Patching the Wii News Channel to serve local news in 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
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