How to make and play backup copies of your wii games
(aka wii hacking for dummies)

I had a simple problem, I wanted to make backup copies of my wii games and play those backup copies while the original discs were safely tucked away. This way I don’t have to worry about losing them or damaging them since I frequently take my wii to friend’s houses to play. Searching all over the internet for how to do this was very frustrating because of all the articles I found, none of them just explained step by step how to copy and play my copied games.

I learned all sorts of interesting terms like homebrew, twilight hack, starfall, gamma loader, etc… and spent hours figuring out what I needed to do. I hope you find this walkthrough before wasting time  just learning what terms you need to search for to get the answers you need. I didn’t want to install any of the wierd homebrew software floating around the internet, or use my wii to do fun stuff it was never intended to do.  By now you may have realized that these are going to be the exact same steps in hacking the wii that you can use to copy rented games, copy your friends games, or play games you have downloaded from the internet. Since all of these things are probably illegal in most places, I’ll stick in a small disclaimer here:

*The following post may contain instructions that if followed may cause the follower to commit a possibly illegal act, I do not endorse those actions nor take any responsibility for broken equipment or violated laws.*

That’s better. Now having said all that, If you follow these easy steps you should be able to *cough*itworkedforme*cough* copy and play wii games.

Glossary of Terms

• twilight hack – using a specially crafted save game for “the legend of zelda twilight princess” game to break out of the normal wii operating system
• homebrew – any wii games or software not developed by nintendo or a licenced partner
• homebrew channel – the special channel that gets installed to let us easily run homebrew software without having to do the twilight hack everytime we reboot the wii
• starfall – the program that stops upgrades and also offers a special button combination to save a bricked wii
• bricked wii – when bad software gets installed and the wii is about as usefull as a brick.
• loader, gamma loader, backup loader – another channel we will be installing to play the backed up games since the normal channel will not play a copied disc.

Overview

Here are the basic steps we are going to take:

1. use a “hack” to break out of the normal wii software
2. install a special channel so we don’t have to use the hack everytime we want to do something
3. downgrade our wii software to a version we like better. This also stops nintendo from upgrading the software without our permission (added in 3.4)
4. install a patch to stop new wii games from trying to upgrade our software and/or “brick” the wii
5. install a program to backup our wii games
6. install a program to play the backup games

Stuff you need

• Nintendo Wii
• WiFi working on the wii. (backing up games will be done from the wii over wifi to the pc. The pc doesn’t need wifi, but it needs to be connected either wired or wireless to the same router)
• Nunchuck controller (we need to load zelda and it won’t start without it)
• SD card (at least 32mb but less than 2gb and formatted as fat16) A mini or micro sd card will work if you have a full size sd card adapter it fits into.Any higher size sd cards are actually sdhc (high capacity) and the wii cannot read those. See a few lines down for the one I used, it came with the usb adapter.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The real thing, not a copy. You can rent it, buy it, or borrow it.
• Computer with SD card reader  running windows (anything from windows 3.1 to vista 64 or even windows 7 should work). A mac might work, but I haven’t tried it. If your computer does not have an sd card reader there are alternatives.
  1. Attach a camera with an sd card slot to your computer using a usb cable. Most cameras should then show you the memory card under “my computer”.
  2. Use a microSD card in a cell phone, usb to computer. Then put the microSD card into a full size sd card adapter (most microSD cards come with this adapter)
  3. Use a microSD -> USB adapter. I used the kingston 2gb mobility kit microSD and it worked great.
• Wii SD Card Files (454) This zip is a compilation of programs I put together from other downloads for hacking the wii. I added just the things we need and even numbered them in the order we will be using them. Feel free to put together your own set of files or even use the  Wii Brew SD Installer. However, if you use the installer, it does not come with the programs to copy games (DVD downloader) or load copied games (gamma loader). You will need to find those and add them to the SD card manually.

Let the Hacking Begin!

Got all the stuff you need? Great! Let’s begin:

1. Create the SD card

Open up “my computer” and right click the drive that is the sd card, select format

Even though Vista is calling it FAT, it is really FAT-16. The volume lable can be anything you want, the allocation unit size isn’t really important either and the default should be fine. Note: I actually used an SD card with a bunch of other stuff on it (it was already formatted FAT-16) and I had no problems. The wii just ignored the other files. Note: If you already have played the legend of zelda: twilight princess on this wii and want to keep your saved game, copy it off onto an sd card before going any further. The next few steps will erase any previously saved games.

Download the wii sd card files (link is above in “stuff you need”). Copy all the files out of the zip and onto the root of the sd card. When you are done, the sd card should look like this

This download is already set to use the twilight hack for wii system version 3.4. To find out what version of wii system you have, turn on your wii, go to settings, and in the upper right hand corner it will show the version number.

The letter after the numbers is for the region (U = United States, E = Europe, J = Japan). Remember what region you  have, so you can choose the right version in a few steps.

If the version is 3.4, the files on the SD card are already good to go.

If the version is 3.3, then open the sd card in my computer, and browse to :\private\wii\title\rzde\
Rename data.bin to twilight3.4.bin then rename twilight3.3.bin to data.bin

If the version is 3.2 or lower, sorry, I really don’t know what to do since I’ve never run into this. You may be able to use the 3.3 twilight hack and just skip the downgrade process, but I won’t offer advice on something I haven’t actually done myself.

Congrats, the sd card is now ready to go into the wii!

2. Hack the wii (install homebrew channel)

Put the SD card into the wii and turn it on. Go into settings and copy the save game for zelda onto the wii.

Pop in the zelda disc and run it. You will notice there are two versions of the save game there, 0 and 2. If you really want to squint at the tiny print on your zelda disc, go ahead. The simple way is to try the first one. Open the save game and when it loads, just walk backwards. Seriously. Just press down on the nunchuck controller.

If at this point you see a black screen with a bunch of text for the homebrew channel installer, you picked the right save game. If the wii just locks up and you don’t see anything going on, hold the power button to restart the wii and choose the other save game. If both of the saved games have disappeared, thats nintendo’s lame attempt at stopping this, just copy the game over from the sd card again.

3. Downgrade to 3.2

The following steps will automatically reboot the wii after each step. I will warn you that this will take about 30 min to finish and until then your wii is basically useless. So don’t start this unless you have the time to finish it. Note that each step may use a different but similarily named program, make sure that you are using the correct program for each step.

(Perform these steps ONLY if your system version is 3.3 or 3.4. If you are already at 3.2 Skip to Step 4)

• Open Homebrew Channel, run “Wad Manager” and install IOS16-64-v257-prod.wad
  
• Open Homebrew Channel, run “Custom WM” and install cios_fix.wad
  
• Open Homebrew Channel, run “IOS Downgrader”
  Follow all prompts until it finishes
• Open Homebrew Channel, run “cIOS Downgrader” and choose 3.2 for your region
  Make sure you choose your correct region
  3.2U = USA/Canada, 3.2E = Europe, 3.2J = Japan

4. Install software

YAY, you made it to 3.2. Now we are going to install starfall which will block upgrades and also save you from a bricked wii just incase you install some bad software later on.

• Open Homebrew Channel, run “Starfall”
  If you read the disclaimer carefully, you will see you are instructed to press B+1 and not B+2.
  Press B+1 until you get to the next screen. It is very picky so dont be surprised if you have to
  keep pressing it a number of times.At the next screen the most important things to install are the
  last 3 options. Many people like to just install everything which is okay too.
  
• If the starfall install fails, reinstall the first two items from Step A (wad manager, custom WM) and then try to install starfall again. This has always worked for me when a starfall install failed.
  
• Open Homebrew Channel, run “cIOS Installer”
  This installs the IOS needed by the launcher.
  
• Open Homebrew Channel, run “Install Shop IOS51″
  Say Yes to installing IOS51 and Yes to patching a fix but No to the Wii Shop Channel.
  
• Open Homebrew Channel, run “Wad Manager” install DjTaz_gamma_Loader.wad – This will install the gamma loader channel which lets you launch burned discs

5. Copy a game

If you have reached this point, your wii is ready to go. While there are a few ways to copy games, the most reliable and fastest way is to use the dvd drive in the wii, and save the game to the pc over wifi.

• Make sure that the wii is connected to your wifi network, and the pc is connected to the same network (either wifi or wired).
• Put the game you want to copy into the dvd drive on the wii
• Make sure you have at lease 4.7gb of available space on the computer since this is how big the game will be.
• Open Homebrew Channel, run “DVD-Dumper_v1.2″ – This will stream a game so that your pc can save it
• Follow the onscreen prompts. At some point it should tell you to open up a browser on your computer (IE, firefox, safari, whatever) and type in the IP address of the wii. When you do this, just click the link and the game will start to save.
  
• I like to name the file [nameofthegame].iso. This keeps me organized. The iso part is important, but the filename can really be anything you want.
  
• Depending on if the pc is also wifi and how much wifi traffic you have in your area, this will take 3-7 hours. Yeah. This is something I usually let run overnight. Just make sure the computer has all the power settings set to “never” so the harddrive doesn’t stop and the pc doesn’t go to sleep.
  

6. Burn a game

If your computer didn’t come with nero or sonic or some other dvd burning software, there are pleanty of free ones. Just google “free dvd burner software”. I used nero buring rom (not free) and it worked great.

There are tons of discussions on which types of dvd’s to use, and they all say to ONLY USE DVD-R. I heard good things about verbatim and i saw some 8x verbatim on sale and they worked fine. Some people say to only burn at 4x instead of the full 8x but I used 8x and had no problems. I’d say try the full speed and if you have problems, then slow it down.

Open the dvd burning software and select something like “burn image file”, and select the .iso of the game you saved.

7. Play a copied game

Put the burned disc into the wii, and select the “gamma loader” channel. Then select load game. TADA, you are now playing a burned game! By the way, on some games you will notice a little lag when they play intro videos, this is because the wii reads burned discs a little slower than the real “pressed” discs. Nothing to worry about, the gameplay should be fine, it’s just the videos that give a little stutter.

8. Additional Information

If you successfully followed these instructions, you may be thinking to yourself, hey, why don’t I just visit (insert name of popular file sharing site here) and download games? While I don’t advocate this (*cough*blockbuster has really cheap all you can rent per month*cough*) because I don’t trust other people’s copies, there are a few things you should know. First of all, check whether the game is NTSC (United States) or PAL (Europe). Even though they are both english versions, the screen resolutions are different. If you don’t know what type of TV you have, go google it and figure it out, and only use the matching type of game.

You may see titles that say “brick blocked” or “wii scrubbed”. Brick blocked means that after the dvd was copied from the wii, any software updates were removed from the game. You don’t need this because you have installed starfall. I would suggest staying away from a brickblocked game because the removal process is not perfect and the game could be messed up. Wii Scrubbed or just scrubbed means that the extra junk information to make a game exactly 4.7gb was turned into all “0″s. Nintendo made all the game companies add junk data to fill up the disc no matter how big the actual game was. The funny part is that even after scrubbing, the game is still 4.7gb. The only benefit to scrubbing is when the .iso file is compressed into a .zip or .rar or whatever, it becomes smaller because a long string of “0″s is highly compressable. However the compression process for a 4.7gb file will take more than a few min. It’s up to you whether this process is worth saving some space. Hard drives are cheap, I prefer to save time, not space.

I hope this guide saves you some time and frustration. Please leave a comment if this worked for you or if you have any problems. I’ll try to respond as quickly as possible, or perhaps another user will comment after you with a solution.

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