January 16, 2026
Nostalgia pings, DNS slings
Patching the Wii News Channel to serve local news (2025)
Fans revive Wii headlines while commenters duel over DNS vs patching
TLDR: A fan project brings live local news back to the Wii’s old News Channel, turning a dead feature into a 2025 vibe. Comments explode with nostalgia and a fiery “patch it vs DNS” debate, plus dreams of reviving other online features—proving old consoles still spark big feelings and clever fixes.
A 2007 console just made 2025 news: a tinkerer rerouted the Wii’s long-dead News Channel to show fresh local headlines from Puerto Rico, complete with that familiar “Downloading…” vibe. The project plugs modern feeds into the Wii’s old interface and ships code on GitHub. It’s retro news with real news—nostalgia meets utility—and the author even popped into the thread to chat. Cue the comment drama.
The loudest debate: “patch it” versus “just use DNS.” One crowd cheered the clever patching as a love letter to console history; the other fired off the classic pedant take—if it’s plain old web traffic, why modify the app at all? Meanwhile, sentimental gamers turned the thread into a memory lane parade, waxing poetic about the Wii’s cozy vibe and the Weather Channel’s tiny thunder sound. A practical crew asked if this trick could revive old Wii and Nintendo DS online games next—cue jokes about a fan-run “NinteNetd.” The energy was equal parts museum curator, bedroom hacker, and Saturday morning cartoon. Bottom line: it’s not just a hack; it’s a community rekindling the Wii’s charm while arguing (lovingly) about the “right” way to do it—and laughing along the way.
Key Points
- •The Wii News Channel was patched to redirect its hardcoded Nintendo URL to an Amazon S3 bucket using Go and the wadlib library.
- •WiiLink’s open-source news file generator was modified to add El Nuevo Día as a news source, producing compatible news binaries.
- •AWS Lambda and EventBridge were configured to regenerate the news binary files hourly to keep content current.
- •Network behavior was analyzed via the Wii’s proxy settings using mitmproxy/mitmweb, revealing a plain HTTP request to http://news.wapp.wii.com/v2/1/049/news.bin.00.
- •Background: The Wii News Channel launched in North America on January 26, 2007, and was discontinued on June 27, 2013.