I was born in 1996, which means my prime gaming years were spent with the Nintendo Wii and DS. So this year, I’ve been on a nostalgic gaming kick, which means I’ve been playing my Wii a ton, and I may have taken things a little too far. Without realizing it, I now own five Wiis, and I know just about everything there is to know about Nintendo’s fifth home console.
While it may have been controversial at the time amongst gamers at launch, after fifteen or so years of gaming on controllers and keyboards, it’s been surprisingly refreshing to go back to the Wii’s fun mix of motion and pointer controls. Nostalgia definitely helps, but some great games in that generation are worth playing, even in 2024. The Metroid Prime Trilogy, Skyward Sword, and Super Mario Galaxy are all huge hits that have held up perfectly, but even lesser-known titles like Trauma Center: Second Opinion, Endless Ocean 2 and Battalion Wars II are also fantastic, and I’ve had a blast playing through them again this year.
The Wii is also a great GameCube, and combining both console’s libraries into one console gives you a vast array of fantastic titles that are super fun and a lot different compared to a lot of the live service and multiplayer titles we get today. People often talk about the Nintendo charm, and nowhere is that more present than on the Wii. If you want to figure out how to get the most out of your old console in 2024, I’ve got a ton of tips, and it all starts with the most important one: just have fun.
Why focus on the Wii instead of the Wii U?
For those of you who read Super Brad’s Odyssey 1, you know I recently picked up a Wii U, so why am I now enamoured with the Wii?
There are a few schools of thought about what’s better, the Wii or the Wii U in 2024, but for me, it boils down to this. The Wii and its accessories are cheap to get secondhand, easy to hack, and built-in GameCube controller ports make playing backwards-compatible games a breeze.
The Wii U, on the other hand, has an HDMI port built right in, which is a nice upgrade for convenience, but if you want to go through all the crazy steps I’m going to outline in this story, it’s just a bit easier on the Wii. Others online will tell you that you can ultimately get a cleaner image out of the regular Wii as well, but at the end of the day, we’re here to play 480p games from 2006 to 2012, so there isn’t a whole lot to be done to them either way. The one caveat I will give the Wii U is that it has the best version of Wind Waker. Most of the other games that I loved on the Wii U came to the Switch, so there isn’t a ton there to go back to for me, but the Wii and GameCube still have a ton of awesome exclusives, and the Wii is the best place to play any games that use motion controls.
If you already have a Wii, don’t rush out and get a Wii U; if you have a Wii U, don’t rush out and get a Wii. Just play with what you’ve got. That said, if you’re a huge nerd like me (and I suspect anyone reading this is), you’ll have a ton of fun venturing down the Wii rabbit hole since they’re cheap to buy, and the modding scene is a little more robust there, making it easier to tinker with.
How to make it look the best on a modern TV
Out of the box, the Wii shipped with composite cables, which are the red, white, and yellow cables that used to ship with everything back in the day. The console only outputs an analog signal, so without actually soldering an HDMI port to the motherboard, you’re stuck with this subpar analog output. Still, there are a few ways to upgrade that, especially if you want to get richer colours.
The easiest thing to do is to simply buy a Wii to HDMI adapter that plugs into the back of your console. These are a dime a dozen on Amazon and Temu, but I found the $27 Mayflash Wii to HDMI adapter worked the best and offered more accurate colours than the cheaper options. Plus, it worked easily with my MClassic Upscaler. Some people will tell you that Nintendo’s official component cables (the red, orange, blue, green and white cables) plugged into a Porta HDMI adapter will provide the best picture, but to my eyes, this didn’t look that any different than the Mayflash adapter. Trust me, I tried every option and met up with so many Facebook Marketplace sellers, hoping to find some magical option that would really boost my experience, but at the end of the day, the MayFlash adapter is the smallest and most convenient since you don’t need to run a bunch of other adapters to use it.
To get the most out of your HDMI adapter, make sure you go into the Wii settings and upgrade the resolution from 480i to 480p. You might also have a few issues with the screen looking stretched. To fix this, you’ll need to play around with both the Wii’s 16:9/4:3 settings and the settings on your TV. For instance, when I plug into my TV, to get a better picture, I need to set it to 4:3 since the TV stretches it automatically, and when I set it up in 16:9 mode, it looks really weird, so your mileage may vary here. Just fiddle with the Wii and your TV settings and you’ll eventually get something that looks normal. I also need to zoom my TV slightly to remove black borders around the screen.
Avoid the larger white adapters that say Wii2HDMI on them.
To take things another step deeper, you can get an upscaler like the MClassic or something like a RetroTink, but those are expensive, so I only recommend them for the diehards. Both work differently. The MClassic works to upscale your picture and smooth out some of the jagged edges in old-school games. RetroTink products work similarly, like the 2X Pro, and they range all the way up to expensive units that can emulate the look of a CRT TV so it presents your games in the way they were meant to be seen. That said, for most, the 2X Pro is probably more than enough since it costs around $130 USD ($180 CAD). The top-end unit is amazing but costs $750 USD (roughly $1,044 CAD), so it’s overkill unless you’re an avid retro console collector with a high-end HDR TV.
I have an MClassic, and while I didn’t get much out of it with the Switch, it does help a bit with 480P and lower resolutions. Plus, it’s priced more reasonably at around $134. It can smooth out some of the jagged edges in the old-school games and interfaces. That said, part of the fun of hacking the Wii in 2024 is the insane price-per-gaming value. I was able to buy a Wii off Facebook for $35, and the other ones I found were just hand-me-downs from my friends who didn’t use theirs anymore. At that point, you can spend like $100, get a bunch of controllers and nunchucks, and just play. Adding an upscaler/anti-aliser like the MClassic can help if you play it a lot, but your mileage will vary. You will want to determine if you consider yourself a display nerd before deciding to get one.
It gets even better looking once you homebrew (hack) it
In the Wii hacking scene, cracking the Wii and installing your own software or emulators is called Homebrewing, and once you do, you get access to a few key upgrades, which make it an astounding gaming experience. First off, you can install all your game backups digitally, so you no longer need to use discs or GameCube Memory Cards. Beyond that, you can also turn off some video features that were meant to smooth the Wii’s graphics out on CRT TVs, but make it look blurry on modern high-def sets. Finally, you can install emulators for other consoles, giving you a more robust back catalog of games if you want to load up SNES, NES, N64, or Gameboy games. It can do other retro consoles as well, but since I was (am) a Nintendo kid, I only have games for those systems backed up.
Since this story is getting pretty long in the tooth already, I’ll just link to my favourite (Canadian) YouTube channel that does a great job of walking you through how to install this software on your Wii. It may take an hour or two, but it’s pretty simple. You just need to download a few apps and buy a big SD card (64GB or more), and you’ll be up and running with your dream Wii in no time. I have a 256GB SD card in my Wii, and it’s already full, with over 100 games.
That said, the gist of it is like this: you crack the Wii using the SD card, you install an app called the homebrew launcher from the SD card, then you can use that app to get more apps, including emulators and a ‘loader’ where you can access all your games stored on the SD card and Bob’s your uncle. You can even install software called Bootmii that will launch you right into this homebrewed environment, so as soon as you power on your Wii, you’re just right into your game library. It’s a small thing, but it really makes the hacked Wii’s feel kinda modern and like an all-in-one machine. You can take it further with custom themes and more, but since I assume most people are just here for the games, I’ll leave it at that.
Personally, I’ve tried both of the popular Wii game loaders, WiiFlow and USB Loader GX. At first glance, WiiFlow looks nicer with its iTunes coverflow-inspired design, but at the end of the day, I settled on USB Loader GX because I liked that It looked more like the traditional Wii Menu, and I found it easier to navigate and had more contextual game info. At the end of the day, it’s dealer’s choice, both are pretty similar in terms of features.
To get the best-looking picture out of USB Loader GX, you need to go into the settings of it and turn on the 480p Pixel patch, and turn off the Deflicker filter. This will clean up the image a tiny bit and remove the default blur that Nintendo applied to the Wii as some form of cheap anti-aliasing. You can also do a few other tweaks, and if you really want to dive this deep, watch the video since it goes into more detail and shows you all the features.
Basically, at the end of this, things will look marginally better, but if you combine these settings tweaks with a good HDMI adapter, your Wii games should look subtly cleaner and more colourful than they did out of the box, which really helps them pop on modern TVs.
Other random tips
If you’re using USB Loader GX to access games, you also need to install a GameCube app called Nintendont to link your GameCube games to your Wii’s new front end. Make sure you turn on the virtual memory card in this app’s settings, or your games won’t save
If you want to get a lot of games, try to get a large SD card. It’s a lot more convenient to have all the titles on a small card plugged inside the Wii rather than having to deal with a Hard drive dangling from the back. If you do use a hard drive, make sure it’s plugged into the USB port closest to the edge of the console.
Get at least one Gamecube controller. Sometimes, if you accidentally disconnect all your controllers, you’ll only be able to re-sync them from the Wii menu. If you use bootmii to get into your Loader right away, having a wired controller to navigate back to the Wii menu is sometimes necessary.
There are two models of Wii (not counting the Wii mini): The old version, which can get hot and a newer model that revised the chipset to draw less power and generate less heat that came out about halfway through the console’s life cycle. If you’re buying a used Wii, look for the newer ones since they should last longer into the future. The older models had a bug where they would stay on in rest mode once connected to the internet (an orange light when turned off instead of a red one). This could result in the chip overheating the GPU, causing a weird array of black dots to overlay your game. My original Wii has this problem, and it’s pretty annoying. To turn off this rest mode, go to Wii settings and disable WiiConnect 24 services.
If you think you have what it takes to solder a chip onto the Wii’s motherboard, you can attempt to install an HDMI port right to the Wii’s video channel to get the cleanest output possible and avoid all dongles. Again, this is probably overkill and only for nerds looking for a fun weekend project. I have not attempted it because I’m still learning to solder, but I’m working towards it.
Another fun upgrade you can get is custom cases on Temu. I bought a clear case and painted the inside red, giving this cool depth to the plastic that I enjoy. But be warned, there are a ton of screws in the Wii, and it takes longer than you’d expect to disassemble and put back together. I also bought a silver case to match my Gamecube controller, and I’m pretty happy with both of them.
There is a rudimentary Wii online service you can install to bring back the weather and news channels called Wii Link24. It is another hassle, but pretty cool for those looking to get their Wii back up and running like it used to.
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