If you’re looking to play your Nintendo Wii games on modern technology such as your PC, your Mac, or your smartphone then you’ll probably want to download one of the best Nintendo Wii emulators around.
Playing the best Nintendo Wii games wherever you want without having to spend a fortune on the classic consoles is becoming a more popular way to play these classic games.
But, you need to be aware that yes, emulators are in fact legal to download, but downloading ROMs is frowned upon and stated against Nintendo’s policy. As a business, Retro Dodo cannot recommend you to download ROMs, however, we can recommend the best Nintendo Wii emulators.
It’s still a grey area when it comes to the legalities of ROMs but according to many the way to get around it is to use your original cartridge to rip the ROM which you have a legal right to do. So, that’s why emulators are legal, because you can in fact legally use the ROMs from your owned cartridges/games.
So, with that sorted, let’s take a look at some of the best Nintendo Wii emulators out there!
PLEASE NOTE - Retro Dodo does not condone illegal downloading or any other shady activities that might get anyone (namely us) into trouble. Please check the legality of ROM downloading in your area and always follow government guidelines on internet safety and copyright laws.
1. Dolphin
If you’ve read our article about Gamecube emulators you will be familiar with Dolphin. Dolphin is a free Nintendo Wii emulator for PC, Mac, and Android smartphones.
But, we must state the obvious here. Emulating Nintendo Wii games requires a lot of power, most PC’s and Macs can do this but when it comes to Android smartphones you will need an extremely powerful one to do so.
Smartphones around the range of $400+ should do the trick, but anything less than that with Quad Core processing may struggle. It's due to the large CPU power needed to run the large 3D games and large files of Nintendo Wii Games.
The Dolphin emulator is renowned for being one of the best due to the large number of settings that you can change and the reliability.
Why Dolphin is superior to its competitors is simply because of the smooth output. It's rare that you will get crashed, freezes or frame rate drops with Dolphin (that’s if you have the correct power).
You can map your keys, show the buttons on the screen, check frame rate drops, change resolution, save states, love states, add cheats, you name it and Dolphin can do it.
It is one of the best Nintendo Wii emulators out there, as of writing this article. There is more information using the button below.
2. Cemu
The second on our best Nintendo Wii emulators list is one known as Cemu. It’s a free emulator for PC users who want to play Nintendo Wii U games on their desktop or laptop.
It was created by Exzap and Petergrov primarily for PC Users. What makes Cemu so great is the compatibility, ease of use, and somewhat easy user interface to navigate through.
Many choose Cemu over Dolphin because the developers behind it are focusing on one console, and one console only instead of having to constantly fix Gamecube emulation like Dolphin.
Due to the developers being somewhat active and updating the software almost bi-weekly, it is rumoured that they will release this emulator for Mac users in the coming months too.
Not only can you save games, load games, change key mappings and so on, but you can also upscale the games to 4K resolution should your PC or Mac be powerful enough.
The emulation is smooth, reliable, and easy to understand, but the comfortability of using Cemu comes down to the quick development updates from the team.
This is worth a shot! All that’s needed is for your PC to be running Windows 7 or above, have Open GL 4.1 as a minimum, and at least 4GB of RAM. Then you’re ready to game!
P.S. You can also use your Wii remotes with it too! It’s no Wii Boy Colour, but it will do!
3. Decaf
Compared to Dolphin and Cemu the Decaf Nintendo Wii Emulator is honestly, nothing special and comes from a community-driven background. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it doesn’t have the backing nor frequent updates to even compare with its competitors.
Nonetheless, we wanted to feature it because, well, it works!
Decaf is a free Nintendo Wii U emulator for PC. It started as an experiment but soon grew in popularity because it worked well at times. It’s easy to install, has a somewhat easy UI and you can do all of the basics like save, load, and change the settings.
The only downfall with Decaf is that it tends to have low framerates and struggles with the larger 3D games that the Wii and Wii U have to offer.
It's not enough to stop you from gaming, but when the competitors have barely no framerate drops, it's hard to choose Decaf over it, especially with very infrequent updates.
But, if you want to try something new, and fancy supporting the underdog then Decaf is a good shout! Apparently, as of writing this article, it can also run on Linux.
There you have it, a brief look at the 3 best Nintendo Wii emulators out there, all of them costing a whopping $0, how cool!
We will update this article with any new updates regarding these emulators and we’ll update it with new entries should new emulators rise from the shadows. We’re also tempted to take a look at rare Nintendo Wiis just like the rare Gameboys article we wrote! Happy gaming ya’ll!
