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Disclaimer

If you are unfamiliar with the term “homebrew”, I advice you to go read my first post, located here. If you would like to know about the risks of homebrew, then please go read my second post, located here. If you have yet to install the homebrew channel, then please read my instructions, located here. I will in no way be held responsible if following the instructions I give or the recommendations I do leads to broken Wii’s or any damage in any form. Allthough I’m very confident that won’t happen, it needs to be said. If you are confident you have a sufficient amount of knowledge about the matter, then please enjoy the read.

In my previous post I wrote about installing the homebrew channel and how to install a game called “Scogger” for it. Assuming you managed to pull it of, this post will go into detail about how the homebrew channel works, and I will give instructions for a special application called “Wiiload”.

Assuming you’ve allready been playing around with the homebrew channel for a bit, you must by now have noticed that a lot of care has gone into its look, feel and layout. This is immediatly noticed by the great banner and the stylish menu. You’ll notice the infrared pointing works fluently and is better than in most games. The homebrew channel has the ability to list 3 applications per page, and the amount of pages that can be created is probably close to unlimited. It also allows you to see the applications logo, revision, author, title, short description and long description. It’s also capable of returning to the Wii menu by the click of a button.

What you probably didn’t know yet is that it uses some pretty advanced networking functions. These include automatic updates and application loading over lan. The autoupdating feature works like a charm, everytime you enter the homebrew channel it will contact a server and check if there are newer versions available, if there aren’t, you won’t notice a thing. If there are, you will be prompted with a changelog and the question whether you’d like to update or not. If you accept it will automaticaly download the new installer and run it. This works very fluently and makes sure you only have to do the installation process once.

It also happens to be possible to send applications from your PC to your Wii, meaning that you can also run homebrew that isn’t on your SD card! The program you use to send homebrew to your Wii is called “WiiLoad” and it was also created by the authors of the homebrew channel. The installation process is rather easy, so I’ll explain it here in a few steps.

• Download this file, in the archive you will find a folder called “wiiload”, and in there is a folder called “win32”.
• In there is a file called “wiiload.exe”, now extract that file to your “c:\windows\system32 folder”. (or where-ever your Windows installation is located, you can also do “copy wiiload.exe %windir%/system32” from the command prompt).
• Now open Window’s “Control Panel” and click the “System”icon.
• Go to the “Advanced” tab and click the “Environment Variables” button in the bottom.
• Create a new “systemvariable” and call it WIILOAD, now give it the value “tcp:yourip”. So if your Wii’s ip is 192.168.2.20 the value should be tcp:192.168.2.20. If you don’t know your Wii’s IP adress then push the “home” button when you’re in the homebrew channel, it will now be listed in the upper left corner. Your system is now properly configured for Wiiload.

To begin using the Wiiload function you have to start the homebrew channel first and make sure its connected to the network.

Assuming you know your way with the command prompt, click “start” (bottom left corner) and then “run”, now type “cmd” and hit enter. In the dosprompt go to the folder where you keep your .elf and .dol files and run “wiiload filename.exe”. So if you’re in a folder containing a file called emu.elf you’ll cd in there and run “wiiload emu.elf”. This will send it to your Wii and your Wii will now run it.

If you’re not comfortable with using the command prompt my next post will explain a simpler and cleaner way to do things.

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