Erm - the link is to PALGN, not Aussie Nintendo. And yes it works.

Actually it´s possible with a backup and a modchip (Wiikey ,Wiinja Deluxe and Cylcowiz)

http://www.gbatemp.net/

I wonder if they'll fix this with a firmware update? Hopefully they'll just turn a blind eye to it, since it is only GC.

Ooh, I'm so trying this!

Shame they didn't opt for keeping the Wii completely region free...

The DS is, so clearly it's not any secret desire to keep imports out of people's hands...

I bet it's just some Bureaucratic Bullox, per norm.

It works :) Quite tricky to do on your own, but i had my dad help me (he was on wiimote duty :P) and it worked great!

What about the Wii itself.

I'll have to to try with Jap Donkey Konga when I get home =]

No doubt Nintendo will patch this, it's just a little bug in the software =/

@Trendy

The DS is not entirely region free. If i'm not mistaken, they've came out with a few DS games in Japan that will indeed not play on the US systems.

I wish I had some cube games for my wii. But after the wii was released all the local stores shot their prices up by at least double, if not triple, now they cost nearly as much as wii games, which pisses me off no end.

This could be good news. I might finally be able to play Resident Evil 4 again (my GC broke about a year ago)!

@aden.exe:

You can always hit up ebay. They have 7400 listings for gamecube games, and just on the first page I saw a bunch of titles going for $5-$15.

Fix to stop PAL gamers getting any kind of break in 3...2...1...

My friend was experimenting with this yesterday. It works, but not 100%. At least not for Japanese games on a US Wii.
Off the top of my head we got Naruto3 to boot, and it plays the movies just fine, but if you attempt to play you are told (in Japanese) that an error has occurred and you need to turn off your system.
Mr. Driller Drill Land works, and is playable.
One Piece Grand Battle works and is playable while One Piece Treasure Battle won't boot as it immediately returns with the fatal error.

Out of those games only Naruto3 was able to display Japanese tect correctly, the others displaying garbage characters (incorrectly decoded Unicode).

Also, it appears memory cards do not work, or work differently. We haven't gotten them to work, and while we tried one of our Japanese formatted cards was reformatted to US format. After that we stopped trying the cards.

Giving me access to ebay is a bad idea. I bought a laminator yesterday just because the auction was ending in 1 minute.

Several forumites on NTSC-UK (a forum for UK importers) have reported that this works, but that certain games have colour issues. This is unsurprising given that the NTSC and PAL Wiis use different colour encoding standards.

There might also be some issues with Japanese games because the PAL Wii doesn't have the Japanese character set built into it, whereas the US one is identical to the Japanese machine only it defaults to Roman characters instead.

I've tried running American copies of Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4 and neither ran very well. Metroid lacked a bunch of textures and all movies in Resi lagged so the sound went out of synch. Other games might work better mind.

It's cool, but if you have to disk-swap anyway, you may as well splurge out on a copy of Gamecube Freeloader (or even an Action Replay disk) - I'm hoping the compatibility would be better and there would be no issues (hoping because I haven't tried my US copy of Resi 4 yet on my Wii)

@Marv2: That may not be a viable option on the Wii. I know that my Action Replay doesn't work on my Wii, so I'm skeptical if the Freeloader will work.

@Field Anony-mouse:

Damn - looks like you're right. According to Play-asia, only certain versions of Freeloader work in each region - I have the multi 1.06, and it won't work on my PAL Wii. I guess I'll have to dig out my Gamecube when I want to play RE4 :o(

@Marv2:

Ah-ha-ha - more experimentation! If I use the swap trick above, I can load Freeloader (screen looks messed up, but ...) from there I can load Resident Evil 4 (US) without issue and even use my game save from my Gamecube (no texture issues as far as I can see).

Phew!

I doubt Nintendo will bother fixing it, they seem fairly lax in their region lockouts anyway. I mean the DS is region free and the Gamecube had the freeloader. I believe that if Nintendo really cared they probably would have gone after the Freeloader (since you know how sue happy Nintendo can be at times) but they just let it slide.

Resident Evil 4 NTSC works on PAL Wiis, at least in Mercenaries. Great find though.

Not all games seem to work with this method, I know that Donkey Konga in Japanese doesn't work at all...

BUT

Your best bet is to buy a Freeloader. You can use this trick to boot all versions of the Freeloader (they wouldn't boot normally), and then you can swap it for any import GC game of your fancy flawlessly. =]

I tried this on a NTSC Wii with One Piece Grand Battle 3 and I must be slow or else it doesn't do it on here. As soon I hit start, I eject and attempt to swap then the Wii restarts.

And you know my Wii detects my Action Replay for the cube but it reboots every time I start it up, odd isn't it?

Ok, Palgn didn't work this out, they are stealing links (yeah evil blah blah blah) from www.maxconsole.com (http://forums.maxconsole.net/showthread.php?t=51099).
I know they(maxconsole.com) talk about the evil side of gaming (modchips etc...), but credit should be given where credit is due.
Fix the link back Luke! I am an aussie too, but i don't appreciate people encouraging the convict sterotype we have, like they do at palgn!

And yes it does work, but Japanese F-zero doesn't. Its missing a alayer of textures, which makes it a hit and miss menu system.

Was wondering how i can find out if my Wii is Pal or NTSC.. im not sure how to test that. Im not talking about answerign where it was bought. but an actual way to test it.. perhaps the dvds themselves