Wiis are dirt cheap, everywhere, and use less power than a laptop.
Couple of ideas to get them plugged in, useful, and ready to fire up and play.
More of an answer to the question, is the Wii homebrew scene dead?, than a chance at anything actually being coded.
Here is an opportunity to dump your Wii homebrew ideas, in the hope a passing wii coding enthusiast might say
"That is a cool idea, achievable, and I'd have fun working out how to do it"
Maybe the Wii is retro enough to start becoming hip again, maybe a covid induced streak of boredom is enough to give someone the motivation.
Maybe this is where your idea will die.
I'll get the ball rolling
Reasons you could have a Wii plugged in, but the software doesn't exist yet, so you don't.
One
Winamp avs studio, and 'milkdrop', used eq responses and beat detections of music, waveform rendering and reiterating geometries, to create visualisations.
It ran on late ninties PCs, but had scaleable functionality to run on higher end hardware.
There is a vast array, thousands, of user generated scripts, it was a real hobby for people, and there is still a community developing tools, scripts and software.
Implentations of the original software have been ported to various platforms, but not the wii, despite the open source code on github.
It would be cool if the wii could convert a stream from a networked media player, from a plugged in usb mic peripheral, or from an embedded media player.
One A
- In fact, your wii could be your go-to interface between your phone and your amp, hooking in over wifi rather than a minijack cable
Two
A homebrew means to ping the wiimotes, perhaps executed using on-console buttons or a GameCube controller from priiboot, using wiimote one to find wiimote two from homebrew...or sending the audio from a usb mic?
Access to the bluetooth speaker on the wiimote is currently beyond homebrew. Although it has been acheived from pc hardware, something about the documentation, something about the broader understanding, is incomplete.
I've noted elsewhere, but the on board speaker could be a gift for emulating low bit rate samples of retro games
3&4&5 - Linux
Native homebrew might be preferable but not possible. These next couple could use a super small, fast booting, linux image, with only the requisite bits of os loaded.
Would be cool to bea ble to configure bits of the boot script from a homebrew gui, but just the text editor in WiiExplorer could edit parameters.
Could restart to the wii loader on detecting a wiimote.
Three
A NAS client
WiiExplorer has a samba share thing, and there's ftpii, but, while they may have worked in the past, they are now very very unreliable.
This could be highly impactful, because not everyone can afford a dedicated hard drive for the wii. This would enable folks to leave it plugged there, sharing media over a network, without the need to transfer games to an sd card
Four
A torrent client
Piracy is bad. Can i have a torrent client now?
Five
Idle/Screensaver/photo album
The wii is capable of functioning as a static display, holding a display image, message, streaming music or text or a photo album from a network or memory.
One could imagine a common config file, a protocol, for homebrew launcher applications to save their state and launch a screensaver homebrew - after 10 mins of photos - this could, in turn, launch a ftp or torrent client, or shut down.
Six
i've mentioned this before, but mouse emulation with the wiimote. Perhaps dynamically controlling the mouse speed/screen zoom with the nunchuck
This would open up so many games that just are not playable on other consoles
Seven
I've mentioned this before too, but such a massive leap with such little work required - ID software, who made Quake, had a simple scripting language so users could define how inputs defined outcomes.
It would be superb if such a syntax, a simple scripting language could be developed to reassign and scale the many analog outputs of the Wii peripherals to the analog inputs of early consoles and arcade machines.
Use the wiimote as the yoke in starwars, use the balance board to play pong etc...
That's it - i'll be sure to check back with more ideas, waffle with you about things thst will probably never happen, but it's fun to imagine...
Couple of ideas to get them plugged in, useful, and ready to fire up and play.
More of an answer to the question, is the Wii homebrew scene dead?, than a chance at anything actually being coded.
Here is an opportunity to dump your Wii homebrew ideas, in the hope a passing wii coding enthusiast might say
"That is a cool idea, achievable, and I'd have fun working out how to do it"
Maybe the Wii is retro enough to start becoming hip again, maybe a covid induced streak of boredom is enough to give someone the motivation.
Maybe this is where your idea will die.
I'll get the ball rolling
Reasons you could have a Wii plugged in, but the software doesn't exist yet, so you don't.
One
Winamp avs studio, and 'milkdrop', used eq responses and beat detections of music, waveform rendering and reiterating geometries, to create visualisations.
It ran on late ninties PCs, but had scaleable functionality to run on higher end hardware.
There is a vast array, thousands, of user generated scripts, it was a real hobby for people, and there is still a community developing tools, scripts and software.
Implentations of the original software have been ported to various platforms, but not the wii, despite the open source code on github.
It would be cool if the wii could convert a stream from a networked media player, from a plugged in usb mic peripheral, or from an embedded media player.
One A
- In fact, your wii could be your go-to interface between your phone and your amp, hooking in over wifi rather than a minijack cable
Two
A homebrew means to ping the wiimotes, perhaps executed using on-console buttons or a GameCube controller from priiboot, using wiimote one to find wiimote two from homebrew...or sending the audio from a usb mic?
Access to the bluetooth speaker on the wiimote is currently beyond homebrew. Although it has been acheived from pc hardware, something about the documentation, something about the broader understanding, is incomplete.
I've noted elsewhere, but the on board speaker could be a gift for emulating low bit rate samples of retro games
3&4&5 - Linux
Native homebrew might be preferable but not possible. These next couple could use a super small, fast booting, linux image, with only the requisite bits of os loaded.
Would be cool to bea ble to configure bits of the boot script from a homebrew gui, but just the text editor in WiiExplorer could edit parameters.
Could restart to the wii loader on detecting a wiimote.
Three
A NAS client
WiiExplorer has a samba share thing, and there's ftpii, but, while they may have worked in the past, they are now very very unreliable.
This could be highly impactful, because not everyone can afford a dedicated hard drive for the wii. This would enable folks to leave it plugged there, sharing media over a network, without the need to transfer games to an sd card
Four
A torrent client
Piracy is bad. Can i have a torrent client now?
Five
Idle/Screensaver/photo album
The wii is capable of functioning as a static display, holding a display image, message, streaming music or text or a photo album from a network or memory.
One could imagine a common config file, a protocol, for homebrew launcher applications to save their state and launch a screensaver homebrew - after 10 mins of photos - this could, in turn, launch a ftp or torrent client, or shut down.
Six
i've mentioned this before, but mouse emulation with the wiimote. Perhaps dynamically controlling the mouse speed/screen zoom with the nunchuck
This would open up so many games that just are not playable on other consoles
Seven
I've mentioned this before too, but such a massive leap with such little work required - ID software, who made Quake, had a simple scripting language so users could define how inputs defined outcomes.
It would be superb if such a syntax, a simple scripting language could be developed to reassign and scale the many analog outputs of the Wii peripherals to the analog inputs of early consoles and arcade machines.
Use the wiimote as the yoke in starwars, use the balance board to play pong etc...
That's it - i'll be sure to check back with more ideas, waffle with you about things thst will probably never happen, but it's fun to imagine...
Last edited by WiizNutz,