A few months ago, I found something on Amazon.  A converter for the Nintendo Wii so I can plug it into my receiver via HDMI.  We’ve been waiting – a year – for the new Wii to come out because they say it’ll have built in support… but after seeing this, I’ve had this nagging thought that hey – we could actually be enjoying a family game of Super Mario or Just Dance or one of the many other games that have been collecting dust.  Also – let’s face it – I don’t want to wait any longer!  They announced news about the new Wii so long ago and it’s supposedly not coming out until November/December timeframe?  Meh.

So I finally did it.  Amazon dropped the price of the converter and significantly dropped their price on HDMI cables down the $5 from $16 (amazon has begun to do this if you buy stuff grouped together – “bundle” purchasing).  Dude!  Heck yeah!  So I ordered them and connected it all up.  Perfect!  Sound is great and all I needed to do was go into the system settings to increase the video quality.  SUPER excited!

Got it all set up – batteries in the remotes and game in… what’s this error message?

Ejected, restarted, put disc in… same thing.

This error takes over the entire system.  You can’t back out of it.

Tried a few other discs.  Some do this error, some do the more friendly disc read error that allows you to back out and use the console.

Super weird.

Looked information up on the official Wii site – and they really just talk about the low-brainers, like inserting the disc with the face turned the right way and the “only official Wii” discs and controllers.  Since none of these are the problem, I turn to YouTube for possible answers.

It seems that with age, the disc read error is pretty common.  So now I get to decide whether to create my own cleaning disc or purchase one online.  Some even suggest a full opening of the Wii – and for quite a number of people – they have huge success with this method.

Greeaaaat.  I get to do surgery on my Wii.  NOT the fun happy family scenario I was picturing!