Browsing the Web on the Nintendo Wii in 2021 – Is It Possible?

hello everybody and welcome back to another video now in today's episode we're going to be revisiting you got it the nintendo wii it's been a little it's been a little while since we did a video on this thing but we're going to be bringing it back today and attempting to see if it's even possible to browse the web on this thing in the year 2021 now there's a couple methods that i want to dive into we're going to check out the internet channel which is the web browser that comes with the nintendo wii or well it didn't come with it you had to get it from the wii shop channel which you can anymore but i have it on this one so we're going to check it out that way and we're also going to check out a homebrew application i i believe is called webbrowser and that is another web browser i think it was last updated in like 2013 which i believe makes it more recent update wise than the web browser that's already on here the internet channel so we're going to see how those two compare and then once we're done with that we're going to be you guessed it let me just grab it over here we're going to be pulling out the raspberry pi this is in the crow pi 2 once again and we're going to be seeing we're going to be seeing how brow service works or even if we can get brow service to work with a nintendo wii uh i don't see why not but that's what i say a lot in these videos and something always goes wrong so this will for sure be a fun one hopefully you guys will enjoy it so if you'll excuse me i have to get my really sophisticated recording device here you guys know that we only use the most sophisticated and modern technology on this channel so that's why i've got this luxurious dvd player right here which i actually still use to capture the video output from the nintendo wii it works great so uh yeah i'm gonna get this all set up and we will check this out and see if web browsing on the nintendo wii in 2021 is still possible all right so first things first let's launch the internet channel which i believe is the only internet enabled wii channel that still works after both we connect 24 and the wii shop channel being shut down obviously the wii shop channel's closure was more recent unless of course you homebrew the wii and install reconnect 24 which i did a whole video on if you want to go check that out so this channel is based on opera nine now that is a pretty old version of opera to say the least and it was first released this channel was first released in 2007 and according to webrew.org the last update it got was on september 1st 2009 but it doesn't say anything about changing the opera version so this is still opera 9 i believe so we're gonna go to google.com uh i could use a usb keyboard but i'm just using the wii remote because i just prefer to just take longer with everything so this here is the google home page and this is actually a ver like this is not the super old version that still has the hyperlinks across the top we've seen that in a couple other videos on this channel when we try to access google on older web browsers typically it'll work but it will display a more basic version of the page without this area up here so with this we can actually get access to the grid or maybe we can't well it's loading something you know what while it's doing this i'm gonna go get a usb keyboard okay so i genuinely don't know what this is doing this is supposed to pop out with a list of google applications or well if you want to call them at you know google docs google drive what else google images google's got some applications in there okay let's just put it that way but yeah it's not it's not doing anything i mean it's loading something it looks like but it's uh i mean you can see the bar down here is right at the very beginning and we still have the spinning circle animation over the the weak cursor here let's try gmail let's click on gmail up here yeah something tells me this is not going to work we can try images here and yeah i think this is just the browser oh wait a second oh there we go google images are just images there you go dang this looks real i mean look at this why is like the search box is like way off to the left oh this is a totally different version of the page like we don't have that you know menu up here we just get oh oh wait we do this is it it just doesn't it just doesn't show like the icon doesn't show up or maybe that just took us back to google images so you got this like invisible button up here now the google like the regular google images page does not look like this if you're accessing it from a modern browser these links are not uh at the bottom there's a little bar down here that's got like advertising business about and how search works which is you got some of those links here and the design of the search box itself is different but so we can click on that and i've got a usb keyboard plugged in so let's do an image search for youtube and press enter and then we got a oh yes nintendo with your great user interface design we gotta hit okay even though we've pressed enter on the uh on the keyboard i wonder if he's just going to load indefinitely that's my guess maybe we've got to hit search okay so that i mean the bar across the bottom went all the way to the right but we're still here oh there we go okay so like i thought this is the mobile results page this is also very common for older browsers they will typically load to the google search results page in its mobile form so this is not the i mean you can still view search results which is great so yeah there you go we can look at all these youtube images let's go to all here and this page already looks a little broken i mean we got i want to say this is probably the search button you know it's got that like blue background with the with the magnifying glass i'm gonna guess that's what that is so we can go we can scroll down here we got some some tweets from youtube what is what is youtube tweeting about we asked the world to film oh yes july 25th 2020 we asked the world to film the story of a single day on earth oh yeah life in a day i remember this i think i got an email about this is youtube free now is youtube free now people ask this when has it ever not been free maybe they mean youtube premium or youtube tv or something but you why doesn't make any sense let's go to wikipedia we'll try to go to a wikipedia page yeah this is a pretty slow browser and this is not my internet connection i'm sure some people will probably say oh it's just your internet connection no this is not as i have a hundred make down and uh this is not a hundred make down that we're getting here so this is absolutely the the browser oh unable to complete secure transaction you tried to access uh oh it's this is the google redirect url here is currently unavailable well let's just try to go to wikipedia directly and see so we'll go up here oh let's just click here i'm like i'm going to the top of the page to get to the address bar okay so let's go to en.wikipedia.org well that's not working either unable to complete secure transaction yeah i was gonna try and see if we could watch a youtube video from this thing but my guess is that ain't gonna be possible i mean obviously this thing was last updated in 2009 you can't really expect it to function perfectly but i used to use this channel all the time i even watched youtube videos from it back in i wanna say well it was probably around 2008 2009 i mean you could absolutely watch youtube videos on this thing it was like a regular web browser i mean it's based on opera that was available on windows you know you could use it on windows if you wanted to so it's like it was a yeah it was a it was a great web browser it was it was very usable obviously it was just you know designed around using it with a wii remote which was the whole thing with the wii obviously but you could uh well the feature with the with being able to use a usb keyboard was not originally included with this that was added in an update i believe the second or third update that the internet channel got gave you the ability to use the usb keyboard with it you know it's just obviously not going to function like it like it used to okay let's just get out of the internet channel here because i don't want to spend the entire length of this video just talking about that uh because i want to check out the wii browser now this is a homebrew application that is actually on the open shop channel which is the revival project for the homebrew browser i mentioned that before on this channel as well so we're going to start the homebrew channel here and we're going to open up the homebrew browser and click on load the only thing is it was last updated i believe in like 2013 which is still newer there it is right there we browser let's check the date first of september 2013 so this is about four years newer than the latest version of the internet channel here it is we browser so we're going to click on that it's got pretty official looking artwork here i want to say that's from like wii sports or the nintendo channel or something maybe it was just created for this but it says right here we browser is a we web browser started from we explore sources and using a customized libwy gui as base for the gui so you can display custom websites you can have support for html and https connections well i would hope it would have support for html if it's a browser it would kind of need to have that so i don't know why that's specifically listed in here but https okay that's good links and web forms capable of downloading files to sd slash sdhc card okay that's pretty cool address bar with on-screen keyboard i wonder if there's usb keyboard support it doesn't say that here it can extract zip rawr and 7z files that's pretty great just from the browser you can extract it that's really awesome supported image formats png jpeg gif oh here come the pronunciation police i can hear them in the comments right now image operation zoom and move auto update feature well it hasn't been updated in the since 2013 so it's been a little while wish list better css support flash videos yeah that also dates this as well multiple tabs oh that's oh i thought that was a feature for a second no that would be a nice feature controls wii remote only to say anything about a usb keyboard it doesn't say anything about a usb keyboard but let's see if it works maybe it will accept input from a usb keyboard so we're going to load it here and we get that i've seen that animation before oh this looks very similar to the internet channel yeah this looks really good actually yeah you got a very similar looking bar down here uh this is what you would click on to browse i assume you could click this as well and it brings up a keyboard here so let me try to type out oh it works awesome so you can use a usb keyboard great so let's go to google.com now the big question can we press enter no we can't we still have to click on ok with the wii remote okay not a huge deal so we'll click the check mark and that should uh i guess that will browse well we got this thing that came up that said we browser hmm uh yeah we're kind of well i just hit the home button that probably just will take us back to the homebrew channel yes it will home for homebrew so we're just gonna load it up again i mean i would think it would like show it loading the webpage but i don't know what this like what is okay we can hit plus here oh these are probably like favorites and probably say favorites there well let's go down here and i mean this looks like the same thing maybe we're going to type out the full address http colon slash www.google.com and we'll hit on ok and check it does the same thing is this like the loading page like does it not display the web page until it's loaded properly okay i really don't know what this is doing what the what is this doing it's just on this like okay and i literally can't do anything i can't press a i can't click on anything pressing plus or minus doesn't do anything pressing home just takes you back to the homebrew channel so how are we supposed to how are we like is there something i missed i mean did it say like there's something you're supposed to do wish list controls uh shortcuts credits and there's nothing about like you have to do this first let's go to settings here maybe there's something we gotta okay homepage google.com unzip files ask each time user agent oh we could change the user agent let's change the firefox that would be pretty great but hopefully we can even do it like okay let's go to the home page oh so it doesn't take you directly to the home page it just cues it up in this box here and you have to click the check mark and this just does the same thing i am like so confused this is not i mean i'm looking at the webrew page for this this doesn't say anything about like there's something you're supposed to do something you're supposed to set up i just press the home button we're going to go back to the homebrew channel again this is so you got top sites over here recent history this is by pressing plus two times uh nothing shows up here obviously okay we can view this as the download manager i mean is there something in settings that i'm missing here let's turn off auto update we'll change the start new session click sound firefox advanced i mean there's nothing that i can see you can send a bug report i wonder if it would actually go anywhere i wonder if maybe i mean it said it supports https can we manually force like https let's go to gosh um you want us go to youtube right off the bat youtube.com let's try it out hit okay i wonder what this does do you want to exit does this just take you back to this just takes you back to the homebrew channel okay one more time we're gonna try to go in here and just load youtube.com with https if that doesn't work i guess we're just gonna move on to checking out brow service okay youtube.com check i mean if this is the loading animation this is a very poor loading animation i have to say like there should be some sort of animation like this isn't an animation at all but like if this is the loading screen i mean this is not a really good loading screen but i mean i've left it on this page for a couple minutes for the past couple of times i did this we'll do it again i mean i'm gonna leave it here for five minutes or so and we'll see if it does anything [Music] okay so it says resuming connection now it was never really connected to begin with okay maybe it's just maybe it just takes a while we'll just leave it on here for a little longer and we've been on this screen for about five to seven minutes oh i can't even press i'm pressing the home button right now and that ain't doing anything i mean we can still move the we hand the wii cursor around but i can't press home anymore so maybe the i mean i would think that the channel is frozen or that the homebrew app is frozen but normally if the entire system locks up we can't move the hand around anymore i keep calling it the hand but you know what i mean the cursor we can't move the cursor on when the entire system is locked up but i can't press the home button so i'm gonna have to turn this off okay so we're loading up the homebrew channel again here i don't know let's just try it again guys i i want to make sure i'm doing everything that i can possibly think of oh the app didn't close correctly yeah oh no it's been restored don't tell me it's gonna try to load youtube okay i was like let's maybe go to https colon slash en dot wiki and we get the same thing okay we'll leave it here and we'll see what happens okay yeah i think this is a lost cause it's been about another seven minutes or so and we have gotten nowhere and i think the yep i can't press the home button again i would think maybe you just can't press the home button on this page regardless of if the call i mean the console's obviously not frozen uh i just i mean i can't power it off from the wii remote but all right i think our next mission is brow service okay so first i gotta dig through my wonderful collection of well i got some apple bags here too but this is mostly just cables in here i know i put this thing in here somewhere where is it at where did i put this thing oh i think i got it there it is okay so we'll get back to this later first off i need to go on the raspberry pi we've got it set up here and we gotta start brow service so i need to open up terminal actually so let's do this with one hand isn't this gonna be awesome i wonder if i got it yes right here um oh and we'll just this is the previous command i ran that uh changes the user agent if the camera wants to focus like a good camera focus in come on you can do it okay so this is the no focus in okay this is focus in this is the command that changes the user agent to mozilla firefox running on windows 10 and also has this specified as the ip address and port that we have to access which we're going to have to change on the wii manually so i'm going to press enter oh i didn't even change gosh darn it really okay there we go i didn't even change the right directory okay so now it's starting so now we have to get the ethernet cable which should be long enough uh okay it's plugged in the 98 pc here let us move the 98 pc ever so slightly and unplug the ethernet cable okay so the plan here is the wii obviously does not have a ethernet port on the back but nintendo sold a usb to ethernet adapter that you could get to use a wired connection with a nintendo wii because it is supported i mean it's literally an option in the wii settings you can select wired connection now i don't see why you couldn't use a standard generic usb to ethernet adapter on the wii but we're going to try that out and see if it even works so we're going to plug this adapter in it's in now all we got to do is i'm going to say all we have to do but we'll see how simple this is we got to go into wii options wii settings and we need to obviously change our network adapter settings so we're going to go to internet and we're just going to add we're going to connection settings we're going to just add a new connection so we're going to use connection to wired connection okay oh come on really all right one online purchase and about a week later we got one of these what is this you might ask this is the official nintendo wii ethernet adapter so it turns out that the wii only supports usb lan adapters that have the same chipset as this one which this amazon basics one apparently does not so it's not useful for this video so i had to pick up one of these and hey look check this out it's literally like a little baby version of the power supply isn't that so cool it fits right in literally it's the exact same design here if you put them up to the edge oh and if you were wondering if that network error we were getting had to do with brow service i actually had this plugged directly into my network switch over there with the default settings like i didn't have the ip address manually set or anything like that so it wasn't able to connect to the network at all which just led me to believe that this adapter is incompatible with the wii which it is so let's go ahead and plug this bad boy in and see if we can get the wii online through brow service with this well i would show you that footage but we ran into a couple of problems to say the least you remember that super advanced capture technology that i mentioned at the beginning well it turns out that it decided to corrupt the dvd i was using to record the wii's output yeah i guess murphy's law is affecting the video making process itself now but let me just give you a little rundown of what happened because you didn't miss much the adapter worked and the wii was able to establish a connection to my home network but when i plugged the ethernet cable back into the raspberry pi and tried to manually specify the wii's ip address and subnet mask it stopped working now i expected the connection test that the wii does whenever you change the internet settings to fail this is because a browser is client machine isn't going to be able to connect to the internet the only page you'll be able to access is the one hosted on the browse service server but it turns out that the wii won't let you use an internet connection unless it is able to establish a connection to the internet it just outright disables the use this connection button for most people this isn't going to be a problem but in our case it's a huge one so i thought that was going to be the end of it but then i remembered something i discovered while i was browsing the open shop channel a homebrew application called offline network enabler which allows you to force activate one of the three network connections even if it isn't able to connect to the internet quick side note this application modifies the wii's nand or flash storage so i'd recommend knowing what you're getting yourself into if you ever decide to install it i thought this would be perfect so i downloaded it went back into settings configured the ip address and subnet mask settings and ran the application and it worked well the homebrew app did it enabled the connection that i set up but the wii still couldn't find the brow service server and even after tinkering with the settings for about an hour i still couldn't get the wii to connect to the raspberry pi in fact the pi wasn't even able to ping the wii's ip address so that's where we're at from what we've seen in this video i'm gonna say that browsing the web on the nintendo wii in 2021 isn't gonna work well for you i mean it's technically possible sort of the internet channel can load some sites and i have seen videos of the we browser homebrew app working too but both of these browsers are pretty old and you're not going to be able to freely browse modern websites without running into some problems in most cases i wasn't even able to get the internet channel to load a web page at all but there you have it that's my experience trying to browse the web on the wii in 2021 hopefully you enjoyed this video even if it wasn't the conclusion you were hoping for oh but on the bright side i remember that i have this composite capture device that i can use for these videos yeah kinda wish i remembered that before recording this one [Music] you

Channel: Michael MJD

Views: 511,276

Keywords: video, michaelmjd, mjd7999, game, review, overview, apple, microsoft, unboxing, tutorial, windows, how-to, mac, os, operation, system, Browsing the Web on the Nintendo Wii in 2021 – Is It Possible?, nintendo wii, homebrew, browser, browservice, homebrew browser, riiconnect24, michael mjd

Id: M0QMD9Ja8VI

Length: 22min 53sec (1373 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021