The Nintendo Wii is an incredibly popular system that offers a unique method of play. It’s no wonder so many people want to make copies of their own Wii games as backups to prevent them from being damaged.
From the beginning, we want to make one thing clear: We do NOT encourage you to copy games that do not belong to you. The purpose is to help you make backup copies of your existing games. Backing up your own drives is completely legal.
While these games come on a disc that closely resembles recordable CDs, they cannot be copied in the same way that a music CD is ripped. It’s a bit more complicated than that. Here’s a guide to tell you the basics of copying Wii games, as well as the circumstances in which you should and shouldn’t.
Your regular burning software can’t copy your Wii games the same way it would burn a CD. Roxio, Nero and other popular burning programs simply cannot copy these discs. This is because there is encrypted copy protection on the disk that prevents your computer from being able to make sense of it.
Of course, like most copy protections, it didn’t take long before someone found a workaround. There are programs available that can read through the copy protection that comes on a Wii Disc.
Once you’ve installed this type of software, making a copy of the game is relatively easy: your computer can suddenly understand data that was previously unreadable. This is true for games on almost any system, including PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii.
Even some PC games use encryption that these programs can crack. If you have more than one gaming system, this software can help you produce backups for all of them, not just your Wii.
Once you’ve found and installed a program to help you crack the encryption, you’ll need to copy the data to your game as a disk image. Once you have this disc image on your hard drive, all you need to do is put a blank DVD or CD into the drive and then tell the program to burn the image to it.
The copying programs that are now available allow you to copy Wii games without having to do anything more than click a few buttons. Copying Wii Games is a great way to backup any game you want. It never hurts to have a backup in case the original is lost or damaged. Enjoy!