QuickJump QuickPeek special edition: Wii homebrew scene coming out of the Twilight |
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The homebrew scene is expanding yet again, now taking Nintendo's brainchild, the Wii, into its folds. The Wii homebrew community is young and has yet to take off, but already it seems to have a bright future ahead of it. Now we wonder, what's in store for Wii homebrew? (Or as many programmers call it, Wiibrew.)
It was only a few weeks ago when Team Twiizers found an exploit in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, practically bursting open the doors for developing homebrew on the Wii. Since then, a barrage of homebrew have already been released. Most of them are simple, sure, but you can't build Rome in a day.
One great thing about the hack - fondly and aptly called the Twilight Hack - is that the console doesn't have to go through any risky physical modding. Not only would your console heave a relieved sigh at not having to reveal its innards, but it also takes away the risk of voiding your warranty, which is always a good thing.
Today, we're going to check out the brief - and yet already substantial - history of Wii homebrew development. We're going to take a look at some of the earliest releases and see how the Wii homebrew scene is starting to pick up from its infantile stages.
Some would argue that Wii owners are casual gamers, and a large part would probably be clueless when it comes to programming. After all, a large part of Wii owners bought it for the fun factor, not for the ambition of becoming the Dark AleX of the Wii.
However, you can't brush off the fact that such a large population is bound to have a significant percentage that knows (and are interested in) programming homebrew for the platform. So, we can at least say that there's no shortage of programmers out there. Who knows, maybe a group of programmer grannies can make, I dunno, a cross-stitching app with the Wiimote.
As proof of the rising community in Wii homebrew, several programs have already been released only a short time after the Twilight Hack. First was Pong (which is poetic, really, considering it's widely considered as the first notable video game) from Auby, and then Tetris (another classic!) from DesktopMan.
We particularly have our eye on Wii Mode, an MP3 player from emu-kidid_08, which can really take off in popularity. Imagine being able to DJ your own sounds with just a flick of the wrist (remember the WiiJ)?
Following that line of thought, what we can also expect to see happen is the homebrew scene taking the innovative design of the Wiimote to a whole new level. The Wiimote itself has been hacked for use separately from the Wii and it's doing pretty well. It's become a DJ (or a WiiJ), an AIBO remote, and even an acceleration measuring device.
Not long ago, the Wiimote was used to emulate a virtual 3D environment, which was pretty cool. Seeing all these things done with the Wii's innovative design, it would be exciting to see where the homebrew scene would take it with the Wiimote's native platform.
There are a bunch of other Wiibrews available (which you can check out by following the "homebrew" tag at the top of the article). A lot of them can be pretty technical, but what can you expect from a developing homebrew community? It's still trying to find its legs.
Will it last?
As with any homebrew scene, developers have to watch that they do not breach legal boundaries (at least, not intentionally). Getting into trouble with copyright issues with the likes of Nintendo will not be a pretty sight.
See, Nintendo can probably give the homebrew community a hard time. Worst case scenario: they can put their foot down and try to squash the community altogether. But at any rate, it's just best not to get into Nintendo's black books.
Take it from Team Twiizers. They're the pioneering group of Wii homebrew, and they've announced that they will not be making an ISOloader, thus allowing them to steering clear of Nintendo's ire by not releasing any hacks that make it easier to pirate games.
Right now though, it remains to be seen what Nintendo thinks about the whole thing. The current Wii firmware supports homebrew, (or at least, doesn't prevent it) but they could remedy this with the next update. (This kind of tactic didn't work with the PSP homebrew scene though.)
If you're a programmer interested in trying your hand out with Wiibrew, one program that might interest you is WriteELF, which writes ELF files on to SD cards (whereas the Twilight Hack allows you to load them). You might also want to take a look at the DevKitPPC.
The DevKitPPC was originally a Gamecube compiler for amateur game programmers. It was recently upgraded with support for the Twilight hack and is now fully able to support the Wii. It even contains the code template for executing a simple "Hello World" program. You can imagine what a great first step this is for the community.
So what now?
On a more "officially-sanctioned" sense, Nintendo has its own homebrew scene in the works with WiiWare. Nintendo will be providing aspiring developers with small budgets to develop games that could be downloaded through the Wii channel.
So really, Nintendo doesn't seem to be against homebrew, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'd like people messing around with their platform. The success of "independent" homebrew will still ultimately depend on how Nintendo will take to the idea.
Still, it's not hard to imagine that the homebrew scene will persist despite a "nay" from the big N - this scenario would lead to some form of limited freedom. Right now we can bask in unfettered development in Wii homebrew though, so let's enjoy the moment.
Then again, Team Twiizers once suggested that Nintendo might even sell more Wii consoles thanks to homebrew (although, do they really need to sell more?). There's also the possibility that they may actually encourage homebrew. And you might even take the WiiWare service as a clear sign of that.
Although Wii homebrew is still rough around the edges (in general), it won't be a big surprise if it got on its feet pretty quick. It's pretty exciting to see where a worldwide resource of programmers - not to mention, programming grannies - could take Wii technology.
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Comments [refresh]
nice article, i wouldnt mind attempting wiiware if not for the cost and probably contractual agreements. i may actually start prgming for the wii unfortunatly for now i can't as i have the version of tp that isnt supported. well anyway i hope this leads to either a better way to load homebrew, or nontendo's official support much like how xbox does the community games with xna, only time will tell