A mod loader for the Wii. Play Riivolution-format mods from the disc, a USB drive or the SD card.

Download · Guide · Troubleshooting · Report a problem · Discord

Your games, with covers from GameTDB	Or on a shelf, as boxes (the Bookshelf theme)
Or as channels, with each game's own icon	and its banner, as on the Wii Menu
Each game's own page and settings	Turn mod packs on and pick their options
Cheats, downloaded for you	Themes (Midnight)
Settings	A HOME Menu, like the Wii's

• Mods, no patching. Riivolution-format packs (the same XML and folders) load into the game as it starts. Your game files are never changed.
• Play from anywhere. The disc, a USB drive (FAT32, NTFS or formatted as WBFS) or the SD card, as WBFS, ISO or Dolphin's RVZ.
• Big mods work. Pulsar and CT-CODE packs such as CTGP Revolution 1.02 and other Mario Kart Wii distributions (CTGP Revolution 1.03 does not work yet), plus packs over the network from a PC (RiiFS), and Gecko code builds like Project+ and REX without their launchers.
• Saves kept apart. Modded saves can live on the SD card, away from your Wii saves.
• Per game settings. Cheats (downloaded for you), picture width, deflicker, borders, video mode (480p, PAL 60), game language and cIOS.
• Online play. Wiimmfi, WiiLink WFC, AltWFC or your own server.
• Feels like a Wii. Covers and names from GameTDB, three ways to show your games (covers, a shelf of boxes, or channels with each game's animated icon and banner), themes, favourites, recently played, letter jumps (hold B and press a direction), a HOME Menu and seven languages (English, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, French and Korean).
• Any controller. Wii Remote, Classic Controller, GameCube controller, the GameCube adapter for Wii U, and USB pads through fakemote.
• A Wii Menu channel, on a Wii or a Wii U, and updates from inside RiftWii (Stable or Beta).
• Experimental: burned Wii discs, in the Wii's drive or a USB DVD drive.

You need a Wii (or a Wii U in Wii mode) with the Homebrew Channel and a FAT32 SD card. Games on USB or SD need a d2x cIOS.

1. Download the zip from Releases.
2. Copy its sd-card folder to your SD card (and usb-drive to your USB drive, if you use one).
3. Put mod packs in sd:/riivolution and games in wbfs or games.
4. Start RiftWii from the Homebrew Channel.

Questions, test builds and help are on the RiftWii Discord. The guide covers everything else: each screen, online play, the GameCube adapter, writing packs, and what to send when something goes wrong.

Yes, RiftWii was written with AI assistance, and I won't pretend otherwise. But it was not vibecoded. Every step was supervised closely, because even the best models make terrible calls when you just throw them at a project and walk away. Left alone, they suggested "fixes" like patching discs at random based on assembly fingerprints to make a problem go away, and seemed to think that was fine. I can't imagine what a truly vibecoded version of this would look like. The design decisions, the testing on real hardware and the refusal to ship shortcuts like that are mine.

This is a hobby project. As a kid I wanted to play mods straight from a USB drive, and Riivolution never allowed it; its developer was firmly against USB loading. RiftWii exists to finally get past that.

RiftWii stands on a lot of other people's work. Code that follows or contains theirs names them in its file header, and NOTICE.md lists each piece: what it is, where it came from (with the commit), and its license.

• USB Loader GX (https://github.com/wiidev/usbloadergx, GPL-3.0): the online server patches (PrivateServerPatcher, domainpatcher), the Wiimmfi patches and Mario Kart Wii security fix, the return-to-channel patch, the language patch, the video mode tables, its fixes for particular games (Kirby's Return to Dream Land's MetaFortress, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Prince of Persia, Resident Evil 4, Excite Truck, the error #002 and 480p fixes), its automatic cIOS choice, the region strings fix and the aspect ratio, rumble and speaker options, the Wiinnertag file the RiiTag support reads (Dimok, zlib), how to find the Wii Menu's fonts for Settings > Menu font (Dimok, giantpune, blackb0x) and read its bitmap font (giantpune and Dimok, zlib), how to drive d2x's USB device on either USB port (Dimok, Rodries, Kwiirk, zlib), and RiftWii's copy of the Gecko code handler. Thanks to its developers and everyone whose work it carries: ToadKing (wiilauncher-nossl), Leseratte and the Wiimmfi team, giantpune, Nuke and the GeckoOS authors, crediar, dcx2, container12345, blackb0x and WiiPower.
• Gecko OS by Nuke, brkirch, Link and the Gecko authors: the cheat code handler (full source in vendor-gecko).
• Brainslug by Alex Chadwick and Florian Bach (MIT): the boot sequence. wup-028-bslug by Alex Chadwick (MIT): the GameCube controller adapter.
• Nintendont by FIX94 and contributors: the USB HID driver, used with its developers' permission. WiiDRC by FIX94: the Wii U GamePad.
• libwiigui by Tantric, FreeTypeGX by Armin Tamzarian, oggplayer by Hermes: the menu's toolkit, text and music player.
• WiiLink WFC (wfc-patcher-wii): WiiLink online play.
• d2x cIOS: the USB and SD game loading interface.
• devkitPro and libogc (Michael Wiedenbauer, Dave Murphy, Hector Martin, Sven Peter and others): the toolchain and the Wii library.
• Dolphin, wiibrew, the Riivolution patch format wiki and libruntimeiospatch: how the Wii, IOS and the patch format behave (read as documentation). libwbfs by Kwiirk and contributors: the WBFS drive layout. Friivolution by december: the launch argument other loaders pass (both read as documentation, nothing copied).
• pugixml by Arseny Kapoulkine, Zstandard by Meta, BearSSL by Thomas Pornin, FreeType, zlib, Tremor.
• GameTDB for game names and covers, RiiConnect24 for the cheat archive, M+ Fonts for the menu font, Zane Little for the menu music.
• DDinghoya for the Korean translation, MidyGamy for the French one.

GPL-3.0-or-later (LICENSE). RiftWii contains no Riivolution code. Its third-party components, their origins and licenses are in NOTICE.md. Each release zip carries LICENSE.txt, NOTICE.md and SOURCE.txt (which commit of this repository it was built from), and RiftWii shows its license and credits in Settings > Credits and license.

Good news: RiftWii follows the GPL to the letter, and then some. For anyone who needs it spelled out:

• Every file that follows someone else's work says so at the top, with the project, the file and the functions.
• NOTICE.md lists every component, where it came from (down to the commit) and its license.
• Every release zip carries the full license, the notices and the exact commit it was built from.
• The Gecko code handler ships with its assembly source, which rebuilds it byte for byte. That's more than most Wii loaders bother with.
• RiftWii itself will show you all ~840 lines of the GPL, in Settings > Credits and license. Scrolling to the end is left as an exercise for the reader.

If you still think something is missing a credit, open an issue. It'll be fixed, politely, and probably faster than it took to write the comment.

This is a free hobby project that loads mods into games for a console from 2006. It's not that serious.

Developers and forks: start with docs/MAP.md (every file, and where each feature lives), then docs/ARCHITECTURE.md and docs/DEVELOPING.md.

I don't condone piracy. RiftWii doesn't come with any games and won't download them for you. Play your own games: discs you own, or backups you made from them yourself.

RiftWii exists for preservation, and to move Wii development forward: out of the stone age of needing an aging disc in an aging drive every time you want to play.