Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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!).
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
Sadly, most people just ignore any console that doesnt have at least a 10% marketshare. Sometimes that is a good thing *cough*ngage*cough*, but other times you get imbeciles posting about great consoles like the GP2x (which i owned, and developed for, until mine was stolen).
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.
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.
Come on, don't act naive. "Homebrew" is code for pirating and emulating old games, and "backups" is code for pirating new games. Now you have your education.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Yes.
Tetris clones like the one I made?Yes.
The point is whatever you want it to be.
I use mine to play Neo Geo games on-the-go on a nice, big screen. I also use it to play around with some game ideas. You could use it to watch TV shows. Or as a Walkman replacement. Or as an organizer. Or to show your pals the game you've made. Or to read a book. It's a toy. You use it for whatever the hell you want.
Also, I don't know what it costs to get a GP2X in the USA. I'm from Europe. I know the GP2X was cheaper than a DS plus a DS-X (which I also own, by the way, as well as a PSP. I just don't actually write software for them because it's so much easier with the GP2X).