About The Nintendo Wii Console

The Nintendo Wii is a video game console released by Nintendo back in 2006. It was in the 7th generation of consoles and was the successor to the Nintendo GameCube. It was released at a time when the Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 were in full swing.

With the Wii, Nintendo began to further shift their focus away from creating powerful consoles and instead on creating unique experiences for players. This can be seen directly with the Wii as it is a motion control based system, allowing your to move the Wiimote to interact with games and connect a Nunchuck attachment for additional control options. The Wii came with a Wii sensor bar that would sit near or on top of the TV and picked up movements made with to the Wiimote.

The Dance Dance Revolution game series and the Nintendo DS were both big inspirations for the Wii. Nintendo worked with Gyration Inc to develop several patents that directly related to motion detection.

The Wii was extremely well receive and performed very well. Nintendo discontinued production of the Wii in 2013 nearly a year after the release of the Nintendo Wii U. It sold over 101 million units over its lifetime, highest selling Nintendo home console to date until the Nintendo Switch took its number one spot later on.

Homebrew, Hacking, and Emulation on the Wii

The Homebrew scene around the Nintendo Wii has been very popular. Some Homebrew projects have even been able to go so far as to add DVD functionality to unmodified Wii consoles.

The Wii has also become a very popular system for emulation. The open source Dolphin emulator project has been widely successful over the years and is able to emulate both the Wii and Nintendo GameCube extremely well.

How To Emulate The Wii

Emulating the Nintendo Wii couldn’t be simpler these days. Since the emulator’s release back in 2003, it has continued to improve significantly over the years and its compatibility with most Wii games is top notch. Because of this, the Dolphin emulator is the go to solution and works fantastically at emulating both Wii and GameCube ROMs.

The Dolphin emulator runs on Windows PC, macOS, Linux, Android, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S devices. Dolphin is rather simple to setup and can be used either as the standalone version which you can get from the official website or can be used on RetroArch via the RetroArch Wii core.

Be sure to check out this guide on how to setup Dolphin emulator and our other guide on how to use Dolphin emulator cheats.