How to Copy Wii Games

Firstly I must stress that the point of this Infobarrel is to help you create back-up copies of your Wii games for your own personal use, not so you can copy Wii games to share with other people. Copying Wii games for any reason other than for personal use (i.e. as a backup copy), is illegal and you will end up in serious trouble for doing so.

So why would you want to backup your Wii games? None of us need reminding just how expensive Wii games are, even if you have done a trade-in of an old game, so it is really important to take good care of your games. However, there are many forces that conspire against even the most meticulously careful person when it comes to making sure your Wii games don't get damaged. Kids seem to like playing frisbee with anything round that doesn't smash on impact, dogs seem to like burying anything, and of course for them, the more expensive the better, and who can forget good old granny, helpfully putting her cup on “that nice shiny coaster” of yours. Cringing at the thought? This is why it is such a good idea to back up all your Wii games, just in case. In fact, if you live in a house where dogs, kids and grandparents are regular features, you might consider putting your original discs away and using the copies for day to day playing, that way if disaster strikes you still have the original.

Firstly you need to make sure you have the right equipment, and for copying Wii games you will need a pc of course, and a disk drive. LG drives are currently the best on the market for burning Wii game copies and will give you perfect copies everytime. Next you need to download a piece of software called Raw Dump 2.0, this will allow you to extract the ISO file from your Wii game and burn it onto disk. ISO files are image files and they contain all the data on your Wii game disc, this is the file that will give you an exact copy of your Wii game.

Once you have Raw Dump 2.0 downloaded, to start to copy Wii games, all you need to do is insert your game, open Raw Dump and click on “start dump”. This may well take some time, so be patient – go and make a cup of tea or something - when it has finished a message window will pop up to let you know. It will creaste a file which will be called “[name of Wii game].ISO” it is important at this stage to check the size of this file. Wii games should produce an ISO file size of 4.37 GB (4,699,979,776 bytes). If the file isn't this size then the dump hasn't run properly, so you will need to try it again. This doesn't happen often, but it is always worth checking before trying to burn your copy as you will waste time and of course a perfectly good blank disk.

Lastly, the disk burning. Open your disk burning software, if it has an automated help box on opening, close this and manually select burn image. This should prompt you to find the image file (ISO file) that you want to burn, which will be the file Raw Dump created for you so remember where you saved it! All that is left to do is put your blank disk in your LG drive and burn away, burning the disk slowly will prevent any potential errors, but high quality DVD disks don't seem to have any problems with high speed burns. That's it, job done – you should now be able to copy Wii games whenever you get a new one so you will always have a back up.