My Wii's DVD drive died a few days ago, and for various reasons I ended up buying a new black one right away.
So my thought was that this was my opportunity to hack the old one, so I letterbombed it successfully and installed the Homebrew Channel and BootMII and did a nand backup.
Now after researching things a bit, I'm trying to decide how to proceed. I'm mostly interested in getting the old Wii to play games in my existing collection, and maybe to work with some homebrewed or mod-ed games. (I'm amazed at what folks have done with SMG 2.5 so far, for example)
So here's what I've been considering so far, and I'm looking for advice on which way(s) to go:
1.) Replace the drive in the old white Wii (about 2 years old NA/USA). I saw people selling replacement drives on Ebay of various versions-- new, refurbs and used, but my near term fix was to just go out an buy another one, because of shipping time. If I go this route, I'd like to know what I should get and whether it's worth a premium to get any particular drive or if there are any preferred vendors.
(I'm not interested in playing burned games or DVDs, and I realize my black Wii won't be able to play them anyway-- but if I have a choice I'd like to have this option)
2.) Hack the black Wii (it's 4.3U firmware, so Letterbombing looks like it good route) find a dumper, a cIOS and USB loader, and then dump archive copies off to a removable hard drive. If go this route, I'd like opinions on good dumpers and loaders. Do all the loaders require the Truncha bug? If so, should that worry me?
2.1) I tend to play just a few games at a time, so I'm wondering if there are any options where I could archive dumps to a "server" over WiFi and then move my working copies to a large enough SD card? I see there are WiFi FTP options, but are there any menu-ed systems with the ease of use of the USB loaders? Also do USB loaders work with DVD roms drives, or USB flash drives? I mainly hear of people using hard drives. A wrinkle to this is that my main machine is a Hackintosh, and its primary OS is OSX-- but I can run virtual versions of Windows if need be, or I have parts to build up a dedicated Windows machine for this.
3.) Buy a LG/Hitachi drive that can read Wii disks, and dump them on a PC (I'm assuming there aren't any OSX options for this) Most of the drives I see available are parallel IDE drive, which are sometimes problematic on Hackitosh systems, so I may have to build a dedicated Windows box for this. I see various new, used and refurb options for these, and some of the prices seem a little too good to be true. If the prices are true for this, this seems like it might be my cheapest route. If any of you have opinions on vendors and dumping software for this, I'd appreciate.
4.) Find images of titles I've already bought and download them from places I'd rather not visit and get them onto something I can load from. Again, I'm not really interested in pirated stuff and I support this boards position on this issue. I think it's self-defeating to the industry, but its tempting because it wouldn't require me to hack my other Wii or buy any hardware. Not my first choice, and I'm not asking for advise on where or how to do this. I guess I'm asking to be talked out of this option I guess.
The main thing that's driving these questions, is I'd prefer not to monopolize the new black Wii running dumps and I'd rather keep it pristine if possible, so as not to confuse the other folks using it. The Homebrew Channel is innocuous enough for most users, but if wasn't there or hidden all-the-better.
Thanks for your help...