Nintendo Wii Homebrew Contest 2007

Croakyvoice writes "DCEmu is hosting the worlds first Nintendo Wii and Nintendo Gamecube Homebrew Coding Contest with prizes of $500 on offer for Homebrew and Emulators for the Wii and Gamecube, The hope is that through this contest an exploit will be released that will allow full homebrew on the Nintendo Wii without a Modchip. Gamecube Homebrew is already on the Wii with a host of systems emulated such as Snes, Genesis, Gameboy and Neogeo."

Re:advertising ploy!

[TodMinuit]

By who? Nintendo isn't sponsoring the contest. It's unofficial.

Re:Not even $500 cash

[the linux geek]

I don't think anybody who actually has any experience with the GP2X would call it a "crappy knockoff handheld." It's a completely open Linux system with dual ARMs and emulators for many, many past consoles, plus native ports of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Quake 2, etc...

Re:advertising ploy!

[Superken7]

By who?

From the article:

Prize Details

[--banner from gp2xstore.com--]

1st Prize) $300 to spend at GP2X Store

2nd Prize) $150 to spend at GP2X Store

3rd Prize) $50 to spend at GP2X Store

I give you 3 tries :-)

Re:Mythical Wii dev kits

[edwdig]

Nintendo promised cheaper dev kits to licensed developers. They never said anything about the general public.

Re:Mythical Wii dev kits

[reybrujo]

Oh, they are availabe here [warioworld.com], and should be under USD 2000 (according to some old gaming articles), but apparently you need solid plan and backing [warioworld.com] to get them :-(

Re:how long

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, no store in the world has "at least 10 Wiis all the time". So you're clearly a liar. But just to be sure, I checked. Not a single Best Buy in Alberta has a Wii in stock right now. The online stock locator showed zero, but I called the Edmonton North store to double check. He told me no one in the province had any either, and checked his own stock locator. I then checked Future Shop online, even though they're owned by Best Buy, and still nothing. Please give me a store in Edmonton that has a Wii in stock that I can call to verify.

Re:Other solutions

[_xeno_]

As well as Flash, you can do HTML and JavaScript and graphics in <canvas> - I experimented with an FPS engine [lazyilluminati.com] a while ago, and developed it just with desktop versions of Opera and Firefox, and reportedly it actually works on the Wii too.

It doesn't work on the Wii - I just tried.

Even if it did, you wouldn't be able to play it because there's no way to generate keyboard events with the Wii. The only events you do get are mouse motion events and the left mouse button.

The Opera-powered Wii browser is still a very capable browser, but it doesn't quite work for things like that.

Re:What GP2X titles?

[LKM]

There are actually commercial games created specifically for the GP2X (check out the store), but this is hardly the GP2X's point. Calling it a "knock-off," as Joreallean has done, is about the stupidest, most uninformed thing I've ever heard.

It's a handheld for people who are into the whole homebrew thing and don't want to a) constantly fight Sony with firmware upgrades or b) buy expensive hardware to get homebrew to run on an unsupported handheld like the DS. The GP2X is a fully supported, programmable, Linux-running handheld. If you want to go into a store and buy games, it's not for you. This handheld isn't for everybody. It's for a very specific subset of all gamers, and for them, it's a great piece of hardware.

Sorry for the rant.

Re:Why homebrew?

[Kent Simon]

Interesting idea, but in practice this is impossible. I wanted to develop for the Wii, so I emailed and inquired about the process of getting a Dev Kit. After reading my email, it was forwarded to the VC dept, because I hadn't had any AAA titles published. At the VC dept level, the email was sat on and I haven't heard from them again. Turns out you have to have a brick and mortar company to be able to develop for the Wii. Not a company you run out of your house, and certainly not a hobbyist developer. This is a major oversight by nintendo, as third party support really matters this time around. And I would love to develop for it.

P.S. Unmodded all of my moderated posts so that I could say that.

Re:Hah, yeah right!

[Pxtl]

Don't be silly. The scene began on the Dreamcast, and at the time, Homebrew specifically referred to home-made *games* not emulators. There are lots of good home-made games that are 100% legit for consoles.