How to Play Wii Games from a USB Drive or Thumb Drive. This wikiHow teaches you how to play a Wii game from a file that's stored on a USB flash drive rather than on a disc. Keep in mind that this works on the classic Wii, but not the Wii. The official Nintendo site for kids. Watch videos, find games, take quizzes, read Nintendo news and more at Play Nintendo - a fun place for kids. If you have a powerful enough computer, you can play Wii and Gamecube games using Dolphin Emulator. This is a good way to engage in games when you do not have the Wii together with you, make the games look much better than they do on the Wii, and play games from 1080p! And the players whose physical consoles are out of order avail themselves of emulators, special programs allowing them to play retro games on modern computers. Nonetheless, it should be noted that not all emulators are capable of running GameCube and Wii games that are more sophisticated and demanding than their predecessors. This guide shows you how to play games released on the Nintendo Wii on your computer. It utilizes the Dolphin emulator. The Nintendo Wii is the ultimate successor to the Nintendo Gamecube system. A problem is that the console has been discontinued long ago. As a result, hardware and discs are starting to wear out.
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Cemu—the Nintendo Wii U emulator—is now a mature program with good performance on most systems. If you’d like to play Wii U games on your PC with all the benefits of an emulator, Cemu is the way to go.
RELATED:How to Play Wii and GameCube Games on your PC with Dolphin
Why Bother with Emulators?
There are plenty of reasons for emulating a game rather than playing it on official hardware.
- Better Graphics: Emulated games can push the limits of your gaming PC, offering much higher graphics quality and in some cases even increased performance. While The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild runs at 720p at around 30fps on a Nintendo Wii U, Cemu can very easily manage 4K@60fps on high-end systems, with texture and graphics mods to boot.
- Ease of use: A normal Wii U requires you to have an additional device plugged into your TV, which you would have to switch to and then slot in the game disc. With Cemu, you can have all of your games digitally on your PC, which will also load much faster than stock hardware.
- Controller flexibility: You can play with official Wii Remotes, but you don’t have to. If you prefer to use a PS4 controller, you can connect that to Cemu as well.
Cemu can’t easily take the place of a home console in your living room, but it does a very good (and arguably better) job of playing Wii U games on PC.
How to Get Wii U Games Legally
Even though emulators are commonly used to run pirated games, it’s entirely legal to run games you’ve ripped from a real disc. To rip games, you’ll need an actual Nintendo Wii U console you can homebrew. The homebrew process is a little complicated, but it’s worth doing anyway as a homebrewed Wii U is handy in its own right as a retro gaming console.
Once you’ve got your Wii U homebrewed, you can rip games using a program called ddd Title Dumper. Transfer them to your computer, and store them all in one place on your hard drive for Cemu to access easily. Most Wii U games are fairly small, around 2-10 GB, so they won’t take up too much space.
Wii Games On Pc
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Setting Up Cemu
Cemu isn’t the most user-friendly of emulators. The setup process is a little involved, and you’ll have to download some files that are usually bundled with programs like this. This may change in the future, but for now, most of this will be manual.
Download the latest release of Cemu from its website and unzip the folder. The folder will be named something like “cemu_1.15.3,” but you can rename this to whatever you’d like, and store it anywhere easy to access (like your Desktop or Documents folders). The contents will look something like this:
Don’t run Cemu just yet; there’s still some configuring to do. There’s a mod called Cemuhook that you’ll want for specific graphics packs and performance options. Download the release matching your Cemu version, and open the zipped Cemuhook folder. You can drag everything in here into your Cemu install folder.
Next comes the graphics packs. Graphics packs in Cemu serve lots of roles, from essential fixes for bugs on specific hardware, to making the game look or run better, to full-on mods for Wii U games. You can download all the most important ones from this tracker on Github.
Open up the zipped folder, press Ctrl+A to select everything, and drag them all into the
graphicsPacks
folder in your Cemu install. You don’t have to copy all of them if you are only playing one game, but they’re just text files and small enough that it doesn’t matter much.The last thing you’ll need to install is shader caches. With the way Cemu works, every time it has to calculate a new shader, your game will lag quite a bit while it figures it out. Luckily after you’ve done it once, the answer is stored in a cache and used for all calculations in the future, so if you play long enough, it will be very smooth. Since you probably don’t want to sit through hours of constant stutters, you can download someone else’s cache and use it instead. You can find a list of complete caches for various games on the CemuCaches subreddit.
Download the caches for the games you’ll be playing, and open up the .rar folder. The actual cache file is a .bin file which you’ll want to transfer to
shaderCache/transferable/
in your Cemu folder.After all of this, you can finally open Cemu.exe to run the emulator. If you can’t open Cemu, make sure you have the latest C++ libraries installed.
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Using Cemu
Cemu has a lot of options to configure, so we’ll stick to the most important ones.
Graphics Packs
You can enable different graphics packs under Options > Graphics Packs. They’ll be sorted by game, and have different categories within each game.
Resolution is an important option to configure, both for performance and visuals. You’ll find it along with shadow resolution and antialiasing quality under the “Graphics” category for most games. You’ll find mods and fixes for games in the graphics packs as well. Most graphics packs can be applied while the game is running, so mess around with the options and find what works best for you.
Connecting Controllers
A significant benefit of emulators is that you can play with any controller you prefer. Cemu still supports real Wii Remotes, so long as you connect them over Bluetooth, but you can use Xbox and PlayStation controllers in the same fashion. You’ll have to set all the buttons up manually under Options > Input Settings, but you can save your configuration to a profile so you won’t have to do it twice.
Cemu will emulate a specific controller under the hood, and for compatibility, you should probably stick to emulating a “Wii U Pro Controller.” This is so that the game you’re playing will act as if you have your Wii U Gamepad turned off and won’t show anything on its screen. If you’re playing a game that uses the Gamepad’s screen, you’ll have to enable “Separate Gamepad View” under options.
Performance
The emulator’s performance will ultimately depend on your system, but there are some settings to enable to maximize yours. Under “Debug,” you’ll find two options for adjusting the game’s timer. Make sure they’re set as shown here, to QPC and 1ms respectively.
A major option is the CPU settings, found under CPU > Mode. If you have a quad-core or higher system, set this to Dual or Triple-core recompiler. This will make Cemu use more threads, and ease up on your CPU.
Under Options, set “GPU buffer cache accuracy” to Low.
That should be enough for Cemu run well on your CPU (assuming you’re not playing on a toaster). If you’re still having performance issues, it might be GPU related, so try reducing the game’s resolution and graphics in the graphics packs settings.
Once you’re all set, you’re ready to start playing. If you don’t see your games in the main window, you may have to add the path under Options > General Settings > Game Paths.
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Ever wish you could play Wii and GameCube games on your PC? Just like your favorite retro systems, there’s an emulator that can do the job, and it’s called Dolphin.
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Dolphin is an open source Wii and GameCube emulator that supports the majority of games for both consoles. Dolphin can run your collection of Wii and GameCube games very well at 1080p on most new PC’s, and even older systems still can crank out playable speeds in standard definition 480p (which is the GameCube’s native resolution). Installing Dolphin is easy, and you can even rip your own games from a Wii if you’re willing to homebrew it.
Why Dolphin Is Better than a Wii
Why do this if you already have a Wii? Let me count the ways:
- If you have good hardware, you can crank up the graphics settings on older games. In fact, even games for the GameCube, which had a maximum of 480p and were stuck at a 3:4 aspect ratio, upscale very well to full widescreen HD or even 4K. There are hacks that let games run at 60 frames per second. There are also many community made texture and shader packs which improve the look of the game substantially.
- All your games will be in one place and load extremely fast. This can also be done by installing USB Loader GX on the Wii, which is actually required anyway to legally get your game disks to play on Dolphin, but it is still an advantage over a regular Wii.
- You can use Wii Remotes with Dolphin, along with any other gamepad, including Xbox 360 and One Controllers. You could also use a GameCube Controller, but you will have to buy a USB adapter.
- It’s compatible with Windows and macOS, with an older release available on Linux.
Dolphin is not without its problems; there are still games that do not emulate properly and have bugs or glitches, but there is excellent community support in their forums, and new releases come out every few weeks which include bug fixes.
Dolphin is open source and is available at their download page. The latest official version is 5.0, and it’s quite stable on most PCs with discrete graphics cards (some integrated graphics can run it, but you’ll have to try it out to see). All versions support the vast majority of Wii and GameCube games, though newer versions fix a lot of bugs in older versions and run better on current hardware.
How to Get GameCube and Wii Games Legally
RELATED:Is Downloading Retro Video Game ROMs Ever Legal?
Emulators are commonly used to pirate games, but they can be used without downloading ROMs, too—and in the case of Dolphin, you can rip your own games to your PC using a Wii. The process is a little complicated, and involves installing the Homebrew channel on your Wii. This is worth doing anyway, as it lets you turn your old console into a DVD player, run emulators, and install games to a hard drive. In the case of emulation, homebrewing allows you to install games to a hard drive, which can be then be connected to a computer to be used with Dolphin.
To go this route, first homebrew your Wii, and install USB Loader GX. These can both be long processes, and may differ depending on what system version you have. After that, you can use USB Loader GX to rip your game disks to an external hard drive. Each game can take up to an hour to rip, and can be anywhere from 1GB to 5GB, though double-layer disks like Super Smash Bros: Brawl can be 8GB in size. Even still, a 1TB external drive can store over 300 games.
It is worth pointing out that some DVD drives can actually rip Wii and GameCube games without the need for a Wii, though it only applies to a few specific drives.
Getting the Best Performance Out of Dolphin
As an emulator, running Dolphin on a PC will give take a performance hit versus the original GameCube and Wii hardware. But the good news is that those consoles are now so old, and new computer hardware is so powerful, that games can generally be run at full speed without issue. If you’re using an older or cheaper PC, you might only be able to play games at their original 480p resolution, but gaming PCs should be able to render GameCube and Wii games at 60 frames per second at 1080p, or even 4K—and they look fantastic.
Before you begin a game, you’ll want to click the “Graphics” button on the main menu. There are four tabs here full of options:
- General: here’s where you select your adapter (graphics card), your main resolution and aspect ratio (use whatever’s default for your monitor), and a few other tweaks. The Aspect ratio is particularly important: most GameCube games default to 4:3 (for “square” TVs), but some Wii games can display natively in widescreen 16:9. You may need to switch between them for the best results. Enable the “Use Fullscreen” option to show the games like a television, and disable V-Sync if you’re seeing slowdown.
- Enhancements: this tab lets you add some cool extra effects, if your computer is powerful enough. If your computer doesn’t have a discrete graphics card, you’ll want to set the Internal Resolution setting to either “Auto” or “Native.” If you have a more powerful graphics card, you can try 2x or even 4x for sharper, clearer graphics. Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering will help with “jaggies,” visible edges of 3D models, and the levels at which they’ll affect graphics performance go up as the variables increase. Click “disable fog” if you’re having trouble seeing in-game objects at long distances. Sterescopy is only necessary for users with 3D monitors.
- Hacks: this tab is mostly for adjusting settings based on performance for individual games. You’ll use it if a specific game is having trouble—the Dolphin Wiki can instruct you on the necessary settings. Most games won’t need them.
- Advanced: this tab has a few more options for advanced uses. The “crop” and “Borderless fullscreen” options are probably the only ones most users will want to try, but “Show statistics” is useful if you’re looking to benchmark your system or diagnose a problem.
Once you’ve figured out the right settings for your game, it’s time to get playing.
Connecting a Controller
One of the benefits of Dolphin is that you can play with any controller you like, including controllers from other consoles and third-party gamepads. If you don’t have a controller, you can use the keyboard and mouse, which is fine for GameCube games but isn’t that great for Wii games.
If you have a Wii controller, you can connect it over Bluetooth. The same goes for Xbox One controllers. GameCube controllers require a USB adapter like this one, and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 controller can connect over USB or with a wireless adapter. If you have any other Xinput controllers, you can use them too
Once you’ve connected a controller, open Dolphin’s “Controllers” panel. You can see here which controllers are connected.
If you’d like to connect a real Wii controller, choose “Real Wiimote”, hold down 1 and 2 on your controller, and click “Refresh” under “Real Wiimotes” until you see your controller. You can connect up to 4 Wii remotes to Dolphin.
You can also edit the controls very easily. Click on one of the buttons in the menu and press the button on the controller that you want to use. Once you’re all set, you’re ready to start playing!
How To Play Wii Games On Your Computer
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