Nintendo have been fighting piracy ever since the days of the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System). Even up to the days of the Dreamcast, they have adopted the stance that games should be on proprietary format (cartridges, special Dreamcast media, etc) but for the Wii, they have decided that maybe the reason why they’re not making as much profit and selling as much consoles is the fact that people hate proprietary things.

Thus, they returned to the world of good old DVD ROMS, to the delight of many hackers who made every effort possible to hack the console to create “modchips” that allows running home-brew software as well as pirated games. Since then, it has been a hard battle between Nintendo and the hackers out there, as the company is so committed to battling it out. The first counterattack was a revised motherboard design that would foil modchips, but it wasn’t long before updated modchips solved that little problem.

Soon after that, Nintendo resorted to putting epoxy on the DVD-ROM IC chips making it impossible to attach the modchip there. Now, another product called FLATMII has been released which plugs in to the DVD-ROM’s drive ribbon and allows you to send data directly to the Wii via your computer. This would enable you to stream ISO backups of your games, so you don’t even have to burn them out on a DVD and insert into your Wii!

Of course, you can also use it to stream other media-friendly stuff like Gecko OS, Mplayer, emulators and a host of other home-brew applications. Take that, Nintendo! But I’m sure a counterattack will be released to thwart this latest attempt at subjugating the Wii, but for those who are holding out because of the inability to mod the new revisions of the Wii, fear no more.

Flatmii Standalone mode Installation Tutorial video