Yeah. I’m just as surprised as you are. I mean, just picture it: a bleeding edge game console—or bleeding edge for 2006, anyways—hosting your dream website! Or blog! Or whatever the fuck. Doesn’t it just sound stellar?
Seriously, though, this is pretty interesting. Yeah, it is just a regular web server. And yeah, you could do the exact same stuff or even more on a computer or dedicated server rack. Capability isn’t really the point. It’s a tall, long brick with 88 megabytes of RAM and a CPU roughly as powerful as a low end Intel Pentium 3.
Really, what is most special about this is availability. Everyone and their grandmother had a Wii, which means everyone and their grandmother could host a web server. Just as simple as it is to Homebrew the Wii itself, you can install the web server. Best comparison is installing an app from the Play Store or APKMirror.
Even better, there isn’t anything limiting what you host. There’s no file that is too big, unless it is larger than the storage available on your SD card. There’s never too many files to host. Nothing. So far, I’ve been able to host my entire personal website and then some, with minimal latency for loading. Practically equivalent to if I had just gone to the actual site that is hosted on GitHub Pages. Of course, some of this may be because I’m not actually connecting over the internet, only the local intranet, so speeds are bound to be quicker.
I think the hard limit here is for stuff like node.JS. That requires the Wii to actually act like a server and run its own code outside of just providing a web page and its linked resources. Unless they randomly make an instance that can run on PowerPC, it isn’t gonna work out too well. For that, you’d need an ACTUAL server, likely one running Windows 7+ or Linux.
Anyways, credits to Cboof and Felix123 for making this app. You can find it here on oscwii.org or go onto the Homebrew Browser to install it. And, oh, yeah, this needs a Homebrewed Wii, not any bog standard Wii. Whoops! This also works on a Homebrewed vWii (the virtual Wii inside of a Wii U). Welp, if you want to see any more homebrewing tips or programming advice, stay tuned to the CheeseBlog for more posts. Cya!
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