Soft modding the vWii

Last night I decided to go ahead and soft mod my Wii U's "Wii mode". Main motivation to do this is to play emulators via the HDMI interface and see if input lag would improve, another reason was to try GC games using progressive scan.

The process is simple enough if you have the right tools. In my case I procured a copy of Smash Bros Brawl many moons ago to perform the Smash Stack on a relative's red Wii. I kept the game in case it was needed in the future.

The process is pretty much the same as with a regular Wii, 

- Start "Wii mode" 

- Delete any Smash saves

- Launch Smash

- Create a save

- Delete custom stages

- Go back to "Vault"

- Insert a regular SD card (< 2gb one) with the smash stack and the Hackmii installer

- Go to the stage builder, the Hackmii installer should begin

- Install the Hombrew channel as usual

I tried FCEU GX, I can even load roms from my NAS. Picture quality and lag improved by a lot compared to using my Wii with composite. Super Mario 3 and Tecmo Super Bowl were definitely playable.

Nintendon't worked like a charm using the SD card exclusively. Great picture quality at 480p, and flawless control with the Wii U Pro controller.

I couldn't get the external USB hard drive to work even using a "Y" cable. It seems the Wii U USB ports are utter garbage. The same drive works great on the Wii and using a regular cable. I'll test tonight with a powered enclosure and report back.

Another issue I found is that with certain homebrew apps (tested multimods, wad manager and the intellivision emulator) after the the app starts the Wii remote disconnects and it doesn't connect back, so it is impossible to use the app or get back out of it, so I have to unplug the console. Multimods screen saver kicks in so I know the console is not locked, just the remote is not syncing. I'll have to do some research.

Update 1: Just read some newer controllers maybe incompatible with certain apps. Last night I was using a Luigi edition remote with integrated motion plus. I'll test with an old regular regular remote and report back.

Update 2: Using a powered interface I solved my hard disk issues, homebrew can see the hard disk no problem. Using an old regular Wii remote solved my controller problems, that one works fine with all homebrew apps (Atari 2600 yay!).