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[Thad]

Welp, I no longer suspect the lens.  Because I replaced it, and exactly the same thing happened: it worked once and then didn't work again.

Between that and the grinding noise it makes every time I turn it on, I'm back to figuring it's the spindle motor.  So I'll probably price those out again and figure out whether I should bother or whether I'm better off just attaching an external hard drive and ripping all my games.  (Course there's nothing says I can't do both.)

Sure did break a lot of little back plastic tabs.  I am not impressed by the quality of materials inside this thing.

[Thad]

Welp, one of the three screws holding the motor on got stuck and wouldn't come out; I had to tap a small flathead through the bottom of it to get it to detach.  And then none of the three screws would screw back in tightly.  (I suspect this was the cause of the problem in the first place.)

In the process of tapping out that last screw, I severed four of the wires soldered on to the optical drive's controller board.

I'm going to go ahead and solder them back on and see if that's enough to get it working, but I'm pretty pessimistic at this point.  Way I see it, my options are probably as follows:

• Hook an external hard drive up to it and rip all my games;
• Save up $40 and replace the entire optical drive
• Save up [whatever] and replace my Wii
• Wait until I get a job and just get a damn Wii U

The hard drive option seems most tempting.  The only spare enclosure I've got is IDE, but it occurs to me I don't even really need a dedicated hard drive that's just for Wii games; I could rip them to one of my other external drives and just hook it up to the Wii when I need it.

Anyhow.  It's been a frustrating but edifying experience.

[Dooly]

You'd need a Wii with a working disc drive to rip Wii games.  Those discs probably won't work at all in a PC's DVD drive unless you have some specific rare LG model drive.

Citation here.

[Thad]

Good to know.  I'm fairly confident I can find ISOs, but I'd still rather get the thing working again.

Chatted with my uncle about it a bit and he pointed out that what I really should be looking at is replacing those screws.

[Thad]

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.