Wii Game Backup Method Revealed

Method to create disc images of Nintendo Wii games to take fifty hours

A method has been found to dump images of Nintendo Wii game onto a PC hard drive. According to a forum post on Wii Newz, a specific line of LG DVD-ROM drives are required along with the program DVDInfo in order to successfully create a disc image.

The LG DVD-ROM drives, which supposedly share similar hardware with the optical drive found in the Wii, are able to read the special game discs via debug commands issued by the DVDInfo software. The entire process is a lengthy one, as it takes over fifty hours to create one single image dump.

Although hackers may be able to successfully extract the data off a Wii game disc, there is still no known method in loading the extracted data for play on the console.

The PlayStation 3 "backup" scene is also just getting its wings – disc images of PS3 games were released within two weeks of the console's launch, but methods on loading the data for play are still unknown.

[Harry]

The point of doing this is what?

So cheapskates get to play free games.

[MicroGamer]

to send Nintendo into a panic. Nintendo is very paranoid when it comes to people pirating their games. That was the reason why they held out with cartridges as long as they did. They thought they were more secure, but really they weren't. When they developed a new media for the Gamecube instead of using DVD it was also because they thought it would be more secure. Now it turns out that media isn't secure any longer. It will be interesting to see what sort of response it invokes from Nintendo.