Nintendo are soon to unleash WiiWare which will give amateur and hobbyist coders the chance to program and even sell games on the Virtual Console. Legal Homebrew on the Wii Arrives.
More Details at Wii News
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Who dugg it? It's already been dugg to like 1,200+.
It's a phail'd dupe.
Great news though! Will they be distributing an sdk maybe?
Awesome! I bet the Wii will become THE homebrew console now, such in the likes of the great Dreamcast.
Sounds interesting and good for homebrew. I wonder if people will be forced to pay to download homebrew games then, and how that could affect homebrew.
Also, is it just me, or is that damn Chinese video on the main page that automatically plays itself whenever I visit incredibly annoying?
A few reasons why Wii will struggle to beat PSP for the title of homebrew king
1.PSP homebrew is not condoned by Sony ( Maybe Nintendo's move may influence sony's perspective) So the homebrew community can be seen as an underground rebelling. Dark Alex, Fanjita , Team Noobz would be kinda useless in terms of customer firmwares and downgraders if Sony actually allowed homebrew on their device.
2. The PSP already has a reputation for homebr3w and may have already lost the battle before begining , keep in mind the PSP homebr3w scene has been around for a couple of years now and could easily squash Wii's competition in it's begining stages.
3. For some reason console homebrew is not as popular as portable homebrew , You can't uses your Wii for GPS,Calculator(LOL),WiFi Remote,Mobile Instant messenger or many other functions portable devices are capable of.
4.Nintendo's efforts reduce the desire of coders to exploit the device , since nintendo's allowing homebrew what's the point of exploiting the Wii ? it's like escaping outa the steel window in your prison cell when the cell door is open.
Sure it will be cool to tinker with programming on the Wii but I doubt anything will become better than the PSP in terms of homebrew. I'm astonished that the Nintendo DS homebrew scene is not nearly as fast moving as the PSP scene is. With the touch screen, you would think there that just might actually be more homebrew potential on a DS Lite. But then again, the DS Lite can't run homebrew right out of the box now like the PSP. Thanks to the new downgrader, every single PSP in existence can now be downgraded if their owners desire.
Also, what's up with the mention of Dreamcast homebrew so often? I don't mean to diss it or minimize it, its just that I found my old Dreamcast and realized it was one of the older units able to run homebrew and I tried burning some emulator CD's and all of the emulators seem to run terrible on the Dreamcast. Aside from the Nester NES emulator for Dreamcast, all others like SNES, Turbo Grafx 16, etc. seem to run slow. Frameskip makes playability really choppy and unnatural.
Maybe I'm using the wrong emulators but I believe I was using the latest versions. Basically, aside from playing self-boot backups of Dreamcast games, is Dreamcast homebrew really as good as it is hyped to be?
Back on topic, I don't think offical supported homebrew kits will ever be as popular as underground scenes like the PSP homebrew scene. There is definitely a sort of rebellious feel to PSP homebrew, maybe even a feeling of elitism. If SONY were to say, fine, you win, do whatever you want and we won't restrict you anymore, it will lose some of its magic.
I don't think it is possible for the PSP homebrew scene to die off at this point. With all of the 20 million or so PSP units manufactured to date able to be downgraded thanks to Noobz and others involved, I think this definitely seals the deal that SONY will just bring out another hardware version of the PSP and that will likely be harder (though I dare not say impossible) to hack.
Its also possible that the homebrew scne thinks its bigger than it really is. I think SONY considers us just a small niche and wants it to stay that way. They don't think parents are going to go out to buy their kids PSP's to downgrade. Although that is exactly what is happening more than you'd think. Kids seem to have more fun playing GBA & SNES on the PSP than they do commercial PSP games.
Anyway, I like Nintendo, I like the Wii, and I think this is just one more example of Nintendo trying to put the consumer first. I get a feeling that Nintendo really genuinely cares about the consumers that purchase their products. Most people definitely don't feel that way about SONY.
I don't want to see SONY fail by no means. I am extremely thankful to SONY for giving us the PSP. I just disagree with a lot of decisions they have made in the PSP's 2 1/2 years of life so far.
Basically, you can admire Nintendo's decision but you can't compare it to an underground scene.
nintendo is kickin ass thats all i have to say
hmmm i doubt nintendo will let you harness all the wiis power most likely thell release a program on pc's that you can just makes some basics games nothings too fancy that you can put on an sd and load it from a the browser and once your happy you can upload it on the vc
Though i do think that PSP homebrew will be better, I am very excited for the release of WiiWare, which will bring much more fun to the Wii, and also make it easier to get new games.
i just hope that many coders will not charge bor their games on the vc