Homebrew on the Wii

Since I did not have Zelda: Twilight Princess, and I do not like modchips, I had never gotten around to installing homebrew on my Wii. Last month I got around to do that, however, thanks to the bannerbomb exploit. It did not go too smooth, however. The Homebrew Channel installed fine, but bootmii and DVDx did not, and I could not install any .wad files. It turned out to be due to a missing cIOS. Some sleuthing turned up a package that let me fix that. I also ended up trying a bunch of homebrew apps, and this is the setup I ended up with:

System 4.0u
HBC
Ultimate USB loader 7.1 (based on Waninkoko's 1.5 loader)
Wad manager
Homebrew browser
Mplayer
bootmii as boot2, loading HBC by default

The USB loader is a blessing. I ended up loading all my games onto a USB disk. It's nice not having to get up to swap disks, and it's great for when we're visiting the family, because we only need to pack the usb hard drive instead of 2 dozen dvd boxes.

One problem, though, is that Wiiconnect24 sometimes crashes the games, so I had to turn it off. No big problem there, huh? Well, no, except that with Wiiconnect24 off, turning off the Wii also means turning off power to the USB ports, and thus preventing the wiimotes and the balance board from recharging. Not to mention that I cannot have the usb disk plugged in and charge both peripherals at the same time, because there's only 2 ports. I wonder if a powered USB hub will let me charge the devices.