As of version 5.0-2874, Dolphin can do the unthinkable: you can now access the Wii Shop Channel from within the emulator.

Dolphin can now download the free demos Nintendo made available on the system, as well as purchase Wiiware and Virtual Console games from the service. Because this feature is so new, it may take some time for the guides to get updated. The Wii Networking Guide will get you most of the way, but, you may also want confirm that you have the following:

• Valid Console ID and keys.bin from that console.
• Console country must be valid for that System Menu region.
• Properly Extracted Certs - Old tool Cert tool was flawed, please go through the process again if you've done this in the past.
• All IOSes and Updates. The System Menu's Online Updater can be used so long as the System Menu and its IOS are installed.
• SSL Verification Enabled - This isn't necessary but you'll want it on if you're buying games. As of 5.0-2941 or newer, this is on by default. In older builds this can be enabled manually in dolphin.ini by using the option "SSLVerifyCert = True".

With all of the above, you can make full use of the Wii Shop Channel within an emulator!

Going all in on Shopping¶

Getting to the point where we could go shopping on Dolphin was a long and tumultuous one. We couldn't even connect to the update servers a few weeks ago, and had little idea why. Leoetlino made it his mission to get the Wii Shop Channel working. In just the past couple of weeks, there have been several IOS-HLE changes expressly made for the Shop Channel and other System Menu functionality integral to this working.

• 5.0-2706 - Dolphin will install channels to the right directory.
• 5.0-2742 - Dolphin now emulates how an IOS can look for TMDs.
• 5.0-2807 - Dolphin will no longer install corrupted contents.
• 5.0-2856 - Support Personalized Ticket Decryption. Allows decrypting titles downloaded from NUS with per console private key.
• 5.0-2872 - Fix reading Certificate Files on Windows - special thanks to starsam80 for this commit!
• 5.0-2874 - Support Functionality for titles to see what is installed to the NAND.

These are just some of the recent changes dedicated toward the Shop Channel and Online Updates. delroth recently implemented title installation for Dragon Quest X, and booto helped with making ES_Launch more accurate with multiple IOSes when working on Majora's Mask and other issues. Without older commits and documentation from magumagu, shuffle2, Parlane, and other contributors, we would have never gotten to this point.

Missing even a single one of these will cause a catastrophic failure with the shop channel with little clue as to what went wrong. This added accuracy does come at a cost. Games now require their proper IOSes when booted from the system menu. We did maintain an old hack when booting from the gamelist, so, users who do not use the system menu should not need to install IOSes to maintain current functionality.

Despite all of the fixes, this is not quite perfect yet: updates can sometimes hang, certain channels aren't playing nice, and deleting channels doesn't go quite right yet. In the meantime, we hope that everyone enjoys this new feature as we march toward flawless System Menu emulation!