to a folder. Open a command prompt and cd to that folder. Run backup-creator.exe with the name of your iso (ex. backup-creator mario-kart.iso). Lastly, burn the newly created partition.iso file with the free burning software ImgBurn. I use all the defaults options with ImgBurn and burn on dvd-r (not dvd+r) media at slow speeds.

The Wii scene is changing fast. The loader and the cIOS will surely be updated again soon to iron out the bugs which are in this early release. Update the loader and the cIOS as new ones are released. Currently, there are a couple of problems with this method. First, read speed is locked at a max of 3x, which means load times are longer and full screen video is slow or jumpy. The second problem is disc compatibility isn’t 100%. Currently PAL games work better than NTSC games and around 20% of games will crash or freeze.