1 – The Nintendo Wii should be menu version 4.2u. Newer versions may work but watch those automatic system updates from Nintendo as they can break the software pre-reqs used by the Amiga emulator.

2 – Obtain a 2 GB SD card.  This card must be a non-SDHC card and the 2 GB size limit is the real deal. The Nintendo Wii will not work with a larger card without some hacking.  So save yourself the trouble (and coin) and just get a 2 GB card. This card will be used to load the Amiga emulation and floppy images later on.

3 – Download and install the Homebrew channel for Wii.  This is a piece of software required to launch the Amiga emulator and other hacker projects.  Note that by installing the Homebrew channel, you’re essentially voiding your Wii’s warranty.   These easiest way to obtain Homebrew is the Hackmii installer, available here. Here are the instructions for this step:

4 – Once Homebrew is running (it will show up as a Channel on the Wii Menu), take your SD card back to your computer and delete everything on it.

5 – Download Simon Kagstrom’s UAE port for Wii and extract the zip file to the root of the SD card. There should be two folders — one called uae and one called apps.  You won’t need to do anything with the folder called apps, but the uae folder is where you’ll place your Amiga ROM files and floppy disk images.

6 – Obtain Amiga ROMs.  The easiest (and legal) way to do this is do purchase Cloanto’s Amiga-licensed (yes, the Amiga license holders are real people with real lawyers who actually exist) emulation product for PC and Mac, called Amiga Forever.   Copy the ROM files from the Amiga Forever CD-ROM into the /uae/roms folder on the SD card.  They should be called “kick13.rom”,  ”kick20.rom”, and so forth depending on the version of the Amiga you plan to boot.

7 – Obtain Amiga floppy images (games).  A great site is thegamearchives.com.  Save these ADF files into the /uae/floppies folder on the SD card.

8 – Re-insert the SD card into the Wii and launch the Homebrew channel.  You should now have a working Amiga.  Use the Wiimote to control the Amiga (keyboard support is extremely limited at this point but workable for most programs).

9 – Enjoy!

An old friend, Fleecy Moss, who was among the architects of the independent takeover of Amiga in the early 2000′s, once gave a talk at a tradeshow in the nineties–and his espousal of the content designation to software was, at the time, a revolutionary concept.  As with many ideas that bubbled up from the ill-fated Amiga wellspring, this concept proved true, and was ahead of its time.  It would be another ten years before the idea was accepted by the greater community.

The app store paradigm has brought this idea to the forefront of the way we think about distributing content.  Yet there’s something holding up the adoption of online app stores to distribute software, and I can’t quite thumb it.  Shareware authors have been distributing license credentials through e-commerce sites for a decade already, yet Apple and Microsoft still don’t sell their developers’ software through their flagship web sites.

Perhaps even more silly is the fact that consumers, vis-a-vis bloggers, don’t already demand such a solution.  If I can buy and download a DRM’d episode of Lost, why can’t I download a credentialed, licensed copy of Squeeze, or Microsoft Office for Mac, or my favorite blogging application, Ecto?   Yet nobody complains.  Indeed, it seems that the idea of a desktop app store is some kind of new idea. Technologizer, the “smarter take on tech”, just ran a piece about it today.   Yet I was talking about it a year ago, and longer.