This week is my 3rd weeks of playing Nintendo WII console. Hehehe … I bought this console after discussing with a friend about providing a game devices for our children. He said that, better for me to buy the WII, because playing WII means doing a moving activities, not just pushing the button like all other game devices, and that is good for our children.

And now, I totally agree with that. WII is different. WII means “body activity”, not just moving our finger.

But wait … this blog is not about talking what WII is. I like to share about hacking the WII console. I’m purely newbie in this area, that’s why I googling intensively about WII, and after 3 weeks, I found some interesting stuff about WII hacking.

1. Bannerbomb is a tools (or exploit?) to run an external application (ELF/DOL file) stored in the WII SD Card. This exploit need a specific binary file stored in the SD Card, and WII Channel menu to active it.

2. Homebrew Channel is a custom channel in our WII menu which enabling us to run the homebrew (3rd party) application. There are many thing that homebrew application can do/provide.

3. USB Loader is a homebrew application for backup our WII DVD games to external HDD (via USB 2.0), and also playing that backup games. For me, the main advantage of this application is the capability to store many games backup, so we don’t need to change DVD anytime we want to play just another game, and give some more lifetime for the WII disc optics (and some other say about the higher access speed, compared to the original DVD play method).

4. preloader is an injected code to the original system menu which give a capability to launch homebrew channel or execute homebrew application just before the WII displaying the system menu. This hacking give us a possibility to solve the brick problem (brick means our WII is not able to go to the system menu, or in the “virgin” WII brick means damage).

Happy WII-ing …