Are your Wii games getting scratched, damaged, and lost? Want to make an easily accessible backup of all your Wii games? To back up your games, you'll need to softmod your Wii and install a backup manager program. Softmodding refers to modifying the Wii's system software with a hack in order to allow you to install the Homebrew Channel and custom programs, such as USB Loader GX. This guide will walk you through the steps of softmodding your Wii as well as installing backup software and copying games.
Running the Homebrew Channel now will display a screen with animating bubbles, but nothing else. This is because you have a blank SD card in the console and the Homebrew Channel is for running Emulators and Applications that you copy onto your SD card into the APPS directory. So now we need to download some emulators, copy them onto the SD card and play some games.
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When you download an emulator, it's usually in a zip/rar file. When you unzip it there are usually 2 directories that you copy exactly as they are to the root of the SD card. The Wii looks in an APPS directory for the emulator itself, while your roms, screenshots, cheat files etc go in a separate directory in the root of the SD card.
Install Priiloader by downloading it from the link above. As with the emulators you already downloaded, the zip file contains an APPS folder, and you need to copy the contents into the APPS folder on your SD card. That puts the Priiloader installer program in your homebrew channel. Run the installer, and follow the prompts on screen (just just press + to install Priiloader). If you get any errors about loader.ini or password.txt, don't worry, these can be ignored. Your Wii will reboot in the Priiloader menu. If it doesn't, power off the Wii, then power it back on and hold reset while it's booting until you see it.
So far, we've been loading our emulators and apps from within the homebrew channel. A "WAD" file is a program that appears on the Wii main menu, instead of in the Homebrew Channel. These can include Virtual Console Games, Apps and 'Forwarders' that bring your Homebrew forward to the main menu. You'll download some great looking forwarders later in this guide, but first we need to know how to install these WAD files. Luckily, there's a program called "Multi Mod Manager" and it's really easy to use.
Up to this point in the guide you've been loading apps and emulators from within the Homebrew Channel. To make things look better, you can download a forwarder for your emulator of choice and this will make a great animated Wii Channel with music that sits on the Wii opening menu. This means you can load your emulator with one click of the Wii remote, and once you have a few forwarders installed your menu looks amazing. You can rearrange the channels on the Wii menu by pointing the remote at the channel you wish to move and holding A and B. Drag to a different slot and release. Here is a link to my Dropbox where you can download the forwarders I use. I have also zipped a collection from a user called Mastershoes which all look a bit samey but there are so many that at least you will have something to play with.
It is best to get a hard drive that works from a single USB connector as this keeps the second USB on the Wii free for using a USB keyboard. You must plug your hard drive into the USB on the Wii that is closest to the outside edge of the console. The link below is a fantastic USB loader, with a built in cheat loader called Ocarina, which can download cheat files from the internet. USB Loader GX allows you to insert the game disk and copy it to the hard drive automatically. It also connects to the internet and downloads box and cover artwork if you choose to.
If you are using a USB loader it's a good idea to make your whole console region free using Priiloader (see above) so you can back up your whole Wii and Gamecube collection without worrying about region issues. Wii games live in a folder on your hard drive called "wbfs". If you rip your Wii games using USB loader it does all the work, but if you download the ISOs from the internet (for games you already own of course), then you can use the Wii Backup Manager (below) to compress them to WBFS format, then copy the file to your FAT32 drive, into the "wbfs" directory. On this screenshot, we've incorporated Nintendon't (see below) so that our Gamecube and Wii games appear on the same screens.
Sometimes its good to whack an infinite life cheat into an old game and whizz through it for old times sake. There's a brilliant app called Ocarina that allows you to cheat on your Wii games. Ocarina is now built in to USB Loader GX, so it's dead easy to use. Load up USB loader, select the game, then instead of clicking start, click Settings. In the Load Game section you can turn Ocarina on or off, and in the Ocarina section you can download the cheats automatically from the internet, turn them on or off, then start the game.
The Homebrew browser is a lovely, if a bit slow and clunky, app that updates your emulators to the latest versions or lets you download new ones directly from the Wii, and you won't need a computer. That's very cool, but if you are only using emulators you may as well just download them from the links above or from WiiBrew.org, because you are going to need to put the SD card in your PC at some point to copy the roms across, so I find it easier to do it all on the PC in one go.
(On computer) Insert the SD card back to your computer > create a folder named "apps" on the SD card > unzip the homebrew_browser_v0.3.9.zip file (from the zip file downloaded earlier) and move everything into the apps folder.
Wii/Wii U are not built to be a DVD player. But with Homebrew installed to softmode your Wii/Wii U, you can download and install a DVD player app (such as Mplayer and WiiMC) on Wii/Wii U and use Wii as a DVD player.
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