Patching the Wii News Channel to serve local news (2025)

(raulnegron.me)

65 points | by todsacerdoti 15 hours ago ago

16 comments

  • msephton 3 hours ago ago

    After playing until late into the night, I would browse the weather channel, searching for places on Earth experiencing thunderstorms. Clicking on the icon would play a short audio sample of thunder. The whole thing was overflowing with personality and charm. Wii remains my favourite video game system of all time, and I've owned them all—from nuon to gamepark and back.

    • cheschire an hour ago ago

      My wife and I spent a lot of time on the Everybody Votes channel.

      She was way more in touch with what the general populace voted on than I was and frequently picked the option that turned out to be popular in our region.

      Such a unique game console.

  • rucury 11 hours ago ago

    Author here, thanks for sharing! Happy to answer any questions or discuss it with folks.

    • sergiomattei 5 hours ago ago

      Dude, this is awesome. El Nuevo Dia on the Wii is peak bori brain. :)

      • rucury 4 hours ago ago

        Thanks, Sergio! Appreciate it. Was definitely fun getting it all working and seeing that familiar logo pop up on the Wii of all places!

  • dfajgljsldkjag 4 hours ago ago

    I used to check this occasionally back when the console was new. It is interesting to see that people are still keeping it running. I guess there is a niche for everything.

    • jonhohle 4 hours ago ago

      I really liked the Wii interface as a TV interface. It felt very much like a modern way to navigate a TV. Modern TVs have some of those features, but none with the whimsy and fun of the Wii.

    • rucury 3 hours ago ago

      For me, it's just such a nostalgic and pleasant to use interface. I still keep the Wii up and running to play some retro games every now and then (it's a great emulation system as well). Being able to learn more about how these "old-school" Nintendo web apps work was something I had been curious about for awhile!

  • wizzwizz4 5 hours ago ago

    Since it's HTTP, you shouldn't need to patch the Wii News Channel: you can do all of this in DNS.

    • ipython 3 hours ago ago

      I was just about to say the same thing - why go through all the effort to patch the binaries when you can just redirect the DNS to your own server?

      Then I saw something about signing with RSA - btw OP, the link doesn't work in your blog - there's some markup issues. But there's no discussion of where the RSA key comes from (just that you create one with OpenSSL). Does the Wii just accept any "signed" content? If so, wow, 2007 was a crazy time...

    • czk 4 hours ago ago

      i thought the article was going to go there, just redirecting the host to a self-hosted ip address serving the bin, but i was pleasantly surprised it didn’t! interesting to learn about the patching process and tooling used

  • mystraline 2 hours ago ago

    So, would it be possible to patch Wii and NDS games as to use local servers instead of now-dead servers?

    I'm thinking something like Bnetd, but, say NinteNetd.