Wii Animal Crossing, WiiKey and 3.3 Firmware Compatibility Guide

Animal Crossing: City Folk is the latest Animal Crossing iteration out on the Nintendo Wii. With huge successes first on the GameCube and later the Nintendo DS, Animal Crossing City Folk offers the same aimless fun that fans have come to expect. The problem with the latest Animal Crossing is that it isn’t a straightforward burn and play for WiiKey users. Animal Crossing itself ships with the 3.3 Wii menu update, which is safe to install with WiiKey. However, the update alone is not sufficient to get your backup copy of Wii Animal Crossing to play nice with WiiKey. The missing step is actually getting the IOS38 wad installed on your system before it will work with the WiiKey.

This guide covers all the steps from how to burn the Animal Crossing ISO image to how to install the Wii Homebrew Channel via Twilight Princess hack to how to use Wii WAD Manager to install IOS38 to enable compatibility with WiiKey. This was testing working on Wii 3.3 firmware update but should work on 3.2 as well.

1. You have the option of brick blocking your copy of the Animal Crossing City Folk disc image. Just make sure you are running on either 3.2 or 3.3 firmware on your Wii. If this is so, you can remove the update from Animal Crossing with WiiBrickBlocker. On our Wii, we already had the 3.3 update installed so we removed it.
2. Burn the ISO image to DVD. We recommend burning with Clone DVD at low 4x speed to maximize readability.
3. If you don’t already have the Wii Homebrew Channel manager installed, you’re doing yourself a great disservice. It’s an absolute must for running great user-contributed homebrew apps on your Wii. If you’ve already got it installed, you can skip ahead to step 13. Otherwise to install it you’ll need to use the Twilight Princess hack. This means you need to have played Twilight Princess at least once on your Wii and had a game saved.
4. Format an SD card to FAT16 or FAT32.
5. Pick the proper game save to load based on the Twilight Princess version you played. More details can be found in our Twilight Princess hack guide.
6. If it does not already exist, make a directory called “/private/wii/title/RZDx/” on your SD card; replace “RZDx” with RZDE (US), RZDP (Europe) or RZDJ (Japan) as appropriate based on the inner circle text which varies depending on the version of Twilight Princess you played. Copy the correct “data.bin” file you chose from the hacked Twilight Princess gamesave package with the matching directory path into the directory you created on your SD card.
7. Copy the Wii Homebrew Channel hbc101-boot-dol.zip file to the root folder of the SD card (note that this is for 3.3 menu update and earlier). Extract the file which should be named boot.dol. You can delete the .zip package after you extract the boot.dol file.
8. Now, put the SD card into your Wii and turn it on. Go into Wii Options –> Data Management –> Save Data –> Wii.
9. Find your Zelda save, click on it, and click “Erase”, and click Yes.
10. Now, go into SD card, and select the “Twilight Hack” save (the icon says “Wiibrew Loader”). Click copy, and yes. Now, go back out of that menu.
11. Insert Zelda, and run the game. Load the file corresponding to the correct save slot as indicated in the table here (US only), and either walk backwards, or talk to the guy that’s standing in front of you. Worst case you picked the wrong file and try the other one.
12. Now the Wii Homebrew Channel will install itself as its own channel in your Wii menu. Follow the prompts to complete the install. You can delete the boot.dol from your SD card now.
13. If you don’t already have the Wii WAD Manager installed, you’re going to need to install it now to get the IOS38 wad installed. If it’s already installed, you can skip to step 16. Otherwise you need to create an "apps" folder in the root directory of your SD card.
14. Go into the newly created "apps" folder and create another folder called "wm13" for WAD Manager v1.3. Now go into this folder.
15. You should now be in /apps/wm13 on your SD card. Copy the WAD Manager v1.3 wm13-boot-dol.zip into this folder. Extract the file which should be named boot.dol (not to be confused with the one you extracted in step 7). You can delete the .zip package when you are done.
    
16. Go back to the root of your SD card. Now create a new "wad" folder in the root directory. This is where you need to place IOS38-64-v3609.wad (and any other wad files you wish to install) so that the Wii WAD Manager will pick it up.
    
17. Insert the SD card into your Wii’s SD slot and turn it on. Then open the Wii Homebrew Channel and start it.
    
18. It will automatically detect that you want to load the Wii WAD Manager. Click on it to load it.
     
19. Click "Load" on this prompt to confirm launch of the Wii WAD Manager.
    
20. Now Wii WAD Manager v1.3 by the (in)famous Waninkoko is launched. Click on the "A" button to continue.
    
21. Select the "Wii SD slot" slot as the source device by pressing the "A" button.
    
22. Select the IOS38-64-v3609.wad file by hitting the "+" (plus) button to install it. If you copied other WAD files, they will also show up here so remember to come back to this screen to load more if desired.
     
23. Press "A" to continue.
    
24. The wad will begin to install. You’ll see text like "Installing Content #0X."
    
25. When installation completes, press the "Home" button to reset your Wii. Though you won’t see any visible changes, IOS38 has been installed and Wii Animal Crossing will now play with WiiKey on 3.3 firmware update.
    
26. Insert your backup copy of Animal Crossing City Folk and enjoy the game!

Images/Code Retard