Let’s be real here – storing your console games on a hard drive has shit to do with “backing them up.” More like “keep playing after you trade them in to GameStop.”
OK, yeah, they also load and play faster. But whatever your objective, sister site Lifehacker found a new hack that allows you to rig a hard drive to your Wii – even if it has the 4.0 System Menu installed (previous hacks called for an icky downgrade to get around that.) Just a warning, this requires hardware in addition to the hard drive, a suite of mod software, and the know-how to use it. And also the willingness to muck around in a Wii and risk melting its graphics card, if a boldfaced “public service warning” is to be believed. The process is lengthy, so be prepared to kill an afternoon. But it is doable.
How to Store/Load Wii Games via USB Hard Drive on System Menu 4.0 [Mike & Heather, via Lifehacker]
elektrixxx
Monday, June 8, 2009 at 8:47 AMOld.
Muskie
Monday, June 8, 2009 at 9:38 AMI’m sorry?
Stop being so overreactive. It’s a perfectly safe SoftMod. All it requires in terms of “extra hardware” is a USB cable and an SD card, and the softmod is completely reversible, and does not modify your console’s hardware in any way, which means it does not void your warranty. Just follow the instructions on the linked website to the letter and you will be backing up your games to your hard drive within an hour. (DO NOT USE THIS FOR ILLEGAL BACKUPS PEOPLE! This is just like the Xbox 360 game loading, it just improves load times, etc!)
Thomas Hambleton
Monday, June 8, 2009 at 12:01 PMMessing around with unofficial firmware voids your warranty.
nitrowii
Monday, June 8, 2009 at 2:34 PMeven buying a wii from Nintendo voids the warranty
Ben
Monday, June 8, 2009 at 5:49 PMAwesome.
Next weekend it looks like i’ll be picking up a 500gb HDD and getting to work on this mod.
All for legitimate purposes, of course ;).
drihscol
Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 12:42 AMto play backups from a usb, it can be as simple as,
stick in sd card, push button,
install custom channel,
install custom ios (its like modified drivers)
plug in hard drive.
i’m pretty sure that no one has ever bricked their wii from just, installing the hbc. although, turning of the wii during ios installation, can brick you.
the service warning is just so if something goes wrong, like a power outage, or stupidness, they cant be held responsible.
BUT! if you install bootmii, then you can dump an image of the wii’s flash memory, so if stupidness does occur, you can simply, roll back from the image.
the benefits of homebrew are immense.
custom themes, custom channels, homebrew games and apps, watching dvds, i dont know what your going on about!