#bootmii

Hoping to use HomeBrew/BootMii and Riivolution to get some new Mario Kart tracks and characters, among other basic Wii hacks.

To be perfectly honest I had somebody do it for me. That being said, the NeoGAF Wii Homebrew Wiki is probably the single best resource if you want to keep up to date on methods to install the Homebrew Channel. Apparently it is easy enough that you can do it through the Wii Message board now. I probably didn’t need somebody else to do it for me, because it’s just that easy (I was just being cautious, because they had done it before and I hadn’t).

Make sure you install BootMii. I’m not sure if the “Dummy’s Guide” on that wiki recommends this or not, because it’s not absolutely necessary, but it’s probably a good idea to have it just in case. BootMii will make it easier to recover your Wii if you happen to do something to mess up the channel listing or whatever. There’s some things I want to do with Wii homebrew that I won’t (like d2x) because I don’t know if I have BootMii installed and I am too lazy/paranoid to check.

Once you get the Homebrew Channel installed, I would recommend installing the Homebrew Browser. This is an online database of a lot of very popular Wii homebrew apps, including emulators. They download through the Wii itself, and install quickly, safely, and easily. I find it to be pretty vital.

Be careful with certain Wii Channels. The easiest way to brick your Wii is to incorrectly install a Wii Channel - when the console tries to load in to the channel listing and it finds a corrupt channel, it will crash and you won’t even be able to get to the right menus to delete the bad data (this is why having BootMii installed is a good idea, because it lets you manage data before the Wii loads in to the channel listing). A lot of Wii Homebrewers frown on piracy, so information and resources on pirating Virtual Console games and WiiWare stuff is sketchy. I would not trust any it, even though there’s a lot of fun stuff out there (people have apparently figured out a way to extract and inject new games in to Virtual Console stuff, and Nintendo’s emulators are usually of the highest quality you can find on the Wii). I’ve also heard that you can do weird stuff like install more channels than you have space for, and that can cause problems, too.