WBFS-manager

Yes, that’s right you can boost the performance of your Wii games by using WBFS. WBFS stands for Wii Backup File System and the basic performance boost comes from running all your games off a HDD instead of a DVD.

Most of the Wii games take some time to “load” and some games like Need for Speed pause in the middle of your getaway from pissed off cops just to load the next scenery. The reason for this is that the Wii can’t read data off the DVD drive quickly enough. The solution is to move your games to a USB hard disk.

There are a lot of tutorials on the net to do this but most of them will use up the entire HDD for Wii games. In most cases you need less than 50GB of that drive for your games since on an average, most games use up less than a GB of space (although the ISO files is 4.58 GB).

I’ll document how I went about this process:

Step 1) Backup all existing data on the USB drive to safe location.

Step 2) Partition your USB Drive. Plug in the USB drive to a windows machine. Go to Control Panel->Admin Tools->Computer management. Then click on Disk Management. Click on your USB drive. Be careful while doing this cause you could wipe out your windows installation if you pick the wrong drive :) . Select the existing partitions on your USB drive and delete them. Most likely there will be only one. Next step, right click on the empty drive and create a new partition. If you plan to use only 50 GB for your Wii games, pick the size and select NTFS. Select a drive letter and put in a label like “wii-usb”. Then partition the remaining space on that drive for regular use.

Step 3) Download and install WBFS Manager. Once open, select the drive letter you assigned for Wii-usb and click the format button at the top. You now have a WBFS drive ready.

Step 4) Backup your games. Download and install ImgBurn. This will convert your DVD to ISO files. Make sure you have about 4.6GB of free space on your hard drive for the ISO file. Click the “Create image file from disc” button to start the backup.

Step 5) Load backup games to your new Wii-usb drive. Click the Browse button on the bottom right of the WBFS manager software and select the iso you just created with ImgBurn. Click the “Add to drive” button and wait till the file is copied over.

Step 6) Enjoy the game. Plug in your USB drive to the back of the Wii. Note that you will need a USB loader on your Wii. I recommend using NeoGamma.

I’ve noticed a tremendous performance increase in the games as well as a reduced load time. Have fun and do leave a post with your feedback.