Just having the Homebrew Channel doesn’t do a whole lot on it’s own, you actually need some applications to make it useful. The only applications I was really interested in were the Configurable USB Loader and the WAD Manager.

The Configurable USB Loader lets me load up ISO files of Nintendo Wii games. Great for making backups and storing your Nintendo Wii disks. It also loads and runs the games faster and smoother. I’ve got an 80GB USB drive I’m using to store my games on right now. I use WBFS Manager for OS X (which was a real pain to track down and find) to get my games onto the USB drive. The application runs on your Mac OS X computer and allows you to mount your WBFS formatted drive and then move your ISO/image files to your USB drive. The WBFS isn’t recognized by OS X, which is why you need this application. There’s definitely applications for Windows, you’ve just got to find them. With the Configuration USB Loader application you can also copy your own Nintendo Wii games to your own USB drive. I really find that to be a nice feature. The interface of the application itself is also quite nice. I haven’t played with it too much, but it looks like there’s a built-in cheats system which is really going to help me fly through a bunch of these games!

The WAD Manager is great because you can install WAD files, which to me are mostly Virtual Console games. Again, I use this for backup purposes. I’ve purchased a few Virtual Console games off the Wii Marketplace, so now being able to have the ability to actually get the WAD files for them is something I find useful. I don’t have to worry if my Wii crashes or something, I’ll always have the WAD files of the games themselves.

That said, I now have all of my consoles except my Sony Playstation 3 modified. I really find this stuff to be fun. It’s interesting to see a piece of hardware run software made by people outside the mainstream. Now, just because the whole process for me was relatively easy, it’s not the same for everyone. My friend said he spent 6-7 hours getting his Nintendo Wii to work right. It was a process that included downgrading firmwares, flashing different versions of firmwares, etc. I think I got lucky because of the age of my Nintendo Wii (it was one of the original units) and the version of the Nintendo firmware it was running. Luckily I had someone who’d done the process so the whole thing probably took no more then 30-45 minutes (from installing BootMii/Homebrew to getting the applications installed).

Useful Links:
BootMii
Homebrew Channel
Installing Waninkoko’s IOS249 for use with USB Loader
Configurable USB Loader Install
Wii Hacking Forum

What you need to check for is the that the multiport module within the kernel has been selected and compiled in. You can find this option under:

Networking support —>
Networking options —>
Network packet filtering framework (Netfilter) —>

Make sure “Advanced netfilter configuration” is turned on, and then it’ll be under:

Core Netfilter Configuration —>
“multiport” Multiple port match support

I ended up having to recompile my kernel, but I’m glad I was able to figure this one out. The people in the #netfilter channel on Freenode were as helpful as usual (and by that I mean they were completely useless). The multiport module is great when you want to open multiple ports without having to use multiple commands, or for organizational purposes want to group multiple ports open. As from my example above you can see I’ve set port the HTTP and HTTPS port in the same line.