Web Server on a Nintendo Wii | Better HN

Web Server on a Nintendo Wii | Better HN

32 comments

nebula880412d ago

Wish we had the level of renewables in the West that China has. Their pricing is supposedly now 7-11 cents per kwH (as opposed to 20-30 cents kwh average in the states). This would further enable usage of all computing instead of tossing it into eWaste. Who cares how much power old equipment uses, host something on it until the chips literally burn out. Every Wii and other console that has homebrew should be running something....anything.

The US is not lacking of space to store this stuff but is tossing so much precious resources into the trash because they are not economically justifiable power wise.

bombcar12d ago

More powerful than a Sun sparkstation 5!

giantrobot12d ago

I appreciate the lack of a reverse proxy in front. While I love the various "website hosted on X" projects they end up in reality just served by CloudFlare. Which is fine since you don't want your C64 or vape pen or whatever to explode. It's just less "hosted on X" and more "single HTML page served by CloudFlare".

weird-eye-issue12d ago

It depends on the cache settings but by default CF doesn't cache HTML

phwbikm12d ago

Gopher. Shake hands. Glad to see you are still hacking

mrweasel12d ago

Projects like this brings a lot of joy to me, even if it's technically only "I configured NetBSD as a webserver".

jofzar12d ago

See also

https://blog.infected.systems/posts/2025-04-21-this-blog-is-...

stevefan199912d ago

I wonder what kind of apps you can run. Matrix certainly won't but IRC server? Probably

bombcar12d ago

The Wii is comparable to a mid-range Pentium III with 64 MB of RAM - so anything that Linux/BSD could run around 2002 can likely run on this.

bmlzootown11d ago

Fun fact, my Wii running Linux was my first server. I had a webserver running, and an IRC bouncer (ZNC). Anything outside the standard "it's available on every architecture" type stuff require manual compilation, however, which can take forever.

LoganDark12d ago

> I was doing this bit using a capture card and Photo Booth on macOS which doesn’t actually support disabling the image-flip on the video feed

I use OBS to monitor my video capture. This essentially lets me use my Mac as a monitor for my headless desktop (which does not have a monitor of its own). Maximum gaming.

Deskflow lets me use my Mac as a keyboard over LAN, too. Beats remote desktop for sure. Especially when gaming.

ninjin12d ago

My preferred way is ffplay(1). Last time I checked I get lower latencies than OBS at that, at least when I use `-sws_flags fast_bilinear`, which is the same scaling OBS uses by default.

LoganDark12d ago

I wouldn't wish bilinear scaling on my worst enemy; 1:N is the only way to go for me. I'll check out ffplay.

Edit: ffplay doesn't support cropping the output to fit my display (or if it does, it's far too arcane for me). As composable as ffmpeg is, it's awful UX for me. I'll stick to OBS.

Shalomboy12d ago

i used to love httpii for this!

tantalor12d ago

Not to spoil the fun, but is it really still a "Nintendo Wii" if you replace the stock OS?

The identity of a "Nintendo Wii" is the combination of its enclosure, hardware, and software. To take only the enclosure and hardware and keep calling it the same thing is absurd. Where does it end? What if I keep the enclosure, but replace guts with an Xbox? Is it still a "Nintendo Wii"?

s_dev12d ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

You can draw the line wherever you like but for me it is still a Wii even with a different OS. I would draw the line at replacing the hardware inside with XBOX hardware. Others may draw the line at the chassis.

john_strinlai12d ago

i personally consider "running on X" to be accurate if it is still X's hardware

sjmulder12d ago

It would be a fun project to do a homebrew HTTP server (and I wouldn't be surprised if it had been done already) but in this case I actually mean to replace my Pi 'home server' with this Wii, and for that I want SSH, git, web, mail, and all that, so practically, NetBSD was a good option.

There's also the fact that there's a modern, up-to-date Unix distribution for this in the first place, how cool is that.

zen92812d ago

Absolutely not. Ruins the rest of the charade when you say "okay, now let's just step around the hard part and instead replace it with a different OS to make it cookie cutter". Wow, you can run a server on hardware constrained stock BSD ...? ... cool ....

sjmulder12d ago

A 'charade'? Just having some fun running NetBSD on unusual hardware and learning something along the way. There's no cheating some imaginary game you seem to think I'm participating in.

malicka12d ago

I think it’s still cool enough to get the OS running in the first place; and there’s still novelty in using something for a purpose completely unexpected, even if the last few steps are cookie-cutter.

mghackerlady12d ago

no, then it's an xbox in a wii shell. I'd say having two out of three makes it a wii. Plus, there really isn't anything stopping someone from writing a web server for the wii, it's just that running a different os makes this silly task much easier

tantalor12d ago

> two out of three makes it a wii

So if I stick a modern hardware PC running a Wii emulator inside a Wii shell, then it's still a Wii?

bombcar12d ago

This strikes at the root of the Biggest Controversy™ - if you beat a video game arcade cabinet on an emulator, did you beat it?

Things can be named analogously - if I have a machine that plays Wii games for me, and nothing else, I'll call it "the Wii".

mghackerlady12d ago

It depends on how fully it emulates a wii and what restrictions it would have, but I'd say if the thing quacks and functions like a wii (you have support for the controllers, the disk drive, network things, etc.) it could be called a wii

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