The emulator will even let you re-download games that were previously purchased on the original Wii itself and let you enter a valid credit card to purchase new games. With all that in place, though, Version 5.0-2874 of Dolphin can now connect to the Wii Shop Channel servers to download WiiWare and Virtual Console games. From there, you have to use some special software tools to extract the certificates and keys that Nintendo uses when validating connections to its online servers.

For one thing, you'll need to use some homebrew software on an actual Wii to dump the contents of the system's NAND memory.

The team behind the open source Dolphin emulator took a major step closer to reaching that goal last week, though, releasing a new version that can actually purchase and download games legitimately from the Wii Shop Channel.Īccessing Nintendo's Shop Channel servers from the PC-based emulator isn't exactly a plug-and-play affair.

Further Reading Accuracy takes power: one man’s 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulatorPerfect accuracy is an extremely ambitious goal for any console emulator to shoot for, and it's one that many emulators never come close to achieving.

Wii homebrew sega emulator channel