Emulators on the Wii?

For those of you who are eagerly anticipating Nintendo's Wii but are a bit disappointed at some of the choices on the first run of the Virtual Console, it seems you may be in luck. The launch on December 8th in the UK will show a few great hits on Virtual Console, but not many of the titles people were looking for. So, one industrious fan figured out how to run console emulators straight from the SD card on the Wii.

The software required looks like something that many GameCube emulation buffs will be familiar with. Using the GameCube version of ActionReplay, the guy calls up SDLoad and pulls emulated games (NES in the video) straight from the card. It's a rather smart workaround since the Wii is based so much on its GameCube predecessor.

It could only be hoped that most people would rather buy the copy on the Virtual Console when it becomes available - just to remove load times and unnecessary steps, if anything. However, not every game is going to be released for Virtual Console, and the slow conversion means certain games will be considerably late for the party. Therefore, this could be a nice fill-in until some of your favourites are released natively for the Wii.

Of course, it should be strongly noted that this is not an activity that Nintendo has in any way sanctioned, and the company has offered no known comment on it yet.

Have you got a thought on the emulation? Would you use this trick as a stopgap until games are properly released on VC, or not at all? Tell us about it in our forums.