Wii Homebrew + USB Hard Drive

Friday, May 29th, 2009 @ 12:30am

I’ve been running Homebrew on my Wii for quite some time and recently stumbled upon the ability to play backed up games from a USB hard drive. There’s several advantages to this, one is I don’t have to worry about changing DVDs anytime I want to play a game in addition to not having to carry them around, and having the games loaded from a USB hard drive should increase my load time.

I needed to keep a log of all the steps I had to take in order to get this functionality working, so I figured I might as well be helpful and provide a list of the steps needed to do so.

The only thing I ask is that you don’t follow these methods to pirate games. It’s wrong and it cheats developers out of money they deserve. Homebrew is there to help enhance the functionality of the system, not for free games. So please use it wisely and don’t abuse the system. It’s all on the honor system here folks.

Prerequisites:

  • External USB Hard Drive
  • Homebrew Channel already installed (See Twilight Hack if you have system 3.4 or less, or Bannerbomb if you have 4.0 for Homebrew installation instructions)

Step 1 – Install cIOS38 (if you don’t already have cIOS38 installed, otherwise skip to Step 2)

  • Download cIOS38_rev14 (you can find it here)
  • Extract and rename “cIOS38_rev14-Installer” to “boot.dol”.
  • Create a folder named “cIOS38_rev14″ under the /apps directory on your SD card and copy the extracted “boot.dol” file to that folder.
  • If this doesn’t work and the installation fails, you need to download the Trucha Bug Restorer for your system. Try that and attempt to install cIOS38 again. Please note that this step may brick your Wii! I highly recommend you go ahead and install BootMii in boot2 and back up your NAND before attempting this portion. Doing so will allow you to recover should anything go wrong, otherwise you are continuing at your own risk!

Step 2 – Install a USB Loader

There’s actually several options available here as far as USB loaders are concerned. Just take a look at the wide range of loaders and pick one that has the features you like.

  • Download your favored USB Loader.
  • Follow any included instructions, otherwise you may only need to copy the extracted folder into your /apps directory on your SD card.

Step 3 – Format Your Hard Drive

You will probably need to partition the drive as the following download will only work with raw, unformatted partitions and not NTFS, FAT32, etc. I highly recommend GParted. It’s also a good idea to partition if you want to use any extra space on this hard drive for other things than your Wii, or if you want to move backed up iso files to your computer.

  • If you want to partition your hard drive, you may want to try and download a partition manager like GParted. Otherwise you can use the whole hard drive.
  • If you decided to use GParted, simply partition the hard drive and leave the partition you want to use as “unformatted” and continue on to Step 4. If you want to use the Windows method, read below:
  • Since the hard drive is already likely formatted, you’ll want to format it as “unformatted”.
  • Once you load up the hard drive in USB Loader, it should format it correctly.

Step 4 – Install & Run Games

The following steps may differ depending on which USB loader you installed (I’m using CFG USB Loader).

  • Launch the homebrew channel and your recently installed USB Loader.
  • Select “USB Mass Storage Device”.
  • Insert any game disc, and press “+” to install it. This may take some time depending on the size of the game.
  • Repeat last step for each and every game you want to install.
  • You’re now ready to play your backed up games! Just select your game, and press “A” to begin.

Some of the USB Loaders will automatically download game covers, and others don’t. If you downloaded one that doesn’t you can find them here. It’s only 40mb to download 450+ covers, so you might want to do it anyway just in case.

If you have any issues with the above steps, please be sure that you remove any and all GameCube memory cards. It seems some Homebrew stuff has issues with the memory cards in place when you’re trying to install.

I tried to be as detailed as possible and cover as many angles as I could, but I’m bound to have missed a thing or two. If you are attempting to follow this guide and are running into some issues, or I seem to be missing a vital step, leave a comment and I’ll try to address it as best as I can.

As a bonus, here’s what it all looks like using the loader I tried. Please note that the above steps will not create a USB Loader channel in your main menu, but will need to be accessed through the Homebrew Channel. If you’re interested in doing so, you can follow this guide here which outlines the steps to create a USB Loader Forwarder Channel and creating channels from games installed onto your USB hard drive.

This is only a small piece of the pie of what Homebrew offers. There’s tons of applications and utilities available, not to mention the ability to play DVDs. You can find more details and information on everything over at WiiBrew.org.

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Memorial Day Weekend

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 @ 11:52am

Just got back from a nice weekend down on the Gulf Coast. Didn’t think the weather was going to hold out, but it was actually quite nice beyond the first day as it didn’t rain at all on Sunday or Monday.

We got to go to the beach for a little bit, but the surf was very rough with two red flags being posted. We ended up spending most of our free day crabbing and shrimping right off the bay in Gulf Shores. Didn’t catch any shrimp, and the crabbing wasn’t that great either with only 3 crabs for the whole day. About the only thing Clint and I brought back of substance would probably be sunburn.

Unfortunately for me, this may be my only beach trip this year. In previous years, my dad’s company would have a week long conference down in Panama City and allow for families to come down as well. They apparently have cut this out this year, so no more family beach trip. I might consider going down to Pensacola and camping sometime, but I’ll have to wait and see what happens with other things this summer.

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Job Geography

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 @ 8:41pm

Job GeographyI actually came across this map several days ago, but haven’t really gotten the chance to post it until now. It’s a time line and map representative of job gains and losses since 2004 and beyond. It’s rather interesting to see the way the job market has expanded and fallen over the past 5 years. It’s detailed enough that you can see the effects of the economy in places like New Orleans (Katrina) or Detroit.

It also reminds me of how crappy the job market is in Birmingham. Over the past 5 years, Birmingham has seen little to no net gains in the job market. At the rate things have been going, I get the strong feeling that I’m just in the wrong place for what I want to do…

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iPhone/Mobile View

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 @ 3:47pm

Jason's Blog on iPhoneI’m probably the only one who would actually access my blog on an iPhone, but I’ve just now pushed out a design that should be better suited for mobile devices. I’ve optimized the design obviously for the iPhone/iPod, but it should work on other mobile devices like the PSP, DSi, or Android (fingers crossed).

Pretty much the only thing you should see is the header menu, the main content area (blog posts, archives, main content, etc.), and the footer. The sidebar and random quotes were removed due to lack of sufficient space. If you see anything in addition to that, it means something isn’t working as it should.

If you have a different mobile device *cough*guy*cough* and are willing to give it a go, please let me know. If the page doesn’t fit right or something just looks strange, please leave a comment here and any images that you can provide to see if I can’t fix it. Any other ideas or suggestions that might help will be considered as well.

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Brakes

Monday, May 11th, 2009 @ 1:15am

Brakes

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Google Chrome

Sunday, May 10th, 2009 @ 1:24pm

Google is starting an ad campaign (as seen above) to help push more downloads of Google Chrome. It’s a fast, streamlined browser and provides a nice alternative to Safari and Firefox. As a web developer, I don’t really care what browser you use as long as you use one that is helping to push standards compliance. If you want to try something new and difference, download Google Chrome today.

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In the beginning…

Friday, May 8th, 2009 @ 4:27pm

To think today that the internet is where it is today is just amazing and the amount of changes that have happened in the past 20, or even 10 years ago. 10 years ago, can you imagine when companies like Google and Amazon were in their infancy, and sites like Wikipedia, Youtube didn’t exist.

Even more interesting is how I got my start doing web development, and as I stumbled upon some of my older site designs I thought it would be interesting to showcase them, and how I got my start on the internet. It’s kind of scary for me to look back and think that I created that, but it’s here for your entertainment.

I don’t remember exactly how I first got started. I recall my dad popping in an old AOL disk cd when we had a 2400 baud modem, and attempting to access the Cartoon Network channel of AOL. It wasn’t until some time later when we eventually obtained a computer with a 28.8kbps that I got my real start sometime in 1996-1997.

My first website was a result of my infatuation with SimCity, so I wanted to share that interest with others. Through Earthlink, we had a member space available at home.earthlink.net/~charawilson/ (no longer exists) that was the jumpstart for that first site, Simcity 3000 News Central. From that spawned a sister project called SCN (SimCity Network), which was a portal for SimCity sites at the time.

Eventually I outgrew the member space that Earthlink provided, and through the generous offer of a friend moved to simcity.boulderd.com (internet archive). With the move I discovered NewsPro (which eventually became Coranto), a perl script that would allow me to update the site from anywhere and not have to edit html code any time I wanted the site to be updated. This is really where my interest starting growing, as I discovered how one could make a site dynamic, and do cool things with DHTML as well.

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25 and counting…

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 @ 1:44am

Today marks me having spent a quarter of a century on this planet earth. I guess 25 isn’t usually a very big birthday, but it feels like a very big milestone to me. My insurance is (supposedly) reduced, and I can now rent a car. Yay?

25 is a big milestone for me at least, since I had a lot of goals that I expected to accomplish before I was 25, but sadly some of my largest goals that I had hoped to achieve have fallen short, although no fault of my own.

“Life is short”, they say, but I think life is really what you make of it. Sure I haven’t accomplished two key goals I had in place, but I have very few regrets of these past 25 years. I heard a very good philosophy the other day that applies very well here, and it goes something like this: Live life without regrets. A regret is something that you wish you had done, but didn’t. To live life without regrets is to take the opportunity even if nothing comes of it. Don’t live life such that have a regrets of inaction.

While I didn’t realize that concept until recently, I have noticed that over the past few years I have been living by this philosophy. The regret of not doing something is much greater than being disappointed by the results of said action. The event may not have the expected outcome, but you will never have to experience the emptiness of not at least having tried. I don’t want to live through life wondering, “What if…?”

It’s difficult to say what I expect or want to accomplish in these next 25 years, God willing. Maybe I had unrealistic goals for these last 25, or maybe the time just isn’t right yet, but I don’t plan on giving up. There is something worth fighting for, and I am going to fight for it with all my heart. The battle isn’t over yet, and today just isn’t another day. It’s a milestone of my accomplishments and stubbornness to keep on going, even when the going gets tough.

Happy Birthday to me indeed.

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Boxee

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 @ 2:11pm

While searching for ways to integrate Hulu with MythTV, I stumbled upon Boxee. Right now, it’s only available for Linux and OSX flavors, but a Windows version is supposed to be released this summer in June.

Boxee is an idea of where I see media centers heading, allowing information to be easily accessed all in one place. I haven’t had a lot of time to play around with it, but I like what I see. It can poll my local hard drive or network to look for content, or even stream my content online by pulling information in from sites like Flickr. Even more interesting is the social aspect of Boxee. By adding friends to my account, they can recommend new media to me, or I can view their streams to see what they’re watching.

Take a look at this video introduction explaining how Boxee works:

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