Starlight Spotlight: A Hospital Wii in a New Light

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_{Stars BG Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Gouliermis (University of Heidelberg). Acknowledgement: Luca Limatola. Edited by MayImilae.}

Dolphin is not affiliated with the Starlight Children's Foundation.

In the early 1990s, the world found itself at a crossroads of technological change. Electronic entertainment was blowing up just about everywhere, with Nintendo at the forefront of the home video game markets with their Super Nintendo Entertainment System console and Game Boy handheld. But if you were forced into an extended stay at the hospital, you might not have access to any of it. Due to a wave of concerns surrounding electromagnetic interference (EMI) from electronics, many consumer devices were banned from hospitals. If you were lucky enough to have a cell phone at the time, you'd have to go outside of the hospital to make calls.

In 1992, the Starlight Children's Foundation partnered with Nintendo to bring video games into hospitals in a way that complied with stringent hospital regulations. Instead of subjecting children to magazines, books, and daytime television (if they were lucky), the foundation wanted to bring premiere entertainment right into their rooms by creating a hospital approved all-in-one media and gaming station. Their belief was that giving kids a well-needed break from the hardships of treatment, injury, and illness would promote recovery.

This partnership proved to be a valuable one, and is still going to this day. As of the writing of this article, this partnership has provided over 8,000 gaming stations to children in hospitals, serving over 15 million gaming sessions to patients in need. From the Super Nintendo all the way to the Nintendo Switch, every Nintendo home console has been housed in a Starlight kiosk at some point!

Each of these kiosks were designed to house an off-the-shelf retail console. Except one. Every single kiosk could use standard controllers and play retail games. Except one.

In this article, we'd like to talk about the weird and wonderful Starlight Wii.

A Brief History of the Starlight Kiosks¶

To set the stage for the Starlight Wii Fun Center and why it is so special, we first need to take a look at its many siblings. Each Starlight kiosk has its own story behind it and challenges that the engineers had to overcome while trying to keep costs as low as possible. In addition to managing all of the electronics and the games, the Starlight Children's Foundation also had to coordinate with Nintendo to build, ship, insure, and repair units throughout the duration of their lifespan.

Note that we are only focusing on North American kiosks for the purposes of this article.

Starlight SNES/N64 Era Kiosk¶

While there is a blurry picture of a prototype Starlight kiosk with what appears to be a Nintendo Entertainment System, the first officially released kiosk was the Starlight Super Nintendo Mobile Fun Center. Compared to modern entries, this machine has a lot of bulk. And it is easy to see why; it has to lug around a CRT television, a VCR (video cassette recorder), and everything needed to play video games!

Much like a hospital table, the original Starlight kiosk could hang over a patient's bed to immerse players in the action. It had a sturdy aluminum shell that helped to limit electromagnetic emissions. Two lockable storage compartments beside the television allowed for the storage of 12 cartridge games.

The lockable compartment under the television held the rest of the electronics. One side of the unit was dedicated to the VCR and the other side was for the game console. The console's side of the compartment could store two additional games that could be swapped in with staff intervention.

While this solution was crude in some ways, it was an incredibly effective way to bring gaming to children in hospitals. The Starlight Children's Foundation would provide these kiosks, the games, and everything else to partnering hospitals. Additionally, individuals and groups could donate the full cost of a unit to the foundation and then have the kiosk sent to a hospital of their choice. The exact price varied. Documentation shows units costing between roughly $3,000 and $4,100 over the years, with shipping and the game costs being the biggest variables.

This initial design also had some serious staying power. Even after the Super Nintendo was supplanted by the Nintendo 64, this same kiosk design was used by hospitals to house the new console. Whether this was through an upgrade path provided by Nintendo or just hospital staff being ultra resourceful, we can't say.

It's hard to know exactly how many of these kiosks exist, but records indicate that upwards of 3,000 were produced, while other sources list numbers as high as 5,000. But by the GameCube's release in 2001, technology had changed enough that the next kiosk would have to be redesigned from the ground up.

Starlight GameCube Mobile Fun Center¶

In October of 2002, Nintendo and the Starlight Children's Foundation revealed the all new Starlight GameCube Mobile Fun Center. Alongside the announcement, Nintendo made a donation of $3,000,000 dollars and produced 500 kiosks for the initial run.

The Starlight GameCube Mobile Fun Center packed some serious upgrades. It came with a Nintendo GameCube console, two controllers, a 480p LCD television, and a DVD player, all contained in a brand new compact kiosk design. Despite inflation and all of the new technology, the price tag of the new kiosk was comparable to the previous one at around $3,000.

This updated design would become the new standard for Starlight kiosks. The hospital bed-esque design was abandoned in favor of a smaller footprint design that was easier to move around and bring bedside. Additionally, patients were given more control over their experience thanks to the new access holes, which they could use to change games and videos themselves.

Unfortunately, beyond the initial announcement, information on the Starlight GameCube Mobile Fun Center is difficult to find. It's hard to tell if any units were produced outside of the initial run, though some charity pages show that there were efforts to raise money and have additional kiosks donated to hospitals.

With all of that being said, it isn't really fair to call these kiosks successes or failures based on the number produced given their purpose. For the most part, the popularity of the retail console is what correlates with the number of kiosks produced more than anything else.

Starlight Wii Fun Center¶

After the launch of the Wii in 2006, Nintendo was on top of the world once more. The motion controlled behemoth quickly sold out in many stores and was rather hard to find during its early days. The revolutionary Wii Remotes expanded the reach of video games like nothing before it. The motion controls could even be used for light exercise and had some application in the realm of physical therapy!

Given all of that, it was no surprise when the Starlight Children's Foundation and Nintendo announced that the Wii would be introduced to hospitals in its own Starlight Fun Center. With an initial run of 1,250 kiosks, they planned to have 500 kiosks landed in hospitals within the first year of the project.

The star of the new kiosk was, of course, the extremely popular Nintendo Wii console. It would come complete with 22 games, two specialized Wii Motion Plus-enabled Wii Remotes, and two Nunchuks. The built-in television was also upgraded to 720p, and the DVD player was swapped out for a more compact model. There were at least three variations of the Starlight Wii Fun Center, but the only user-facing hardware difference was the size of the television.

For children in hospitals during the mid-2000s, the Wii would have been a revolution. Unfortunately, the controllers that made the console a hit posed a problem when brought into a hospital environment. Wii Remotes connected to the Wii console wirelessly over Bluetooth, but most wireless consumer electronics were still not allowed in hospitals at the time due to lingering EMI regulations. By this point, there were proposals floating around to loosen the regulations, but some were still in place during the development and release of the Starlight Wii Fun Center.

So, on top of turning the Wii into a seamless plug-and-play experience, the engineers also had to figure out how to modify the hardware so that it could even be allowed near the patients in the first place. This brings us to one of the biggest differences between the Wii Fun Center and the GameCube Mobile Fun Center: the console itself is no longer accessible because it had to be sealed away within the kiosk. The kiosk's aluminum shell acts as a Faraday cage to prevent any wireless signals from leaking out and interfering with other equipment.

Anyone who has used a Wii can see how making the console work without any wireless signals would be difficult. How would they connect the Wii Remotes? Some readers may remember seeing wired Wii Remotes attached to store kiosks, but those actually wouldn't work here. Those Wii Remotes were indeed wired to the unit, but the cable only served to provide power and to secure the controllers. The actual Wii Remotes themselves still communicated wirelessly with the Wii console over Bluetooth. On the other hand, if you were a game developer at the time you may recall that some devkits used Wii Remotes that communicated via a wire, though those were still powered by batteries.

After looking at both of those options, the engineers made the logical choice to simply combine both ideas into one cable.

These changes were enough to get the Starlight Wii Fun Center approved for use in hospitals. But what about games? Because the console had to be locked away, players wouldn't have access to the disc drive to change games. The obvious first thought would be to include a single premium disc game to wow players, such as Super Mario Galaxy, and then fill out the Wii's NAND with a mixture of Virtual Console classics and WiiWare games.

Apparently, Nintendo and The Starlight Children's Foundation scoffed at the idea that the latest kiosk would have an inferior game library compared to previous models, and they went far above and beyond for the Starlight Wii.

Included on the Starlight Wii are 22 full retail games. To access the games, they streamlined the entire Wii experience, removing the Wii Menu and instead having players boot directly into a special Starlight Game Select Menu.

This slick cover flow menu isn't just for looks. You can select any game on the menu and be playing it within seconds. Better yet, if you attempt to return to the Wii Menu, the game instead sends you back to the Starlight Game Select Menu so you can swap games. The downside to this streamlining is that there is literally no Wii Menu! That means no access to any channels, creating Miis, or changing any settings on the console.

This leads us to the Starlight Wii's most inexplicable limitation. For some reason, the Starlight Wii deletes all save files every time it powers on. While we don't know exactly why this was done, considering that kiosks of later consoles had to include instructions on how to delete inappropriate Miis and save files, one guess might be that doing this prevents patients from leaving unwanted presents for other users. Another possibility is that they might have been worried about the Wii getting bricked through NAND modification, and thus chose to reset saves on the NAND on every boot up.

While frustrating, this limitation wouldn't have been too bad if the console came with games that don't heavily rely on having save data. And indeed, some games seen on these units are pretty much fine to play without saving your progress. Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort have a ton of content available right from the start, and you can unlock extra modes like 100 pin bowling in a single session of standard bowling.

But other games found on Starlight Wiis aren't as nice without being able to save. Mario Kart Wii is a great pick up and play game, but every time the Wii turns off, all of your unlocked karts, bikes, and courses are gone! Super Mario Galaxy, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Super Paper Mario are all long games that a normal player won't realistically finish in just a few hours.

If you were lucky, you might be able to just leave the console on as long as it's in your room. Even if you switch games, so long as you don't actually turn off the Wii, your saves will persist. Unfortunately, these kiosks would often be unplugged and taken from room to room throughout the day. Sometimes they would be available in common rooms and left powered on, but if any of the players were to power off the Wii from the Wii Remotes, all of the save files on the machine would be lost.

Nonetheless, the Starlight Wii Fun Center was a resounding success. They successfully took on the many engineering challenges and created a kiosk that was truly unique. The cost was a bit higher than the previous kiosk at $4,250, but after adjusting for inflation, the difference isn't too great. And considering that it brought modern gaming into hospitals at a time when EMI regulations made it infeasible in most cases, it's an impressive piece of technology. What is perhaps even more impressive is that there are still some Starlight Wii Fun Centers active in hospitals today and Nintendo of America is still providing technical support for these kiosks!

Starlight Wii U Fun Center¶

By the year 2009, the tide was already turning on mobile devices within hospitals across the world. Within years of the Starlight Wii Fun Center's release, a lot of its eccentricities were simply no longer necessary. As the Wii's heyday passed and its successor, the Wii U, took over in the home market, some people (yes, really) were asking if there would be a Starlight featuring the new console.

And their Wiish would come true in 2015, late into the Wii U's short lifespan. It was only then that Nintendo finally announced that they were working on a Starlight kiosk that would take advantage of the Wii U and its internet capabilities. As such, for the first time, the kiosk would not have a media player. Instead, patients would have access to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video, and other services through their respective Wii U apps.

Hardware-wise, the kiosk came with a 32GB Premium Wii U console, a wired Wii U GamePad, a store kiosk-style wired Wii Remote and Nunchuk, and a 1080p television. Each kiosk also came with 25 pre-installed games, though the hospital could purchase additional games on the Nintendo eShop to bolster the library. An incredibly generous 2TB external hard drive was included in the unit for storage - enough to hold the entire Wii U game library with room to spare! If that wasn't enough, the front of the Wii U was physically accessible, meaning that a patient could play their own physical Wii U and Wii game discs.

No longer shackled by EMI regulations, the Wii U can connect to the internet over Wi-Fi and the GamePad uses its proprietary Wi-Fi-based protocol to communicate with the Wii U. The Wii Remote and Nunchuk tethered to the unit are powered by the cable, but wirelessly communicate using Bluetooth, and are intercompatible with store kiosk Wii Remotes. In fact, if for whatever reason you have an extra store kiosk Wii Remote laying around, there is an extra port on the bottom of the unit that will power it! If that isn't an option, retail Wii Remotes can be used with the Starlight Wii U to allow for four player action.

One thing that we should mention is that you can actually save your progress. In fact, The Starlight Wii U Gaming Station provides a stock Wii U experience, complete with the standard Wii U Menu and all of the apps you'd expect. The hospital would be given the password for the original Nintendo Network ID on the console and the PIN for parental controls. As for things like inappropriate Miis and save files, the manual came with complete instructions on how to delete any inappropriate data.

Unfortunately, the Starlight Wii U Fun Center had an incredibly limited run. It would have been a hard sell for prospective donors to spend $5,000 on a kiosk with a struggling game console in an era when it was competing against phones and other mobile gaming solutions.

While some could argue that the kiosk form factor just didn't make sense in the modern world, perhaps the Starlight Children's Foundation could find success by switching things up.

Starlight Nintendo Switch Gaming Station¶

The Nintendo Switch took the gaming world by storm in 2017 and was an instant hit. The highly portable tablet console retained the mobility of a handheld while also providing a reasonable home console experience when docked. It sacrificed raw power for portability, but the gamble paid off in the end. Nintendo has sold over 150 million Switch consoles as of 2025, and it inspired many companies to create their own portable gaming consoles.

Of course, most gamers were concerned if the Nintendo Switch would be the center of the next Starlight Gaming Station. And in 2019, the answer was that the Nintendo Switch would star in the next Starlight Gaming Station... in a kiosk form factor.

More colorful and lightweight than previous Starlights, the Starlight Nintendo Switch Gaming Station provides a docked Nintendo Switch hooked up to a 1080p television, 25 pre-installed games, two kiosk-style Joy-Cons, and a standard Pro Controller. Instead of an external HDD, the Starlight Switch comes with a 256GB microSD card for game storage. Additional games could be also purchased by the hospital from the Nintendo eShop like before.

Just like its older sibling, each Starlight Switch Gaming Station costs $5,000. Unlike the Starlight Wii U Fun Center, however, the Nintendo Switch itself is not directly accessible by the patient, meaning that they can't bring their own cartridges or undock the console to use it in portable mode.

Despite patients and family being able to freely bring their own devices into hospitals by this time, the Starlight Nintendo Switch Gaming Station was undeniably a success. Not everyone had access to a phone or Nintendo Switch, and when they didn't, something like this provided tremendous value.

However, the true potential of the Switch as a hospital entertainment machine wasn't truly realized in this form.

Starlight Nintendo Switch Handheld¶

One of the most notable aspects of the Nintendo Switch is how portable it is. While it isn't as rugged as a full Starlight Gaming Station, it makes an excellent starting point for an ultra-portable solution that would be far more cost effective than the traditional form factor. Cutting costs isn't always the most important thing, but a cheaper solution means that more children get to play video games during their hospital stays.

To fufill demand for a cheaper unit, Nintendo and the Starlight Children's Foundation created a second variant of the Starlight Switch in 2021.

With its new briefcase design, the Starlight Nintendo Switch Handheld costs roughly 1/3rd of a full kiosk at roughly $1,600. It comes with a yellow Nintendo Switch Lite, 25 pre-installed games, and a briefcase that protects and charges the Switch. A large cord keeps the console tethered to the briefcase while it is being played.

The Nintendo Switch Gaming Station and especially the Handheld have reinvigorated the gaming arm of the Starlight program, with thousands of units produced between just these two offerings.

Legacy of the Starlight Kiosk¶

As of the writing of this article, the Starlight Nintendo Switch consoles are still going strong, and we're likely years away from finding out if there will be a Nintendo Switch 2 Gaming Station or Handheld. We have a suspicion that, given the success of the Handheld, we may have seen the last of these kiosk style solutions.

In 1992, a kiosk was the only way to bring console quality gaming to a place where it would otherwise be impossible. Does a kiosk make sense with a hybrid console in 2025, though? We don't know, but that's a question for the engineers and decision makers within Nintendo and the Starlight Children's Foundation. They know if there are situations where patients would be better served by a kiosk.

Regardless of the future, looking back at these kiosks gives us a fascinating snapshot into the era that made them necessary. The Starlight Foundation and Nintendo of America took on a specific challenge across decades while creating some truly fascinating feats of engineering. If technology has progressed to that point where none of that is necessary, that's a good thing - even if the resulting product isn't as interesting for those of us looking back at it.

Regardless of what comes next, we salute the Starlight Children's Foundation and Nintendo of America for the joy they have brought children through their partnership, and we hope that they continue it for many years to come.

A Hero's Retirement¶

The Starlight gaming program has been going on for over thirty years now, so it should come as no surprise that many of the earlier units are no longer in active use. Even with insurance, parts, and repairs covered for years, eventually wear, tear, and/or simply being too outdated leads to a unit's retirement. Given that there are roughly 8,000 of these machines out there that have served 15 million gaming sessions, each one has seen a lot of use.

It may seem frivolous to care about the fate of the Starlight kiosks given the nature of their line of work. But yet we can't help but hold some reverence toward these very special machines. The fact that there were only 8,000 units produced across six major revisions only makes it more important to preserve and document the ones that have survived.

Being an emulation enthusiast often brings out the old saying "one man's trash is another man's treasure". And at a government liquidator, we stumbled upon a treasure: a Starlight Wii Fun Center for an incredibly fair price. But like most things that seem too good to be true, there was a catch. The unit was located over 1,000 miles away from the closest Dolphin developer, and someone had to pick it up in person.

And this is where the combined forces of the retro-gaming and retro-preservation communities came to our rescue. We put a call out for help, and multiple people came forward and offered to pick it up and store it for us while we figured out a way to get it to its new permanent home.

The process ended up being an absolute headache from beginning to end. Coordinating pickup, transportation, and storage over the course of weeks for something very fragile and incredibly heavy was anything but fun. And by the end of the journey, just about everyone involved was burnt out. But the end result was worth it.

We had our very own Starlight Wii Fun Center. And we love it very, very much.

As should be expected from a unit that served children in a hospital for over a decade, our Starlight Wii Fun Center has a few dents, scuffs, and scratches. One faded sticker tells us that Cure on Wheels sponsored this particular unit. Outside of the cosmetic damage and the Wii Remotes needing repairs, the unit was otherwise functional. After cleaning the kiosk up and repairing the WIi Remotes, we had the unit just as functional as the day it first arrived at the hospital for active duty.

There was one problem with the unit that wouldn't be so easy to fix, though. Starlight Fun Centers were usually donated to hospitals in pairs, if not more.

Our Starlight Wii Fun Center was originally part of a trio serving the same hospital. While we would have loved to save all three units, we simply didn't have the resources to buy and transport all of them. And now, while this unit was fully functional, it was all alone. How in the world could we solve the "problem" of it becoming lonely? Given how uncommon these units are and the fact most of them don't-

Whelp.

While working on this article, we stumbled upon a hospital staffer looking to offload a mostly functional Starlight Wii U Fun Center. It was retired after suffering damage to the cable that powered the Wii U GamePad, which caused the power to sometimes cut out. Having already gone through the ordeal of moving a Starlight Wii across the country just a few months ago, we thought why not go through it again?

Buying a Starlight Wii U Fun Center wasn't necessary for this article, but we'd be lying if we didn't say it helped out immensely. Just having the two experiences side by side helped to shine a spotlight on the overwhelming oddness of the Starlight Wii.

Thanks to this and first-hand accounts from others who have access to the other major Starlight kiosks, we can say with confidence that the Starlight Wii is the exception among exceptions. It has a secret that it shares with no other Starlight kiosk.

As we hinted at earlier, the Starlight Wii Fun Center does not have a retail console inside of it.

Playing with the Starlight Wii Fun Center¶

When you get an incredibly cool toy, even if it is technically for research purposes, the first thing you have to do is play with it. The Starlight Wii Fun Center is no exception to that rule. The kiosk has a Lynx LX00501 media player that supports a plethora of media types, so of course we had to test it out! We made sure to only play approved Nintendo Media™ on the device.

The Lynx is notorious for hardware failure and you can even find complaints on the internet about this particular model! One of the reasons we ended up with this particular kiosk instead of its siblings was that this one still had a functional Lynx player, whereas the other two kiosks had players with read errors. On the plus side, the player is able to handle bumps quite well, given its origins as a DVD player intended for use in a car.

Playing old DVDs on a Wii kiosk was susprisingly entertaining, but after a few episodes of The Legend of Zelda and The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, it was time to get to the main course and power up the Wii. All we had to do was switch the input on the television and hit the power button on the Wii Remote.

As we mentioned earlier, the Starlight Wii comes with 22 full retail games. You can select any one of them and start playing it within a couple of seconds. If you access the HOME Menu and choose to return to the Wii Menu, it will simply re-open the Starlight Game Select Menu instead. While we know different Starlight Wii Fun Centers have different games installed, here's the list of games packed onto our unit:

Our unit appears to have a later set of games, likely putting its production date as sometime in 2011. Earlier Starlight Wii kiosks can be seen with a set of almost entirely different games. One example is that Super Mario Galaxy appears on earlier kiosks, while Super Mario Galaxy 2 shows up on later ones. Supposedly, any individual of the 22 games could be swapped out using an "authorized computer", but most Starlights in the wild have the same or very similar sets of games depending on their era.

The question remains to how any of this works, though. Did they use an external hard drive like on the Starlight Wii U? Or did they leverage the SD card slot in some way to allow for storing games, much like the Nintendo Switch can do with microSD cards? Or did they do something completely different? There's only one way to find out.

Diving Inside the Starlight Wii Fun Center¶

Scouring the Surface¶

As is tradition by this point with anything from Nintendo, opening up the Starlight Wii Fun Center is a painful experience with triangle screws, security bits, and hex bits plaguing the kiosk. Of course, the Wii itself also has plenty of tri-point screws.

Annoyingly, the battery covers on the Wii Remotes are glued shut, meaning you can't get to the screws to take it apart. Applying any kind of solvent is extremely difficult because it's not glued around the seams, but rather inside the compartment. However, after bathing the Wii Remote in isopropyl alcohol for a few hours, we were finally able to pry open the battery door.

It was no surprise that the Wii Remotes didn't work properly, considering how much gunk we found on the mainboard. Pretty much everything had to be very carefully cleaned to reduce stickiness and improve the connection on the contacts. Of the four Starlight Wii Remotes we have, the rumble motor was also dislodged on three of them, and one even required us to resolder the motor!

After much cussing while putting things back together, the Wii Remotes have been returned to their former glory, with every button working properly and the Wii Remote speakers again playing audio.

With that, it was now time to look for the actual Wii. Opening up the back of the machine was surprisingly easy compared to the Wii Remotes, so long as you have the correct bit. Seven security screws (there's technically eight screws, but we were missing one) hold the back panel and two keyed doors that covered up the electronics.

The actual Starlight Wii looks mostly like a conventional early Wii, complete with GameCube controller ports and memory card slots. For reasons that will become apparent in the near future, there's a hidden debug menu that is only accessible by holding the Z button during startup on a GameCube controller plugged into port 4. From there, we can access a few settings only meant for authorized service personnel.

Beyond this though, in order to learn anything more about the console, we're going to have start poking around all of the hardware.

A Mess of Wires, PCBs, and a Nintendo Wii¶

There are a lot of wires inside the kiosk, so we narrowed our focus to the Wii portion specifically and its unusual characteristics. We began by following the cables coming from the wired Wii Remotes and Nunchuks to see where they went.

The cables from the controllers route to the bottom of the machine, where they connect into the Controller Repeater Modules.

But there is more going on here. The Controller Repeater Modules have a second cable that connects to the Controller Select PCB on the front of the machine. In fact, this is the PCB that the Nunchuk selection dial lives on!

The Controller Select PCB houses the selection dial, but also the power input for the Wii Remotes and the repeater modules, via a 3.3 volt AC adapter that plugs into the board. As far as we can tell, the wires connecting the Select PCB to the Repeater Modules carries power for the controllers and a signal that carries the dial's status, and the Repeaters do the actual connecting and disconnecting of the Nunchuks.

The Controller Select PCB is not optional. If it is not connected to the Wii and functioning properly, the Wii will refuse to boot! Remember the cable connecting the Controller Select PCB to the Wii? The Wii sends a small bit of data to the select board when it boots, then a chip on the PCB does a small transform on that data and sends it back. We're not entirely sure why it's doing this, but our best guess is that it's a handshake to make sure the equipment is working properly. If this fails, the Wii will display an error and refuse to boot the game launcher.

All of these electronics and wiring handle the problem of turning wireless Wii Remotes into wired controllers. But none of this tells us how exactly they fit 22 disc games onto a Wii. Having looked at the front and back of the console, there seemed to be no external storage connected at all! There wasn't even a SD card inserted into the machine! To figure out how this works, we're going to have to start taking apart the Starlight Wii itself.

Tearing Down the Starlight Wii¶

As we said earlier, the Starlight Wii looks fairly innocuous at a glance. Other than a sticker containing the serial number and a strange green hue in the disc slot, it's easy enough to mistake it as a normal Wii... that is, until you try to eject the "disc".

The back of the unit is where things start to get a bit different. There are actually a ton of extra ports that handle some of the special things the Starlight Wii can do. While it would be fairly easy to make assumptions on what each port does, the service manual removes any doubt.

Outside of the Controller Select Board, pretty much everything else can be disconnected from the Starlight Wii and it will still boot normally. All of the other electronics deal with piping the various cables to the Wii, including the unused LAN adapter and a mysterious USB-B to MiniUSB extension cable for connecting an authorized computer to manage games on the unit.

Next up was disassembling the Wii. A job like this would ordinarily be low risk and low stress, but given the rarity of these devices, the utmost caution had to be taken. We did not want to take a working unit and leave it inoperable.

We began by following standard procedure for disassembling a Wii. After removing the case and metal shielding, however, we discovered something unusual: a strange board occupied the space where the DVD drive should've been.

The board pictured above is a GRVL-WiiHD-17. It acts as a Wii DVD drive emulator similar to those used in devkits. The reason why we were able to access that hidden debug menu with a GameCube controller is that the Starlight Wii is based on a development console!

The drive emulator is powered by a Cyclone II FPGA that emulates the Wii's DVD drive commands. The Wii itself is oblivious to the fact that it isn't communicating with a normal DVD drive. The question then becomes, if the Wii isn't reading DVDs, where exactly is it getting the data? Well, if we flip over the board, we can reveal the truth behind the Starlight Wii.

The HD in "GRVL-WiiHD-17" doesn't mean High Definition; it means Hard Drive! A 160GB SATA hard drive holds all of the titles found on the Starlight Game Select Menu. While modern Wii homebrew has managed to create something similar by using cIOSes and USB drives, seeing an official solution like this meant for players is fascinating. And while this machine may have some ancestry to a devkit, it's arguably better!

The RVT-H devkit came with a 40GB or 80GB hard drive that was partitioned into 8 banks, allowing a developer to store up to 8 games at once. The Starlight's drive emulator appears to work somewhat differently, as it supports at least 23 unique titles at once. Each title represents a single "bank" on the hard drive. If you're wondering why we say 23 when there are only 22 games installed, that's because the Starlight Game Select Menu always occupies the first bank of the drive. This detail is incredibly important for how the Starlight Wii works!

When the Starlight Wii boots up, it goes through the normal boot process and loads the Wii Menu. However, the normal Wii Menu isn't installed on the Starlight Wii. In its place is a minimalist replacement that automatically loads whatever is in the DVD drive when it starts up. When the Wii is first powered on or rebooted, the DVD drive emulator defaults to the first bank, which results in the "Wii Menu" loading the Starlight Game Select Menu.

Unlike the RVT-H, which uses a physical button to swap banks, the Starlight Wii has something fancier. The drive emulator supports special DVD commands that only the Starlight Game Select Menu can use. By taking advantage of these commands, it can not only access the entire hard drive to grab cover art for the menu, but also change which bank is currently active. When you pick a game, the menu plays a little animation and fades out, but behind the scenes it is changing what bank is active and reloading the "Wii Menu" to boot whatever is in that bank. When you close the game via the HOME Menu, the drive emulator switches back to the first bank and the game returns to the "Wii Menu", causing the Starlight Game Select Menu to reappear. This is how the Starlight Wii is able to elegantly swap between games!

Given that the Starlight Game Select Menu was on the hard drive, our goal transitioned to dumping the hard drive and finding out what data was on it. This task... would turn out to be quite an experience on its own.

Dumping the Starlight Hard Drive¶

First, the good news. Thanks to the amazing reverse engineering efforts of deadlyfoez and j4m13c0, there are already tools that allow us to dump the contents of a Starlight Wii hard drive! The bad news is that these tools are difficult to use. To make matters worse, if you're not careful, the hard drive has a nasty surprise waiting for you.

In addition to the game data being encrypted, the hard drive uses a security lock. To unlock the drive and access its contents, the correct key needs to be provided. If you attempt to use an incorrect key too many times in a row, the hard drive will permanently brick itself. This little "quirk" turns what should be a simple task into something tense. Adding to the stress was that the first SATA adapter we tried didn't support the security lock, leading us to get several failures. Thankfully, to reset the failure counter, all we needed to do was re-assemble the Wii and boot it up to give the drive the correct key.

Even with these bumps in the road, eventually we figured out that the SATA adapter was the problem and we decided to use an old PC's built-in SATA controller. With that change, the key immediately worked and the process of dumping the drive began. The first few attempts failed due to bad sectors roughly halfway through the disk, but after swapping over to ddrescue, we were able to image the HDD in spite of the errors. Thankfully, none of the data on the drive was affected by these bad sectors.

With the data preserved and the key in hand, we could technically make a replacement hard drive if those bad sectors are a sign that it's on its last legs. But for now, we put the Starlight Wii back together to confirm that it still worked. The first time we put it back together, it had a fatal error on boot. One disassembly and rebuilding later, it did boot correctly. Phew.

Even after all of that, the data we dumped was still encrypted. Thankfully, j4m13c0 provided a Python script that was able to turn the blob of data into a set of game images. Using Dolphin, we verified that these were valid games and Dolphin could even play them without any modification!

For those of you hoping for some unique versions of games, we have to burst your bubble. All games on the Starlight HDD contain the exact same data as their retail versions. The only exception to this is the Starlight Game Select Menu, which obviously never saw a retail release. Booting that in Dolphin doesn't quite work because we do not emulate the special DVD commands that it sends to the drive emulator.

While it would be fun to emulate this functionality someday, there are currently no plans to pursue it.

Hacking the Seemingly Inpenetrable Starlight Wii¶

Given that the Wii was one of the easiest to hack consoles of all time with one of the largest homebrew scenes in all of gaming, you'd expect hacking the Starlight Wii to be simple. After all, people even figured out a way to hack the Wii Mini, right?

But the Starlight Wii actually proved to be rather resilient. It was missing just enough in every direction that none of the existing methods of hacking would work, at least without some modification.

The challenge was set out. The Starlight Wii has:

No Wii Menu
No Wii channels
No internet connectivity
No ability to connect extra Wii Remotes
No permanent save data
No disc drive
SD card support
GameCube controller ports
GameCube memory card slots
Two USB ports
Fixed game selection
Various debug/kiosk specific ports, including wired Bluetooth

The longer we thought about the problem, the harder it became. The lack of a Wii Menu and online capabilities axed most common methods of softmodding a Wii. But considering we had a library of 22 games, something had to be possible, right? With some of the best minds at our side, we started plugging away at the Starlight Wii.

Save Exploits¶

While our particular Starlight didn't come packed with The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess like some earlier versions, it did come with Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga which features a similar save exploit. Another suggestion was to use Mario Kart Wii, which has a save exploit targeting its competition loading code.

As there is no Wii Menu and the system wipes saves, you might be wondering how we could transfer a save onto the Wii. Remember that debug menu we talked about earlier? It actually has the ability to copy saves onto the NAND! Could we use this feature to load a save containing an exploit?

Unfortunately, this method doesn't work as the Wii reboots when closing the debug menu. Because save files are deleted when the console starts up, even if we we did import a save, it would be gone by the time we could load the game. Plus, without a way to enable WiiConnect24 outside of the Wii Menu, we couldn't actually load any competitions in Mario Kart Wii.

Smash Stack¶

Smash Stack is an exploit that takes advantage of a bug in Super Smash Bros. Brawl's stage builder. All we would need to do is copy a custom stage file containing the exploit to the SD card. Because custom stages stored on the SD card are separate from the game's actual save data, using Smash Stack would allow us to sidestep the save deletion problem! Unfortunately, our Starlight Wii did not come with Super Smash Bros. Brawl, so we weren't able to investigate if it works ourselves. If any Starlight Wii has Super Smash Bros. Brawl installed on it, Smash Stack might actually be a viable option.

If anyone knows if this would work, feel free to leave a message on the forums or our Discord server.

BlueBomb¶

As many of you have probably heard, BlueBomb was a massive achievement in Wii softmodding, as it allowed hackers to finally breach the Wii Mini. The Wii Mini was an interesting challenge because it removed so many of the staple vulnerabilities that people used with other versions of the Wii. The system had no internet capabilities and no SD card reader. As such, an exploit for the Wii Mini had to work within its strict limitations.

BlueBomb is an exploit for the Wii Bluetooth stack that only requires a single USB port to load a payload. And as we already know, the Wii Starlight has multiple USB ports! Unfortunately, exploiting the Bluetooth stack requires you to wirelessly connect a Wii Remote, and the Starlight Wii only connects to special Starlight Wii Remotes through the controller repeaters.

Despite that setback, it was probable that the console still used Bluetooth, but it doesn't broadcast it over the air. The back of the Wii does have a jack for Bluetooth input, so we wondered what would happen if we just put a giant antenna on it instead of the included cable.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite work. While the antenna did carry some data, as we were able to wirelessly connect a Wii Remote over the antenna, it wasn't a strong enough connection to sync a new Wii Remote for BlueBomb. In hindsight, the reason this antenna didn't work is because both the jack and the antenna were both female and we just didn't notice. The motherboard we borrowed the antenna from has the same size jacks, but they are male. Oops.

Thankfully, this oversight didn't deter us from continuing to try things, and we eventually decided to try hard-wiring the Wii Bluetooth coax to a PC's Bluetooth coax. We figured this was our best chance of getting a proper signal.

Our work wasn't done quite yet, though. BlueBomb requires compatible software in order to load its stage1 exploit, and the Starlight Wii has a very limited software selection. Thankfully, fellow Dolphin contributor flacs came to the rescue and searched our Starlight Wii's library for one that had potential.

The end result was a custom-made BlueBomb stage0 that worked with Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey. This was the last thing needed in order to boot the Homebrew Channel, and we were finally able to dump the Starlight Wii's NAND!

While this was great, there were a few downsides. First, we had to re-do the entire BlueBomb process every time we wanted to start the Homebrew Channel. While we could've installed it to the NAND, there was no point as we had no Wii Menu to load it! We also couldn't install BootMii to boot2 using the HackMii Installer, as it doesn't support the boot2 found on devkits. Sure, we could just install BootMii to an IOS, but what would we use to actually load it? The Starlight Wii wasn't protected from failure because our exploit not only requires us to load the cut down Wii Menu first, but also two titles on the hard drive.

After going through the tedious BlueBomb process a couple of times throughout the NAND dumping process, we sought out the help of experts once again to find a better way.

While we can't use the HackMii installer to install BootMii to boot2, installing BootMii isn't completely impossible. We just had to get our hands a little dirtier. deadlyfoez suggested a rather risky option that would solve our issue: using a boot2 backup program, we could backup boot2 from the Starlight and then manually install BootMii to it. If done correctly, importing that newly modified boot2 would install BootMii onto the system. The risk was that this wasn't some widely tested and incredibly stable homebrew; it was a personal dumper they'd used on similar development hardware in the past. There was a chance it wouldn't work due to no fault of our own. If something went wrong, the Wii would be completely bricked and require hardware flashing to repair.

Given that we had already backed up everything of value on the Starlight Wii, we decided to move forward with the plan. Thankfully, the entire process went off without a hitch and now BootMii shows up as soon as the Wii powers on.

The best part is that none of our mods interfere with normal usage of the unit. If we simply remove the SD card, the Wii boots directly to the Starlight Game Select Menu as if nothing was installed. Even if we do leave the SD card in, BootMii works fine with the custom software and does not interfere with the Starlight Wii Menu or the Starlight Game Select Menu.

The total process to restore the unit to working condition, backup all of the data, and figuring out a way to hack it took roughly four months as a side project. Now it will remain maintained, occasionally played, and ready to help if any developers move to emulate the Starlight Wii hardware.

A Lasting Impact and Legacy¶

After spending a lot of time with two of these kiosks over the course of several months, it's impossible for us not to hold them in high regard. We're not the only ones, though. Throughout the research phase of this article, we ended up seeing many memories of people seeing these kiosks in hospitals and the excitement they brought. These machines were beloved by the people who used them. And that's what makes the Starlight Wii Fun Center so special. In an era where a Wii could never be in a hospital, designers, engineers, and game developers were able to bring these games to children who were in need. Its mere existence is the perfect encapsulation of a specific challenge at a specific moment of time that wouldn't have been a problem before nor after. And now, these peculiarities stand only to make it an interesting artifact of a bygone era.

The Starlight Children's Foundation is still going strong as of the writing of this article. On top of their gaming program providing Nintendo Switch Kiosks and Portables, they also continue to provide supplies and toys to hospitals. If you wish to donate to the Foundation, you can do so at their website. There are also many third-party charity streams that benefit the foundation throughout the year. For those who are interested, there is one coming up December 5th through the 7th that involves multiple streamers.

With that final note, we hope that you've enjoyed this trip through this rather obscure sidequest of video game history.

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