Finally having some luck with running games from the HD. (I DID wind up throwing down $6 for a VPN subscription so I could grab some torrents without anyone hassling me. I find it profoundly stupid that I have to take such precautions to download rips of games I have already paid for -- bought new at full price, no less! -- AND it's irritating to have to toggle the VPN off every time I want to watch something on Netflix. But I also find it pretty amazing that it's so damn easy to find rips already converted to WBFS on Pirate Bay.)
Anyway, still waiting for a few to download, but the ones that have are working fine and recognizing my existing saves and everything. It's pretty neat! Better still, the launcher can download cover art and shit for all of them.
No luck launching GameCube games yet, even though I've done everything the tutorials say. Push come to shove I could just hook up my damn GameCube I guess.
I've probably got enough disposable income just to replace the entire damn optical drive anyway without having to worry about disassembling lasers and spindles and shit, but I'm having quite a bit of fun with this. I realized years ago that I spend more time fiddling with elaborate ways to launch games than I do actually playing them.
Speaking of which, Wii Homebrew is certainly the most painless method I've ever found of emulating VirtualBoy games. I fired up Wario Land the other day and...well, it looks like shit because it's a Virtual Boy game, but it was really easy to set up. I'm pretty sure Wario Land is the only good Virtual Boy game and I've been meaning to replay it for years. Wonder if there's a way to tweak the color scheme like you could do with the four Game Boy shades; it'd be nice. Get something with a little better visibility going on.
You know, if Nintendo's not going to put VB games on Virtual Console, somebody should port a VB emulator to 3DS. Because while Wario Land is certainly playable without the layers showing up at different depths, I WOULD be curious to see it that way again.
I'm also curious to check out some hacked games. I mean,
Mario Kart Black looks kinda stupid, but I have to admire the effort that went into it.