Aloha, Wiibrewers! We have a ton of new programs and games for you this week, including teknecal's new brainchild, the Homebrew Browser. We'll get more on that later. For now, I'd like to introduce you folks to the Wiibrew Pick of the Week section, where I share with you guys my favorite Wiibrew for the week. And with that, on to the news!

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Wiibrew Pick of the Week

WiiPhysics is quickly one of my favorite homebrew. It was written by Beardface, one of the Wiibrew community's more prolific developers. WiiPhysics is a physics playground, where you get to doodle objects on screen, and the program subjects your doodles to the laws of physics. It's a fun app and hopefully we get to see more updates for it in the future.

Link: WiiPhysics v1.2: improved drawing, bug fixes, new layout, more
Link: WiiPhysics v1.0: physics playground program

Wiibrew Programs

Here's an extremely useful program from another prolific coder, teknecal. "Useful" is an understatement. The Homebrew Browser lets you download and update your Wiibrew directly on your Wii, eliminating the need to have to transfer your SD card to and from your PC just to transfer files. Who knows? Maybe someday it may even become a permanent part of the Homebrew Channel.

Coincidentally, the program the Homebrew Browser takes from, FTPii, also sees an update this week from joedj.

Link: Homebrew Browser: grab and update homebrew directly on your Wii
Link: Homebrew Browser v0.1.2: server response check, new features
Link: FTPii v0.0.8: no-op SITE CHMOD command added, MKD bugfix

This homebrew program that takes after GeeXboX, though this one's a native Wii application that doesn't need Linux. DragonMedia Player is a media center in its alpha stages. It can play a number of audio files, including MP3. The author hopes to release future updates with USB-hard drive support, and DVD playback. That's something to really look forward to.

Link: DragonMedia Player v0.03 Alpha - Wii-native MP3, tracker media support
Link: DragonMedia Player v0.04 Alpha: seek bar, hotkeys, background image, more

Wiibrew Games and Emulators: going old school

  

Wiibrew games have gone old school this week. Let's start it off with Wiibrew Chess, one of the earliest Wiibrew games released. This update comes from vader347 and adds Wiimote support to the game.

Link: Wiibrew Chess v0.0.2: now with Wiimote support

Next up is Wii Tanks, the Wiibrew version of the classic arcade game, Tanks. The game now features nunchuk support, as well as a few bug fixes from the previous version. Also out this week is an update to Missile Command, based on another retro arcade game.

Taking an old school game and pimping it out with rumble feedback is Captain_Hero's Pimp my Pong. Pimp my Pong also has Wiimote cursor control, but it's really the program's name that got me.

Link: Wii Tanks v0.3a blasts those bugs dead, adds nunchuk support
Link: Missile Command v0.5a - MIRV crash bug fixed
Link: Pimp my Pong - rumbling paddle fun with Wii remote

Yabause Wii, a Sega Saturn emulator for the Wii, has been given an unofficial mod by Ac_k. The program was given several optimizations and improvements here and there. Also updated this week is RIN, the GameBoy Color emulator for the Wii. The update sports a new navigation feature, as well as a few other additions.

Link: Yabause Wii (Ac_K's unofficial mod)
Link: Rin version 20080628 - fixed saving SRAM and states for Wii version

Dev's Corner

For devs this week is an update to the popular library, libwiisprite, which was used in WiiPhysics, Missile Command, and a whole lot of others. This latest update now offers buffer loading for images.

Link: libwiisprite 0.2.2 - supports buffer loading

Beardface, who has been quite prolific in releases this week, has given the community a dev tool which would prove useful in future homebrew. This is LibOSK, an on-screen keyboard which also uses libwiisprite). Images, font, and even the language itself is fully customizable.

Link: LibOSK 0.4.4: configurable on-screen keyboard for Wiibrew apps

Finally, we also see a release from DS homebrew developer 0xtob, who has ported Box2D over for the Wii. Box2D is a 2D physics library, whose power was demonstrated in both Pocket Physics for the DS (also from 0xtob) and WiiPhysics. Cool, eh? The dev also released a sample program for easy reference

Link: Box2D for the Wii: 2D physics engine, with sample program

In other news

This piece of news doesn't really belong in Wiibrew news in the strictest sense, but I'm thinking the Wiibrew crowd would be more appreciative of this news for its technical nature, rather than the whole Wii community at large.

In an effort to curb piracy, Nintendo released new drives for the Wii console, but this was quickly hacked by the team behind the Wasabi modchip.

Link: Wasabi: New D2E drives hacked

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That's it for today! I hope you all agree with me when I say there's a lot of great releases this week. I actually have my eye on Homebrew Browser, and I hope it really takes off and becomes one big hub for the Wiibrew community to release their programs. See you all next week, and keep on brewing!