this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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I got 2 dirt cheap second hand Wii's last month, with some accessories. I never owned one and now that i'm a dad i wanted to introduce my kid to video games and play with him. Installed homebrew on one and keeping the other one as a backup. We love it. I was surprised with how well the games hold up, Super Mario Galaxy is amazing. My kid loves Kirby's Epic yarn, which I must admit is absolutely stunning visually and in gameplay.
Someone else mentioned getting a small form factor pc and then do emulation, that's also a great low budget idea. The only thing with that i found is finding the right input devices. Especially wii emulation is hard because of the wii remote and nunchuck, which is why i went on the hunt for the hardware. But the emulation route is very viable otherways. I run bazzite linux and can recommend it.
Good luck!
If you have a compatible Bluetooth adapter (it can be hit or miss), you can select Real Wiimotes in the controller section of Dolphin, and make sure continuous scanning is enabled, then once a Wii game is running, you press 1 & 2 simultaneously on the Wiimote, and it'll sync up (but certain controllers, like Wiimotes with motion plus built in may need you to use the dedicated sync button instead to sync).
You'll also need a USB IR bar for the Wiimotes to function, which can be had for around 8 bucks from ebay.
However, I personally couldn't get the Wii motion plus functionality to work in the handful of games that use it, and some games still don't work right in dolphin, like Wii Sports Resort.
I had no issue making Wii Sports Resort with motion plus. Do you use the wii mote with it inbuilt or the dongle?
Also (and fwiw) some of the older versions of Dolphin seem to handle motion plus a bit more gracefully. I can't recall if I played Sport resort with Ishii Dolphin or an older v5 version of mainline but yes, it for sure worked for me.
Looking at it again, I misremembered the Dolphin wiki entry for it. Apparently it only has problems unless using Bluetooth Passthrough mode, which I didn't really want to mess with to get working with my bluetooth dongle.
Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to use Playnite, as I've fully sworn off Windows personally in favor of Linux. However, even if Playnite were on Linux, I'm honestly not sure I'd go that route for myself. Even though it's fully configurable powerful, with macros that can be set up to get things just right, and specific versions of Dolphin may be more ideal for a particular game, I'm kind've at a point in my life where that type of fine-tuning and tinkering is far less appealing compared to when I was younger, where I would've seen it as a fun challenge.
The original merit of consoles was that they're simple plug-n-play devices that don't require much though to use, and that aspect is really appealing to me nowadays, as it leaves me more time to troubleshoot or experiment with non-gaming things, like tinkering to get a good audio production setup going on my Linux PC with certain outboard audio (which can be time consuming to figure out). So for me, a jail broken Wii really fits the bill of a simple box that I can just turn on and know everything will just work, and no update will mess anything up and require me to look into it.
But that's just me! For others, that tinkering and the end result of it is highly gratifying, and more power to em, I say :)
I hear you. Oddly enough, I seem to have gone the other way - I have more fun ekeing out the last erg of performance than actually playing sometimes.
Its a sickness, I admit :).
The tinkering mentality (roused from the dead thanks to emulation and retro gaming) has now led me into adjacent areas, like self host local LLM, media servers, coding etc. I credit the revival entirely to the delightful Wii (and the gentle introduction to modding provided by all the guides).
It really is a great system.