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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."
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.
By who? Nintendo isn't sponsoring the contest. It's unofficial.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
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!).
How long did you have to wait for the wii to come out?
Until you get lucky ;) Seriously, I have been going to various stores, every once in a while, asking them when their next batch is due.
If you are in the UK, then GAME make you do this. Those of us who have better things to do than hang around video game stores would be well-advised to try GameStation, who will take a deposit and phone you up when your name reaches the top of the list.
The Wii is a thoroughly well-designed and enjoyable toy. I'd certanly like to see it opened up a bit. How else will we get Wii change-ringing?
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
Prize Details
[--banner from gp2xstore.com--]
1st Prize) $300 to spend at GP2X Store
2nd Prize) $150 to spend at GP2X Store
3rd Prize) $50 to spend at GP2X Store
I give you 3 tries
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
Sorry, no store in the world has "at least 10 Wiis all the time". So you're clearly a liar. But just to be sure, I checked. Not a single Best Buy in Alberta has a Wii in stock right now. The online stock locator showed zero, but I called the Edmonton North store to double check. He told me no one in the province had any either, and checked his own stock locator. I then checked Future Shop online, even though they're owned by Best Buy, and still nothing. Please give me a store in Edmonton that has a Wii in stock that I can call to verify.
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.
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."
There are actually commercial games created specifically for the GP2X (check out the store), but this is hardly the GP2X's point. Calling it a "knock-off," as Joreallean has done, is about the stupidest, most uninformed thing I've ever heard.
It's a handheld for people who are into the whole homebrew thing and don't want to a) constantly fight Sony with firmware upgrades or b) buy expensive hardware to get homebrew to run on an unsupported handheld like the DS. The GP2X is a fully supported, programmable, Linux-running handheld. If you want to go into a store and buy games, it's not for you. This handheld isn't for everybody. It's for a very specific subset of all gamers, and for them, it's a great piece of hardware.
Sorry for the rant.
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).
Don't be silly. The scene began on the Dreamcast, and at the time, Homebrew specifically referred to home-made *games* not emulators. There are lots of good home-made games that are 100% legit for consoles.