Starlight Fun Center

From Rare Gaming Dump
Revision as of 02:36, 2 September 2018 by Abequinn (talk | contribs) (I mean it sounds better)
The Wii Fun Center.
The Wii Fun Center GUI.

The Fun Center is a contraption made by Starlight Children's Foundation and Nintendo to bring their consoles to hospitals. It consists of a console, TV, and DVD player that can be transported easily around the hospital grounds. SNES, Nintendo 64, GameCube, Wii and Wii U versions have been made.

Perhaps the most interesting Fun Center is the Wii version. It actually runs on development Wii hardware. You load games onto it and they are displayed in a GUI, which can be considered watered down compared to USB Loaders, especially WiiFlow. In order to get games loaded on it, you had to call Nintendo's Fun Center hotline and use a Windows download manager to download them.

Of course, we don't have the firmware or much internal info on how the Wii Fun Center worked. It's one of our Holy Grails.

The Wii U version seemed to have the games pre-installed on the system without any different GUI, and the other versions probably worked like a real system would, where you have to use cartridges or discs.

An interesting note about the Wii Fun Center is that a possible system error message was "Please insert disk", and if this message occured the owner was instructed to return the system; this is an NDEV Menu error message displayed when there is no inserted disk (real or emulated).