Patching the Wii News Channel to serve local news (2025)

Summary

Patching the Wii News Channel to serve local news in 2025 August 25, 2025 🎧 Now Playing: Menu (News Channel) via Nintendo Music App In keeping with my passion (?) for displaying local news articles in unexpected places, I figured it would be a fun project to try and see what it would take to display current local news on the Nintendo Wii console’s News Channel. Here’s a sneak peek at the result: In this post, I’d like to share my research and process for getting this all to work. tl;dr - click to expand (spoilers) Patched the News Channel’s hardcoded Nintendo URL to point to an S3 storage bucket using Go and wadlib to extract the necessary binary file and edit it in-memory Modified WiiLink’s open-source news file generator to add “El Nuevo Día” as a news source Set up AWS Lambda + EventBridge to regenerate the necessary news binary files hourly Source code: WiiNewsPR and WiiNewsPR-Patcher The Wii’s News Channel The News Channel debuted in North America on January 26, 2007, a little over two months after the Wii’s launch. Since that date, it mostly came pre-installed with Wii consoles and was a novel way to read news from all over the world. Together with other “utility” channels like the Forecast Channel, it tried to position the Wii as more than just a gaming console. Check out a video recording of the service from right before it was discontinued on June 27th, 2013: VIDEO How the News Channel fetches content Before we can consider displaying custom news on it, we have to figure out how the News Channel actually fetches content. We know that it must have fetched news somehow since it displays a “Downloading…” splash screen on startup. Luckily for us, the Wii natively supports proxying via its internet connection configuration settings! Meaning we can set up something like mitmproxy on a local machine and observe its HTTP behavior. We can start mitmproxy’s web interface for a more screenshot-friendly UI: mitmweb --listen-port 8080 If we run a man-in-the-middle proxy...