Skip the FreeLoader - Buy Twilight Princess Instead!
The Twilight Princess hack continues to bring us wonderful homebrew opportunities on an almost daily basis, with one of the most impressive uses so far being released yesterday over at TehSkeen. As bilingual and enthusiastic gamers worldwide have noticed, the Wii implores an annoying little thing that the Nintendo DS and GBA did not - regional lockouts. This archaic convention has long meant that games purchased in Europe or Japan won’t be playable in America, and vice versa. Transnational gamers have been forced to use products like Datel’s FreeLoader to bypass these regional lockouts and legally play copies of official games that haven’t come out in the player’s territory. With yesterday’s announcement of a single file that can be transferred to a SD memory card and loaded via the oft-reported Twilight Princess hack, players with the required materials now have a free solution to get their international game on.
Obviously this his huge news for the homebrew community, as the ability to get more original titles and play archival copies of games via a boot file can’t be too far off. Homebrewers have already successfully dumped the first virtual console game, as well as ported various emulators that will only improve with time. Even Tetris has found its way over to the system via the “soft mod,” making many curious homebrewers excited for the future.
For those a little worried about using their copy of Twilight Princess for ill, take a peek at this simple video walkthrough that tells you where to put files and how to work the necssary SD card. I’m assuming you can pop in the aforementioned “FreeLoader file” instead of the Tetris one in order to play your import games, but I can’t affirm 100% without a copy of Twilight Princess myself to test it out. Maybe sometime next week?
Either way, it’s the beginning of an exciting era for Wii Homebrew. We’ll keep you updated as we find out more here at My Wii News. Now to decide if I’m patient enough to wait another week and a half for Mario Kart Wii to come to the US…
Hacking / Modding | 
Ilchymis | April 16, 2008
By Lukatoll, April 17, 2008 @ 2:10 am
i have no idea what this homebrew stuff but it sure does look interesting.
By Mr Parkle, April 24, 2008 @ 1:38 pm
Last word I heard about the Freeloader is that the new firmware update for the Wii is able to prevent it from working. I guess this Twilight Princess hack is almost the only way to get it going.
By Link81, April 24, 2008 @ 3:36 pm
So do u think someday somone will create a bootloader that alows unmodded Wii to play backups??
This could be very interesting, we could put our elf files on dvd s to boot nice homebrews
By Ilchymis, April 25, 2008 @ 3:58 pm
Link - That’s what I’m thinking is on its way soon. Chances are some people already have it; I don’t really get how you could do Import discs first and not have the ability to play burned.
I just got a copy of twilight princess, and I’m getting pretty stoked!