I completely forgot to update everyone on what happened with my dead Wii! Let me just rectify that for you.
In Part II, I’d had an email from Nintendo telling me that a bricked-by-homebrew Wii could cost ¬¨¬£200 to repair. Taking it to a local repair shop, I was told that there was little they could do for me, so I bit the bullet and sent it to Codestorm, who do the Wii repairs in the UK. In the covering email I said “It’s broken”. As it was.
Amazingly, in under a week, I’d had it checked, been told it would cost ¬¨¬£27.40 to repair, paid, and had it returned. They’d replaced the main board.
Unfortunately, everything had gone. And I mean EVERYTHING. Saves, homebrew, Miis, settings, downloaded games, messages… everything. Thankfully, the downloaded games could be redownloaded, the homebrew channel could be reinstalled (silly Nintendo sent me a 3.3E firmware Wii, not a harder-to-exploit newer model), and using some homebrew I could recover my Miis (well, the important ones) from my remote, where I’d luckily thought of backing them up to a few months ago.
It took ages to get the right cIOS files installed on it to allow USB Loader to work again, and I’m never getting my saved games back (even the ones backed up on my SD card refuse to work on my “new” Wii), but I’d have the same problems with a new Wii, and that wouldn’t cost ¬¨¬£27.40.
All in all, I’m quite pleased. And, in the case of some games, it’s given me reason to play them from the start again.
