Due to numerous reasons ranging from lack of interest to a small attack surface, sometimes it appears that a console might never get hacked and the Wii Mini was a prime candidate. Now, the Wii Mini has finally been hacked, a staggering 7 years after its initial release! In this article, we’ll also be taking a quick look at some recent updates to popular Switch homebrew.
The Wii Mini finally gets hacked after almost 7 years with Bluebomb
For almost 7 years, the Wii Mini was unhackable but FullMetal5’s Bluebomb finally changed that!
The original Wii was released back in November 2006 and has been hacked (and even fully emulated) for many years with a pretty beefy homebrew library as evidence of this. Fast forwarding 6 years to 2012, Nintendo released the cheaper red coloured Wii Mini which was effectively a normal Wii but without many features including GameCube support, only one USB port, reduced video-out capabilities and no internet or SD Card support. As a result of the latter two omissions, existing Wii hacks such as Letterbomb and FlashHax were rendered useless on it and this left it unhackable for many years.
This changed thanks to the work of FullMetal5 who managed to find and exploit a vulnerability in the console’s Bluetooth stack a little under three weeks ago. Now, he has kindly released Bluebomb which is a complete hack allowing you to get HackMii on your console and install the Homebrew Channel so that you can enjoy the full hacked Wii experience! Furthermore, the exploit is also compatible on the regular Wii console although using it takes more work than Letterbomb so Wii owners should probably stick with that exploit.
To get Bluebomb and finally liberate your Wii Mini, check out this link and follow the instructions. A Linux computer is needed in order to run the exploit on your system so make sure you have a Live CD on hand 
GBATemp has advised to wait a bit before doing any permanent modifications to the NAND as current tools aren’t tested with the Wii Mini.
Nintendo Switch Homebrew Releases
Development on NX-Shell won’t be as active as it used to be but Joel16 has vowed to release a few more updates before halting development
Back to modern consoles, the last 2 days also saw some popular Nintendo Switch homebrew being updated which includes:
- NX-Shell 2.10 got released with a fix for FW 9.0.0+ (input issue fixed), some minor improvements like disabling sleep when in FTP mode, bug fixes and a code clean-up
- The eBook reading functionality (muPDF) has been removed for now
- Joel16 noted that he doesn’t have as much free time as he used to and he has less motivation than before when it comes to working on NX-Shell. This means that updates will probably come slower and development might halt eventually
- Atmosphere Updater 0.5.0 is out with touchscreen support, an extra confirmation dialogue box and some other minor improvements
- GZDoom Release 5 has been released with full support for FW 9.0.0 (input issue fixed) and the inclusion of the latest upstream changes.
Conclusion
If you were ever thinking of getting a Wii on the cheap, now may be a good time as Wii Mini consoles can be found for as low as $55/€50 with all accessories (make sure you get a WiiMote and a sensor bar if you don’t already have them) on eBay and possibly even cheaper locally. However, it’s important to know what the Wii Mini skims on before taking the plunge and buying it since regular Wii consoles only go for a tad more money or the same price if you look around!
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