The Homebrew Channel: ugly GUI

For various reasons I've not felt the need to mod my Wii up to now. There would have been a few advantages - being able to play my American and Japanese GameCube games, importing US games that didn't get released here, backing up some of the saves for games that don't allow copying.  But these advantages were outweighed by the idea that it was a difficult process and would make my Wii behave oddly.

I now have a bit more impetus to do this. I don't want to replace my Wii with the Wii U completely, for various reasons - GameCube support, Lost Winds not transferring, an extra step needed to get to the Wii menu. However, there are now benefits to moving data to the Wii U, including a cheap upgrade price for the various Virtual Console games I've bought.  If Nintendo had a proper account system in place this wouldn't be an issue; I could just transfer the games I'm interested in. They don't; I have to move everything across or nothing at all.

However, by modding the Wii I am able to have the stuff I've bought in both places; back up the system before transferring, transfer, restore from backup. I can continue to use my Wii for playing Wii games, but can pay the upgrade price for Super Mario World.

It wasn't a difficult process at all. I followed the guide here, and it took twenty minutes all in, from plugging the sensor bar in (as this moves between the Wii U and the Wii) to looking through the Homebrew Browser. The Homebrew Channel has a nice channel icon and a pleasant enough background, but as soon as you start installing anything else you quickly see why companies pay people so much for graphic design. Some of this software is very ugly indeed.

So first stage complete: I have a modded Wii and have it backed up to an SD card.  All I need to do now is to transfer my data and then restore it back to the Wii as well.  And then work out how to make everything region-free.