Not to worry, you can still hack your Wii without Twilight Princess

Want to run some homebrew games, apps, a DVD player, or emulator on your Wii? Too bad! Nintendo doesn’t want you to. Fortunately, their console is far from un-hackable, though the latest versions aren’t vulnerable to the original Twilight Princess hack. Lucky for you there are other ways of going about it. This new hack, which should work on any Wii, works by injecting some “malicious” code into a banner on your home screen. Though it’s not really malicious, is it? They should have called it “friendiferous.”

Lifehacker has a nice long tutorial on how to get it done — you’ll need an SD card and some easily-downloadable files. It’s free and relatively easy — and it’s your hardware now, so why not do what you want with it?

Learn to Use an External Hard Drive to Back-up and Play Wii Games

For the longest time, Wii owners cried out for a hard drive attachment for their beloved white console. And eventually, Nintendo answered… not with a hard drive, but by letting us save Virtual Console games, WiiWare titles, and Wii Channels to an SD Card. Good enough.

For some.

For others– namely, the sort who use the Wii Homebrew Channel, sometimes you want to do more. “A disc that never leaves the case can never be scratched,” says Lifehacker, who found the following tutorial about how to use the Homebrew Channel to allow you to save Wii titles to an external USB 2.0 hard drive.

For further information on doing this yourself, you can find the tutorial here.

Me? All I really want now, admittedly, is to be able to back up the Wii save files that they won’t let me, which are ironically the same files I most fear being erased. I’ve no desire to rebuild Animal Crossing: City Folk or Super Smash Bros. Brawl, should the worst happen.