There were few news outlets that didn't feature former US president Donald J. Trump's mug shot from his indictment in Fulton County, Georgia, after its Thursday afternoon release.
This included the Nintendo Wii News Channel. If you still have a Wii console hooked up in your living room, you could, with an exploit, an SD card, and some patience, still have an active News Channel on your Wii. If you were checking 2023's news on your 2006 console Thursday, you could have seen Trump's image in all its fuzzy, compressed notoriety. This inadvertent performance art was made possible by RiiConnect24, a service that has been providing Wii owners with online connectivity for a longer period than even Nintendo originally offered.
I'M CRYING https://t.co/QRHoMyFl3h pic.twitter.com/ZHknpMAM6r
— Squibbus (@Squibbus) August 25, 2023
Full disclosure: I am a sincerely soft target for a loosely organized crew of hackers keeping a service running long beyond its corporate end of life. RiiConnect24 certainly falls in that category. Nintendo shut off WiiConnect24 in June 2013, ending the ability to receive forecasts and news, share Mii avatars and messages, participate in the "Everybody Votes Channel," and use the network aspects of certain games.
RiiConnect brings back all of that, and it propped up other games and services left behind, including Animal Crossing: City Folk item deliveries, the Kirby TV channel, and the WarioWare D.I.Y Showcase. Even if you don't have a Wii stored in your garage, attic, or deep closet storage any longer, you can get RiiConnect24 mostly running inside the Dolphin emulator (the one back-channel banned from Steam).
The devs on Discord for RiiConnect24 are quite active, with regular updates about service status and things like silver rose gifts in Animal Crossing causing crashes. At the end of 2022, RiiConnect24 posted a Twitter thread about its accomplishments that year: Improving news languages and globe tracking, restoring more Nintendo Channel content, and hosting Wii game nights in their Discord every Saturday—and you can, of course, talk on Discord through your Wii, through a hosted instance of Discross. There were more than 70,000 Wii consoles registered to use RiiConnect24's Wii Mail service.