Posted by Ub3rG33k on Jan 28, 2010 in
Nintendo If you are like me, and got very lazy and modified your Wii so you could play your games from a Hard Drive, then this takes laziness to the next level. 
Even with the mod, you had to fire up the homebrew channel, or fire up the CoverFloader, or WiiCoverFlow or whichever channel you had for accessing your hard drive, then select the game, then load….you can now remove a step, and have your games as channels, and below I’ll show you how.
Assumed prerequisites.
You have a Wii
You have a homebrew channel installed
You have your games installed to a compatible hard drive connected to the Wii
Assuming you have the above, lets continue.
Download the latest version of WBFS Manager if you don’t already have it installed.
Download the latest version of Loadstructor (Torrent link here)
and finally the common-key.bin (Torrent Link Here)
Once everything is installed, connect your hard drive to you PC. This should appear in my computer but you won’t be able to access it, this is normal.
Fire up WBPS Manager, and select the external hard drive with you games on it from the drop down box, and click load. You should see a list of your game, if so move onto the next step.
Unzip the Loadstructor zip file and copy the common-key.bin into the root of this folder.
Run the Loadstuctor.exe and you should be met with the below screen.
I personally left all the setting as default.
Click on Add from WBFS, and select the game you want as a channel, using the CTRL key you can select multiple games
Once you have your games selected hit the RUN! button, this will create the wad files on your chosen output folder.
Once complete (took around 20 seconds a game on my machine) you will have a number of wad files in the above folder. Copy these to your Wii SD Card into a folder called wads on the root.
Now we head back to the Wii, take your external hard drive and SD Card with you and plug them into your Wii
Fire up your homebrew channel, then run WAD Manager (assuming you still have this on your SD Card from installing your homebrew channel, if now version 1.5 can be found here or here
Select the newly created wads, and install, that’s it, jobs done ! You will now have Wii Channels for all you favorite games
Final Note :
If your game won’t load and you sat looking at a screen saying Loading ISO, try disabling the Fix 002 Error, as not all games need this, and it seems to be switched on by default, and secondly, I’ve found that I have to completely power off my Wii between games, I can only assume something gets cached.
Anyway, hope this of some help. If you get stuck, drop me a comment and I’ll give you a hand.
Tags: bin, card, channel, click, coverfloader, ctrl key, Download, drive, external hard drive, fire, folder, folder copy, game, homebrew, key bin, laodstuctor, Link, load, Loadstructor, Manager, multiple games, next level, PC. This, sd, sd card, step, step unzip, Torrent, version, wad, wad files, wads, wbfs, wii, wiicoverflow
Posted by Ub3rG33k on Dec 15, 2009 in
Tech 
As time goes on, and I buy myself more and more gadgets, these obviously come with more and more remotes. Over the last couple of years I’ve tried various “All in One” remote controls, from the cheap “enter the device ID, and hope for the best”, to a Cambridge Audio MI+ “Smart Remote”
I’ve been more than happy with the Cambridge MI+ however I made the mistake of leaving another remote on top of it, which drained the batteries….
As I couldn’t really be bothered reprogramming it all (which took me ages to get everything how I wanted, also all the macros I had set up), I decided to give the Harmony remotes a try.
I found a good deal on Amazon, and got one of the basic Harmony 515 remotes just to give them a try. The major selling point to me, was that it backed up the remote to an online database.
A couple of days later, the remote arrived, very simple PC/Mac GUI interface, pick your devices and bobs your uncle !
One of the limitations of the 515 remote, was the fact that it will only run up to 5 devices, however this is where the limitations end.
The major thing that makes the Harmony remote series stand out from all the rest, are the way they work. On the “All in One” remotes, you basically switch on device a, then device b, then device c, then switch device a to channel d, etc etc. The Cambridge remote did attempt to combat this, by giving you the option of macro, which meant with 1 button press, you could macro “switch on device a, then device b, then device c, then switch device a to channel d, etc etc”.
The setup of the Harmony creates Activities. Once you have set up your devices, it will give you a list of suggested activities based on your devices. An example of this would be “Watch TV”. The setup runs through, and asks the following question.
Assume you want the TV on (and what channel, AV, etc), the PVR on, do you want the amp on, if so what channel, when the activity is complete, do you want the volume controls to control the amp or the TV, etc. Once done, you plug your remote into your PC/Mac and download the information to it, and your done. When you then click the “Watch TV” activity, it turns on the TV, switches to my HDMI channel, turns on the Sky HD, turns on the amp, and switches to CBL/TV, sets the control to emulate the Sky+ remote, and the volume control to control the amp.
This setup works for DVD, PS3, Xbox, and anything else I throw into the mix !
With being so impressed with the 515 remote, I treated myself to the Harmony One remote, and moved the 515 up into the bedroom. This gave me chance to use the “Replace Remote” function within the Harmony software, plugged in the Harmony One, clicked Replace Remote, and within a few minutes it had configured the new remote with my configuration, all the devices worked as before ! Brilliant !
The advantage of the Harmony One, is that it can control up to 15 devices, has a colour touch screen and comes with dock/charger, and to be honest looks the business.
If you are looking for a smart, all in one remote, look no further than the Harmony series !
Tags: 515, activity, amazon, amp, audio, batteries, button press, Cambridge, channel, control, couple, couple of days, device, device id, everything, gadgets, gui interface, harmony, Harmony One, harmony remotes, logitech, mac, Mac GUI, macro, macros, mistake, one, pc mac, pvr, Remote, remote controls, Replace, series, setup, Sky HD, Smart, switch device, time, top, try, volume, Watch, watch tv
Posted by Ub3rG33k on Sep 2, 2009 in
PS3 Well, if you’ve got a PS3, and turned it on in the last 24 hours you will be greeted by the happy “Dude…there’s a software update, you know what to do…”
..message.
What do you get I hear you say, well let me tell you.
The first thing I noticed was the new startup screen with the PS3 logo…looks kinda cool, and then was met by the “sparkly” new theme…looks kinda cool.
In the top right hand corner of the desktop you get your icon, number of friends online, date and time (digital and analogue ?)
Each time you start up the PS3, the it defaults to the What’s new icon (which has replaced the Information board), however instead of the feed ticker, you now get 9 rotating images of “What’s new” in the Playstation store.
Being an Xbox live user, I do really like the way your friends list is treated, clear, you know who’s online, and can quickly see which game they were playing last…..so what have Sony done…..well, they’ve but a HUGE border around each one of your friend, which is twice the width of everything else in the column !…not nice ! I wouldn’t mind if it provided you with more information, but it doesn’t it just looks ugly !
For some reason there are now 2 icons for the Playstation Store, one in the games section, and one in the usual Playstation Network “channel”….really? is there any need ? I could understand if there were more than 1% on the PSN Store that wasn’t a game that would be fine, but apart from the sat nav, the Eye Create, and the VidZone everything else in there are games….
1 Addition I did like was the integration of the BBC iPlayer, granted you could goto the website through the browser before and it worked, but now you can do this straight from the XMB. I don’t however like where they’ve positioned it, they’ve given it a channel of it’s own called TV (I’m assuming this is also used for the play TV, but……), I would have personally added it to the Video channel to reduce the size of the bar.
Another addition I do like, is the right thumbstick controller during video playback. If you rotate clockwise or anticlockwise, it will step backwards and forwards with very hight precision.
A “Save Screenshot” option has been added to the web browser, which is pretty cool, but not sure I’d ever use it..
Apart from that, it’s all I’ve noticed, I have read people complaining about the larger fonts…but I’m cool with this, my vision was starting to go anyway 
Tags: 3, Addition, analogue, BBC, browser, channel, cool, Dude, everything, feed ticker, game, games section, icon, images, Information, information board, Iplayer, kinda, message, new icon, online, play tv, Playstation, playstation store, PS3, psn, psn store, screen, software, sony, startup, startup screen, store, Theme, thing, time, time digital, update, Video, video channel, xbox, xbox live, xmb
