Play Sonic Mania on the Wii U

Sonic Mania Wii U

Yep, that's exactly what the title says. 🦔

A few days ago I tweeted a video where I show Sonic Mania Plus running on my Wii U.

This tweet gained quite a lot of traction, so let's talk about it in details.

The people behind the project

First of all, I must say that this was only made possible thanks to the incredible work done by Clownacy in porting the source code of the Sonic Mania decompilation to the Wii U, as well as Rubberduckycoly and MGRich for making the decompilation project.

You can check the source code on GitHub.

It is worth noting that there is also another port being made by Radfordhound, his port is going to bring GX2 rendering, which should fix the lag on Special Stages, and support for more controllers.

You can see more on his Twitter profile.

Playing as a Wii U game

Normally you would use The Homebrew Launcher to launch the game, but by using HBL you lose some of the Wii U's features you would normally want to use while playing a game, such as:

  • The ability to access the HOME Menu to change the controller settings.
  • The ability to view your friends list.
  • The ability to share screenshots via the internet browser.

For this reason I made my own installer so you can run the game directly from the Wii U Menu like any other game you have installed, it has two variants:

  • ⭐️ Vanilla Mania, with the boot sound being the sound of a ring.

Mania Vanilla

  • 🌟 Mania Plus with the sound of a chaos emerald + ring (inspired by Sonic Generations 3DS)

Mania Plus

Choosing one is just a matter of which design you prefer, both installations will only launch the game you have on your SD card, that being the base game or Mania Plus.

Assuming that you have the DLC, you can read this release note to learn how to enable it.

Download

You can download the installers here:

Install it using your favorite WUP installer or use the Homebrew Bundle version (.wuhb) with your Aroma environment. Don't forget that you need to keep your Data.rsdk on your SD card, it should go in sd:/RSDK/v5/Data.rsdk.

I'll be updating the download link whenever a new release is out.

Enjoy. ✨

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