So you have a Wii and as with all optical media, you hate it. Just because they’re flimsy, unreliable, flimsy (did i say that already?) and not to mention unreliable. (I’ve got to find me some new words)
Anyway, jokes apart, yes, there is a way to do this. and YES it’s a hack. The idea is that you plug a hard drive into one of the USB slots on the back of the Wii , and rip/store your games. When you want to play them, you have only to access the hard drive and select what you’d like to play. There are 3 primary reasons that I am excited to have this working:
- Convenience – It is so much more convenient to not have to screw around with finding/storing game discs. Now I can load them onto the Hard Drive and put them away in a closet.
- Speed – Ever get tired of listening to the Wii spin discs while trying to load content (especially cut scenes and saves)? This hack supports full USB 2.0 speeds, and you’ll notice a significant decrease in the amount of time it takes to load games and game content.
- Storage – When you rip your games, the USB Loader is smart enough to know that it doesn’t need to copy all 4.7 GB of game disc if it doesn’t all contain actual game material. Turns out, almost all Wii games that I’ve seen are somewhere between 1-3 GB of actual storage. This means that you can backup many, many more games than would be possible when blindly ripping a full game disc.
Apparently it doesn’t work with a Segate Free Agent Drive. But I’m not here to tell you how it works… read about it here