O’Reilly’s Hacks Blog points out a way to work around the Nintendo Wii’s arbitrary 2GB limit on storing games and save information to an SD card. After formatting the card using the SDFormatter tool, simply fill everything but 2GB with junk data that you can later replace. Useful for anyone who’s hacked their Wii for homebrew apps. [via]
Nintendo doesn’t exactly advertise it, but the remotes for the Wii gaming console—including the balance board that comes with Wii Fit—have Bluetooth capabilities. That means you can connect your Wii peripherals to your computer to operate the media centre hooked up to your TV, play emulated games with a Nunchuk, Classic Controller, or even a Balance Board, and pretty much have them do anything you can do with a keyboard. Let’s walk through linking up your Wii peripherals and putting them in control of your Mac, PC, or Linux box.
You’ve hacked your Wii to run homebrew apps and play back DVDs without any difficult hardware hacking and now you want to dive into more of your homebrew options. Let’s take a closer look at how to install new homebrew applications on your Wii through the homebrew channel, play back virtually any video or audio format, run old-school video game emulators, and more. Oh, and we’ll play a little Doom, naturally.
Despite the fact that it ships with a DVD drive, for whatever godforsaken reason, the Nintendo Wii doesn’t support DVD playback—until last week, that is, when a homebrew hacker released a tool that enables DVD playback on your Wii. The best part? You don’t have to crack open your Wii or disturb your hardware in any way to install it. Let’s take a detailed look at how to softmod your Wii with the Twilight hack to run homebrew apps. Then I’ll show you how to install the Wii port of the open source media player, mplayer, to turn your Wii into a DVD (or should I say WiiVD?) player.
If public humiliation via Twitter isn’t your preferred weight loss strategy, how about gaming? Blogger Mickey DeLorenzo lost 6.8kg in simply 41 days by adding regular use of the Wii Fit to his daily routine. This isn’t exactly surprising — any conscious increase in physical activity should peel off some of the pork — but it might be more appealing than taking up jogging in mid-winter.
For the geek fitness freaks out there (I hope I’m not the only one) – here’s an early look at Nintendo’s forthcoming Wii Fit game. Wired’s Game/Life blogger Chris Kohler used Wii Fit (which gets you to use a Balance Board) and kept a diary for a week to track his progress. He says it’s the best “exer-game” to come out so far – even though it told him he was fat!
Want to create an easy-to-navigate home page for the browser on your Wii or any other? Wii Browser, a free page creation tool, lets you create a page full of big, easy-to-click links to set as your homepage. You can also easily edit or rearrange your links from inside your Opera-powered Wii browser, as the site uses a number-based passkey system instead of requiring a login/password, which can get a bit tedious with a Wiimote-controlled keyboard. The main value here is in being able to edit your links from your computer browser rather than through slow screen typing, but it also gives you a Wii-friendly page you can browse to from any system. For another Wii homepage idea, check out Google’s Wii-formatted Reader. Wii Browser [via eHub]
These days, every gaming system in your living room better be able to do more than just play video games if it’s going to earn its place next to your TV. The Xbox 360 makes for an excellent Media Center extender, and the original Xbox is the king of homebrew video-game-cum-media-boxes, but when it comes to expanding your home theatre beyond gaming, the Wii has always been a bit light on functionality. The best thing it’s got going for it is the excellent Opera web browser, but web browsing with the Wii remote is still a bit clunky. Luckily, using that very same browser, you can turn your Wii into a full-fledged media centre with the freeware Windows application Orb. Here’s how.
Design student Chung Da made this elegant looking plastic handle for a Wiimote controller to convert it into a zapper or gun. He used sheets of plastic acrylate but says you could easily use the cardboard from a cereal box. A couple of elastic bands holds it in place so it can easily be removed once you’re finished playing shoot em ups and want to return to something less violent on the Wii, like cow racing.You can download a PDF template for the gun handle from his website.
DIY Wii Zapper/Gun [Chung Da][via Make]
Wii Sports seemed like couch potato’s dream come true – a console offering to help you get fit and active while playing games. But a new study sponsored by Nintendo itself says that the health benefits of playing Wii Sports have been somewhat exaggerated.The study, reported in the British Medical Journal, found that Wii Sports players used just 2% more energy than players of other video games – burning an extra 250 kJ per hour. Waa. :(
