Riigion Frii Wii

Yesterday I played about a bit with installing the Homebrew Channel onto my NTSC-J Wii in an effort to get region free working so I could buy the new Mario Bros game without having to go through the hassle of ordering it from Yes Asia (Added to the fact, it's more expensive in Japan and the release date is after the UK). Anyway, the Homebrew Channel works with version 4.2 of the Wii's firmware (the latest) and allows you to install SoftChip which can boot *cough* backups and apparently games from other regions.

Full instructions are available here: GBA Temp. You need an SD card and a bit of time. It took an hour or so and the only set back I had was accidentaly re-formatting my Wii and losing all my save games (Nothing to do with the instructions in the guide, just a lack of my understanding of Japanese and clicking one of the wrong buttons in a settings menu [and then clicking OK ... twice]). Anyway, once I had everything set up on the SD card it all seems to work quite well. I downloaded the SoftChip program, popped in Mario Kart (PAL version) and it booted and I can play it, which is quite handy since I lost that ability when Nintendo stopped my Freeloader working.

Just bought Mario Bros. today and it works fine too, so looks like I'm not tied into Japanese games (until Nintendo release 4.3 at least).