So Nintendo is offering us their old games to us on the Wii for five, eight, ten or even fifteen bucks for a game. I say fuck them. Now, don't get me wrong - I love Nintendo, but that "charging people for their old games again" bullshit gets on my tits like nothing.

So, here's how you can screw Nintendo in the poop chute and get a NES emulator (many others, too) for free.

Well, not exactly. You'll need three things - a copy of Twilight Princess, a SD card (preferably 512 megs or more) and a SD card reader.

So, let's get to work. If you had a Zelda save on your Wii before, back it up to the SD card and copy it to your PC. Then remove it from your Wii. This is essential.

Now, we're going to install a thing called The Homebrew Channel using a method called the Twilight Hack.

Open the folder with your Zelda save on the SD card. Remember the filename and the folder name. Then get rid of that file, and that file ONLY from the card.

Download this and this.

Unpack both things. The first one is the Twilight Hack itself. There are four files inside, and one of them is the right one for you. Each file is for a different region - one is for NTSC-J, one is for NTSC-U, one is for PAL. Which one is right for you? Well, look at the folder name of your Zelda save. The file with that foldername is your one. Copy it to the card, to the folder that contained your save and rename it to the name that your save had (content.bin, I think, but I could be wrong). That's it for the Twilight Hack.

Now, for the Homebrew channel itself. Copy the boot.elf file from the tar.gz archive onto the root (the main one) folder of the card.

That's it for the channel itself, but what about other applications?

Make a folder on the card called "apps". Get yourself some apps from WiiBrew. Each application should have its own folder. For example, ScummVM should have a folder called scummvm in apps. Copy the boot.elf file and other shit from the app archive into the apps/scummvm/ folder and that's it.

Now, unmount the card and put it back into your Wii. Copy the Zelda save (which is the Twilight Hack in disguise) from your SD card to the system memory. Boot up Zelda and load the game. Either talk to the guy in front of you or take a step backwards and BOOM, congratulations. You just broke your Wii, dumbass.

Anyway, what happened is a buffer overflow. The Twilight Hack exploits a vulnerability in the game by giving Epona a very, very long name which causes the game to crash. This allows you to use custom code (in this case, the boot.elf file from the SD card). Now follow the instructions on the screen.

Well, that's it! You just have f'd Nintendo in the A and scored yourself a way to play NES games for free. If you ever feel the need to add other applications, just put them in the apps folder.

So, that's it. Use http://Wiibrew.org to get applications. As a bonus, I'll show you how to install and use the NES emulator. Unfortuately, you need a Gamecube controller for the official release. There is a version that uses the Wiimote, but I don't know how well it works.

Get yourself the emulator from here. Make it its own folder in the apps folder and a fceu folder in the root of the card. In the fceu folder, you also need to create two subdirectories, roms and saves. Put your roms into the roms folder and that's it. Boot the homebrew channel, start the emulator and enjoy.

That's it. Go home now.

Holy shit, Faust from Guilty Gear. That guy freaked the shit out of me.

Blackout wrote:

What's up with that .gz extension?

GZIP. A very popular archive format, especially with UNIX users.

Winrar extracts it.

Okay, you little bastards. I found something MORE awesome than the homebrew channel's NES emu.

YOU CAN INSTALL VIRTUAL CONSOLE GAMES THAT YOU DOWNLOADED OFF BITTORRENT AS WII CHANNELS.

You read that right. You need an app called Wad Installer. Get it from here and install it to the homebrew channel.

Now, you also need .WAD files with the games (not only games: Wii Channels, probably WiiWare as well) - how do you get them? Off torrents, where else? I can't post you direct links, but I can tell you that typing "wii wad file torrent" into Google gives results as great as getting a titfuck from Chun-Li while watching Morrigan and Elena make out in the background.

Now, create a folder called "wad" in the root directory of the SD card. Put every .wad you got off bittorrent in that folder. Make sure the files are from the correct region (don't download PALs when you're in the US/Canada and stuff).

Now, connect a Cube pad again and boot up the program. Follow the instructions. After it's done, the console will restart itself and voila - you can play your damn games.

It works with everything you can get from the Shop Channel.