Back on January 1, I made several resolutions for this year. For the most part, I've been successful in keeping them, as well as coming up with new ones that I've managed to stick to. However, one of them stands out in my mind more than the others...
Find a Wii U and hack it.
Little did I expect that in 2024, I would end up needing a new office chair, a new bed, and $1700-$2500 worth of repairs to the car. I wasn't sure how I would get to the only used game store in town to see if they had a Wii U in stock last year, and now I can't even start my car. I couldn't get down there at all, let alone pay them what they want for the thing, assuming they have one at all. As it turns out, you can't get Wii U's from the internet because sellers are still asking launch-day prices for them. I mean, I could probably get one from Craigslist with a horribly scratched-up Gamepad and a weird smell coming from the disc drive, but I'm going to say at this point that I'm not going to be able to keep that resolution. 12 months of time turned into 1 month of time and I just can't make that work.
I still want to play games on the TV though. Since only 1 of my computers can play Nintendo 64 games adequately, and it's previously occupied being my studio computer, I've decided to look into jailbreaking my standard Wii, instead. Ever since that unfortunate business in 2013, it spent about 10 years just sitting there on top of my DVD player until I finally put it away earlier this year. Actually, that's not entirely accurate—from about late 2018 to mid-2019, I had started playing it again; but when I replaced my old CRT TV with a new LED one, I found that the analogue connection wasn't able to play games adequately. There was so much latency, buttonpresses would get lost because the screen wouldn't update fast enough. Fortunately, the new TV could accept a VGA cable, so I could carry on playing NES, Super NES, and N64 on my Windows XP laptop. So, actually, the Wii was only sitting there disused for 5 years, not 10.
I got it back out about an hour ago, thinking that maybe, since I have a new new TV now, I wouldn't have the same latency problem and I could use my Wii as an emulation machine instead of holding out for a Wii U. Unfortunately, something has happened in the amount of time it was left standing there alone. Once I was able to coax it into starting up, I found that the colours were being processed much darker than normal, as though something has gone wrong with the GPU. More likely, it's the cable; I'll have to test it in my old CRT to make sure. Fortunately, even though the picture was dark, I could see well enough to test the picture for analogue latency; there isn't any! So, assuming all I need is a new AV cable, I can carry on with the jailbreak and get N64 games back onto my TV for the first time since 2019. I just hope I won't need the disc drive for anything, because it made the most terrible grinding sounds when I started it back up. Of course, this is a launch-day Wii; in computer years, it's 90, plus it spent much of its middle-age sitting around doing nothing.
I hope it's the cable, not the AV Out port. I can reasonably assume it's one of these because the Wii outputs video and audio through the same port and the first 2 times I started it up, it produced neither picture nor sound. If it's the port, well, that's also where an HDMI adapter would plug in, so the problem would continue in spite of it. That also means I would need to throw the console away, because I have no way of getting it to a repair shop and, even if I could, it would be more cost-effective to simply replace the thing anyway. But, here I am, always planning for failure! I don't think that made it onto my resolutions list: "Try planning for success instead of constantly anticipating failure." It should have been.