This Wii emulator lets you buy actual games from Nintendo’s Shop Channel

Perfect accuracy is an extremely ambitious goal for any console emulator to shoot for, and it's one that many emulators never come close to achieving. The team behind the open source Dolphin emulator took a major step closer to reaching that goal last week, though, releasing a new version that can actually purchase and download games legitimately from the Wii Shop Channel.

Accessing Nintendo's Shop Channel servers from the PC-based emulator isn't exactly a plug-and-play affair. For one thing, you'll need to use some homebrew software on an actual Wii to dump the contents of the system's NAND memory. From there, you have to use some special software tools to extract the certificates and keys that Nintendo uses when validating connections to its online servers.

With all that in place, though, Version 5.0-2874 of Dolphin can now connect to the Wii Shop Channel servers to download WiiWare and Virtual Console games. The emulator will even let you re-download games that were previously purchased on the original Wii itself and let you enter a valid credit card to purchase new games. (This is why people use emulators, right?)

While Dolphin users can now enjoy access to Nintendo's Shop Channel servers, the emulator obviously can't connect to the online gameplay servers that Nintendo unceremoniously shut down three years ago. Efforts continue to set up custom servers and workarounds that allow games like Mario Kart Wii and Super Smash Bros. Brawl to still be played online.

The new Shop Channel access comes on top of years of previous work to convert Dolphin, which started as a GameCube emulator, into a fully featured Wii emulator. That effort has led to a maniacal quest for accuracy in the high-level emulation of the core IOS housed on the Wii's ARM coprocessor, as well as the interprocessor communication protocol that lets the Wii's chips work together seamlessly.

That high-level emulation has allowed for Dolphin to recreate a lot of very low-level features found on the actual Wii hardware. The emulator can now download required System Update files directly from Nintendo's servers, copy games to and from a virtual SD card, and even install Channels and content from games like Wii Fit and Dragon Quest X (which encode data using a proprietary and little-understood Wii File System). We can't wait to see just how much further the Dolphin team can go in perfectly recreating the functionality of Nintendo's most popular home console.