Ola, Wiibrewers! It's been a busy week on the Wiibrew front this week. Several of our favorite Wiibrew programs were updated this week, including the Homebrew Browser and WiiPhysics. Big news this week is the release of Whiite-Linux, which lets your console serve as a PowerPC-based Linux computer.

Any chance we'll see it adapt a Windows or Mac OS anytime soon? Er, probably not. Might as well make a PlayStation 2 emulator for the Wii. Wait, that's actually not so bad. Aw, dang, now I want one. Anyway, enough dreaming and on to the news!

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Wiibrew Pick of the Week

This week's pick of the litter is Guitarfun, a Guitar Hero clone a la Wiibrew. Guitarfun was originally made for the PC, with the keyboard serving as the guitar peripheral. The original author, Hermes, was also the one who ported the game unto the Wii, with some great new features.

The best feature is support for a variety of peripherals to serve as the guitar, including a USB keyboard, the Wiimote, or even the guitar peripheral from Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock.

Link: Guitarfun v2.7, Guitar Hero clone: support for Wiimote, USB keyboard, GH3 guitar

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Wiibrew Programs

This week sees the successful release of Whiite-Linux, a real implementation of a Linux system for the Wii. The release also features support for many USB devices that Linux already handles, like USB keyboards, mice, and even hard drives. It's a mighty useful system, to be sure. Seeing as a lot of Wiibrew are Linux-based, it would be interesting to see how Whiite-Linux would affect the Wiibrew landscape.

Link: Whiite-Linux v0.1a: Linux for Wii, with support for USB devices

Wiibrew developer teknecal whipped out two new builds for Homebrew Browser this week. The first update gave several new features to the program, including the ability to support applications which load files from the SD card. The second update fixed a small bug that gunked up the works when downloading certain programs.

Link: Homebrew Browser v0.2.0a: fixed downloading problems
Link: Homebrew Browser v0.2.0: support for applications that load from SD card, more

Also updated this week are FTPii and SD Explorer. FTPii sees an extra security measure, sporting a new authentication system in its list of features. SD Explorer is now on version 1.0a, although we're not exactly sure what's new in this build as it wasn't mentioned by the author. Still, it must have been updated for a reason, so better safe than sorry.

Link: FTPii v0.0.9 - added password authentication
Link: SD Explorer v1.0a

Last in our Wiibrew Programs section, but certainly not the least by a long shot, is WiiPhysics. The fun physics program from Beardface is now on version 1.3 and has several great new features, not least of which is the implementation of new GUIs for Dynamic Gravity, Restitution and Friction. Objects now also have their own configurable density.

Link: WiiPhysics v1.3: configurable density, increased world size, loads more

Media Programs

When it comes to Wii-native media players, it's currently a toss-up between MPlayerWii and DragonMedia Player. Although MPlayerWii is new to the scene, it displays some promising features. It not only plays several formats of audio, but it is also capable of playing video files.

DragonMedia Player however, has an ambitious outline for the future, even though it is not capable of playing video yet (although this may change soon enough). Part of its plans for the future include support for DVD, as well as USB access.

Link: MPlayerWii v0.02 - faster SD reading, optimized audio playback
Link: In development: MPlayerWii v0.01
Link: DragonMedia Player v0.06 Alpha - OGG Vorbis in the house
Link: DragonMedia Player v0.05 Alpha

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Wiibrew Games

Shooters are the name of the game in this week's offering of Wiibrew games. Scratch that. Shooters and MahJongg, I mean. Well don't ask me, it's not like devs have a weekly theme they adhere to. It just so happens we have two new shooter games this week, and a MahJongg game as well.

 

First up is Barrage Wii, a port of an old-school Linux game which has some nice particle simulation when you shoot stuff. The other one is Space Shooter, which was originally a 2D space-shooting game (if the title didn't give that one away yet). The MahJongg game is similarly marked with its no-frills title: MahJongg Wii.

Link: Barrage Wii - a point-and-click shooter port for the Wii
Link: Homebrew - Space Shooter v0.2
Link: Homebrew- MahJongg Wii v0.1

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Dev's Corner

Wiibrew developers have a new resource at hand (no pun intended) with Wii Homebrew Cursors. It's a set of cursor images that mimic the Wiimote's own cursor set. The author even provided a generic set of cursors to go along with the standard Player 1 - 4 cursors.

Link: Wii Homebrew Cursors v1.1 - cursor resource for homebrew devs

Also updated this week is the popular libwiisprite library. In preparation for a project of one of the library's authors, the sprite library now has several new features, including the addition of a reference pixel system that allows you to scale and rotate the sprite around a specific point. It also comes with a couple of speedup improvements.

Link: libwiisprite v0.3.0a: reference pixel system, speedups, more

This development library has been around for a long time now. It isn't strictly Wiibrew but since it has to do with the Wii's peripherals, it rightly belongs here in the Wii updates. The WiiRemoteJ library is a library that enables computers to interact with the Wiimote and the Wii Balancing Board via Bluetooth, with Java as the mediating language.

Link: WiiRemoteJ v1.4: Java library, Wiimote and Balance Board interaction via Bluetooth

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News from the front

We don't know how it was done, but it was apparently done. A YouTube video reveals that someone managed to run the classic Nintendo 64 game GoldenEye 007 on the Wii. It was done via a Virtual Console inject using the Sin and Punishment WAD. As reader emcp pointed out, 007 never used to work when injected, so this is great news. The downer is, we don't have anything on it other than the video that shows it works. Still, progress is progress. We just have to wait for the dev to release his/her work.

Link: Wiibrew video: GoldenEye 007 N64 working on Homebrew Channel

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That's it for this edition of the Wiibrew Weekend Warrior! As I said, it's been pretty busy hasn't it? And you know what? I like it. I hope you guys too! Hope to see even more Wiibrew come out next week! See you then!