WiiLi.org start's the bounty with $499, taken from the original donations made to the site to get the dedicated server.
The Money goes to and is controlled by the people from distrowatch.org, or another well know person/site. osnews? , slashdot?
We can setup a chip-in (created by distrowatch.org?) so that people interested in contributing chipin to the bounty.
Also The chip-in mechanism allows for other people to include the chipin on their sites:
Distrowatch decides on the winner and sends the money.
No time limit, the fund will keep increasing until the goal is achieved.
It's called WiiLi.
Who gets the money?

The first person to:

Boot Linux on the Nintendo Wii without voiding the warranty.
Using attached hardware on USB, etc, is fine, as long it is documented what it does and where to obtain/build it.
X needs to run.
Wiimote, keyboard, mouse, dvd drive, sd-card and network support.
Documentation off the code execution technique on the Wiili.org wiki.
Youtube video and how-to.
Any files used to do it must be provided
Needs to show the full av cable during the whole video to make sure it is for real
No cutting out parts of the video
Just an idea, feel free to contribute. Keep this away from Digg or alike until we have a more precise idea of how to make this work.

It's not an easy task! The chip-in thing could make the bounty go very very high!

Here for all to try is version 2.0.1b2 of Snes9xGx. Here's a list of some key changes:

- Now reads a global preferences file. All preferences are now global except for joypad configuration and calibration. The latter two are still stored in the SRAM for each game and only apply to that game. Other settings are now stored in a preferences file and apply to every game. If you aren't saving preferences you'll get the defaults and any changes to preferences will be temporary, but global prefs will carry over to subsequent rom launches (i.e. like it was before b1.)

- Auto loading of SRAM is now an option. Auto saving of SRAM is still an option. Both default to OFF. If you want them on permanently, change the setting and then save the preferences.

- Comes in 6 flavors, each one is for a specific preferences and auto save/load SRAM location. For instance there is one for a memory card in slot B, another for an SD card in slot A, another for SMB and even one now (yes, for you sindrik), that does not load a preferences file at all. Choose the one you want or collect them all! You can still, of course, manually save and load SRAM wherever you want.

- SD SRAM saving has been fixed! You can now load and save SRAM from SD card, including importing and exporting to other platforms. Also you can boot either the sdslota or sdslotb variant to have everything done with the SD card, whichever slot you put it in.

- menus rearranged again, hopefully for the better. For one thing, the Zoom option now resides in the Emulator Options menu and has been renamed to "C-Stick Zoom". Like all the options in the Emulator Options menu, it is now a global setting. The emulator options menu has a "Save Preferences Now" menu item. The Joypad configuration menu has a "Save Config/SRAM" menu item for convenience - joypad config is per game and thus still stored in the SRAM file.

- many under-the-skin changes - take a look at the source code

Known problem: SMB loading may fail on occasion (at least it does on my wireless network every once in a while), but I'm hoping that I've at least stopped it from crashing/hanging when this happens. Let me know how it works for you. Overall it works pretty well for me.


HOW TO USE THE DOL FILE
---------------------------------
If you are using an SD Card adaptor (SD Gecko or equivalent), set up your SD card (and Action Replay if you are using that to load SDLOAD) as instructed, then copy the "snes9xGx201b2-sdslota.dol", or your choice of dol file, to your SD card. Also create an "SNESROMS" folder and a "SNESSAVE" folder at the top level of the SD card. Put your SNES roms in to the "SNESROMS" folder. SRAMs and the preferences file will be stored in "SNESSAVE". Insert the SD card into your SD card adapter, and plug that into slot A. Boot SDLOAD via Action Replay or however you do that, and run "snes9xGx201b2-sdslota.dol" (but you might want to rename it to a shorter name as SDLOAD doesn't display long file names properly) via SDLOAD.

If you are making a bootable DVD, I recommend, though it isn't required, creating an SNESROMS directory at the top level of the DVD and put your SNES roms in there - see note number 10 above. For example, if you are using "BootableDisc3" to create your bootable DVD, then, in addition to renaming "snes9xGx201b2-mcslotb.dol" (or whichever dol you wish to use) to "bootldr.dol" and putting that into "my_bootable_disc", also create a folder called "SNESROMS" within "my_bootable_disc" and copy all of your SNES roms into there. Also put in a filler file in the top level of the "my_bootable_disc" folder if necessary to make the DVD at least 500 MB in size. Then run BootableDisc.bat and burn the resulting iso file to DVD. See the documentation that came with "BootableDisc3" for details on using that tool - there's more to it than this!

Attached is the latest version of the hddhackr. It works with the new 120 gb signature. However, this current version can not dump the hddss.bin file automatically from that drive, you'll have to manually dump sectors 16-22 with a tool like winhex and save them as 'hddss.bin'. After that, continue as normal with the hddhackr and everything will be fine.

Also, I'd like to stress that there are 2 versions of the WD BEVS drive out there: the 'RST' and the 'LAT' version. This tool currently ONLY supports the 'LAT' version ! You can find on the sticker of the HDD which version it is. I'll hope to be able to support the RST version of the drive in a future version of this tool