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Nintendo Wii Homebrew Contest 2007
Croakyvoice writes "DCEmu is hosting the worlds first Nintendo
Wii and Nintendo Gamecube Homebrew Coding Contest with prizes of $500 on offer
for Homebrew and Emulators for the Wii and Gamecube, The hope is that through
this contest an exploit will be released that will allow full homebrew on the
Nintendo Wii without a Modchip. Gamecube
Homebrew is already on the Wii with a host of systems emulated such as Snes,
Genesis, Gameboy and Neogeo."
This money would be a great incentive to get homebrew running on the Wii, (which is lacking due to the availability of modchips). The wii is an excellent console, and I'm looking forward to being able to do more with it.
[obligatory]
How long did you have to wait for the wii to come out?
[/obligatory]
Why UNIX?
I recently managed to get myself a Wii and from playing around with it, I feel there is a lot of untapped potential. Much of this could be accelerated if they made it easier for individual developers to add new channels. Although the Wii does not have a huge amount of processing power, when compared to a home PC, some of the stuff that I could see being added to it:
- MP3 Player, accessing music from SD card or a media server such as iTunes. Currently the only MP3 player is part of the slide show.
- Ability to play MPEG and MPEG4 movies, using codecs other than Motion-JPEG, from SD or a media server
- Support for Bonjour, for discovering services on you local home network.
I know that the Wii is meant to be a games machine, but once you have explored the weather, news and internet channels you realise it could be so much more. This price also makes it very attractive.
On the game front this kind of competition could foster more imagination, than some game companies are will to provide, especially when it comes to using the controller.
BTW you can play Flash based games with the help of Opera.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
though I wonder whether this just another advertising ploy...
Yup, you can. It's a bit difficult using the wii remote rather than the gun from the NES, but check out http://www.nintendo-hacks.com/duck_hunt.swf
Works on a computer too, using the mouse, if you're bored at work.
Allowing anyone to develop a Wii Channel -- even if it's only restricted access through something like RSS -- would only have a positive effect on the console.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
This Coding Competition will hopefully ignite a mass of interest for creating homebrew and emulators on the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo Gamecube.
The article does not encourage homebrew developers to find a new way to run homebrew on the gamecube, far less on the wii itself (in wii-mode). As far as i can tell from the news post, it is just a GC homebrew competition which does not limit the loader to known methods.
It would be far more interesting if someone already 'known' to the homebrew scene would create a bounty for the first person who is able to run homebrew on the wii (in wii mode, that is).
Something similar to what StoneCypher did with the dswifi library, which was done by sgstair(thanks!).
Remember, they're still a for profit company.
It's not even for real money. It's $300 store credit to some junk store that sells crappy handheld knock offs.
The marketting divisions of Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony seem to be exceedingly blinkered when it comes to home games production on their consoles. It worked for the Amiga, which because of direct support from Commodore (docs and tools) saw the emergence of a huge and extremely buoyant community with legions of Amiga supporters worldwide. And that's only one example.
There is really no reason for NOT supporting private developers, because every console that is purchased will also lead to commercial games sales as well, it's totally inevitable. Some people have suggested that the manufacturers are afraid of competition from the amateur sector, but that is just totally unsubstantiated. After all, all those years of game development and millions spent in asset production cannot easily be rivalled at home.
While there will always be some people who simply cannot afford commercial games, in general the existence of a successful amateur sector would be *additional* to the success of commercial products, and it wouldn't replace them. The argument that the console manufacturers want their cut from licensing games doesn't stand up either, because they will continue to get their cut from those commercial games. If the sectors are additive, then that income is not reduced.
Of course, if the multi-million dollar games are so crap that people prefer the amateur products instead, then there would indeed be an effect, but that's not likely to happen in the general case. Even if the commercial investments are highly inefficient and tied to games with poor/boring gameplay, they still provide *gloss* at least, and so people will still buy them.
I put it down to the truism that "marketting is clueless", as always. Which is a big pity here.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Where are the inexpensive dev kits you promised last year, Nintendo? Sony and Microsoft are actually supporting homebrew, Nintendo is dragging their feet. I hope I can look forward to interesting and exciting news at E3 with regard to homebrew, dev kits, and VC originals ... but I'm not holding my breath. Please live up to your promises, Nintendo, don't turn this into another GameCube broadband adapter.
+0 Meh
Game and Gamestation have stocks, my local Asda has them. I ordered mine on Amazon UK or else I would have got one from Asda today.
...as if you could get one to play around with in the first place.
It's nice that they're having a contest for homebrew, but this contest and others of its ilk would never result in a Wii homebrew exploit being developed - unless the prize of said contest is in the 5 or 6-digit area. Modchips are big business. You can bet that the first person who comes up with the exploit will try and peddle it to the HK shops for a nice chunk of change. Whoever is working on homebrew exploits for the Wii is already doing it for the big payday and not for a $500 contest.
Apparently it's possible to stream your iTunes library to Wii:t unes-on-wii-for-free.html
http://hackaddict.blogspot.com/2007/06/tutorial-i
Haven't tried it yet though.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
The one thing that truly bugs me is the lack of support for Wii import games by both chips and loaders. Currently you have to buy a Japanese console to play them. I would love to give Naruto Shippuuden: Gekitou Ninja Taisen EX for the Wii a try. It is supposed to be the best Naruto game yet. The imported Naruto fighting games on the Gamecube are amazing. Japanese released Naruto: Gekitou Ninja Taisen! 3 and 4 (which are not available in the US) are much better than the previous versions. I am very glad that I am able to play them on a gamecube with a "Freeloader" disc.
"What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?" - Doctor Who
Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all want to sell development kits and licenses to use them. Officially allowing homebrew would mean commercial developers could make their own devkits, thus depriving the console makers of that revenue stream.
Not only have I never found a store with the Wii in stock, I've never even seen one with a demo unit.
I'm starting to suspect it's all just a giant myth...
DCEmu has been doing this for years, but the amount and quality of homebrew titles for the systems that get cracked do not seem to have made it worth the effort; however, it has opened doors to creating better emulators, which are of course not used for legal homebrew games the majority of the time, and for aiding game pirates in ripping game images which will run on cracked systems.
So, is this really about accelerating the Wii homebrew community or is it a cover story to get help in cracking the Wii so that pirated images of commercial games can be run on it sans modchip?
Microsoft has the semi-right idea with letting people use the XNA stuff to create games for the 360. Sure it is pretty locked down, but it is still is doable and well documented. The real hard part is that coming up with the idea for a 360 game is HARD, not to mention people expect "next-gen" graphics and sound for 360 games which is almost impossible without a large team. On the other hand, anyone who picks up a Wii controller immediately can come up with 10-50 ideas along the line of a Wii Sports or other mini games. And I think people are just fine with the quality of the graphics of the Wii. Throw in a standard "Mii" library for creating the characters and you are rolling right along.
Too bad I don't think Nintendo has their system set up for this. Oh well.
i've been looking to buy one at $249 since the release and can't find one!
can anyone point me to a single source stocking the wii at its advertised price?
nope! didn't think so!
i'll wait for the next gen and then get mine for $20...
I'd pay to be able to play Lunar: The Silver Star and Dark Wizard on my Wii. Anyone else?
Of course, that assumes that the drive is capable of reading standard CD-ROMs, which the Sega CD used.
Cynicism, like dogmatism, can be an excuse for intellectual laziness. - Susan Shirk
So how do I make Flash games without a $700 devkit? With the DS, I need $500 for a PC, $130 for a DS, and $50 for an R4 and a microSD card. I download the software to CD or microSD at a public library, and then I take it home and install it on my PC. With the Wii, I need $500 for a PC, $250 for a Wii, and either $700 for an Adobe Flash license or $250 for an Adobe Flash Education Edition license and at least $450 for a semester of community college.
It'd be nice if they'd admit that it's actually a GameCube and emulator contest, since nobody can load homebrew Wii code yet. It'd be even nicer if they focussed their efforts on helping load homebrew onto the Wii, instead of getting emulators developed for a system that doesn't have homebrew at all; some people find that worrisome. DCEmu means well, I guess, but their priorities could sure use a reinvestigation.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Part of the whole homebrewing philosophy stems from the high cost of development of some of these systems (case in point PS3 dev box is 10,000 dollars)
But if you REALLY want to create some good games for the Wii, and maybe even sell them via the Virtual Console for 5-10 bucks, then 2k for a developer kit aint that bad at all.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I thought that the only thing running on Wii was gamecube code. I haven't heard of any actual homebrew that can make use of the wiimote. Did I miss something big here? I hope so because that would be awesome!
Actually, it's part of what killed the Amiga. During the end of the Amiga's life cycle, many game devs stopped support for the Amiga and moved to the Genesis and SNES instead, because piracy on the Amiga was so rampant.
Turrican III, for example, one of the archetypical Amiga games, came out for the Genesis first, and was only later ported back to the Amiga. Factor 5 quoted piracy as the reason why the franchise moved to the Genesis.