Question Design challenge: connecting 12 Wiis to HDMI as cheaply as possible

[Diminuendo]

Hi all, I’ve got an interesting design challenge I’d like some help with.

I’m a high school teacher and I teach video game development. Over the past two years I have slowly acquired 12 Wii consoles whenever they went up on Facebook marketplace place for $20 or less. My intention is to use these consoles to show game design concepts and enable 12 player Mariokart through the lan hack for a full class of 24 students. As the lan adapters are less than $5 in Japan I also have a full set of those.

My challenge now is connecting all of these consoles as cheaply as possible to my classrooms monitors. I don’t mind investing time to achieve this. I am considering using Aurelio’s VGA mod with some modified Dterminal cables to deliver the vga signal to cheap $10 VGA to hdmi adapters, but I don’t want to use RVL loader. Is there a way to auto boot into the system menu?

Alternatively, are there any cheap dterminal or component to HDMI adapters I could use for this? Also up for any suggestions entirely different to what I’ve thought so far.

Thanks for any help.

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[YveltalGriffin]

The cheapest and easiest solution is a bunch of Wii2HDMI converters.

AliExpress ($3.26)
Amazon ($8)
ElectronWarp ($24)

These convert 480i/480p component to HDMI and are totally plug and play. If you set the Wiis to 480p mode, they should be lagless.

VGA patches aren't ideal for your usecase since they currently don't work on the system menu, and require an invasive hard mod.

Other options for HDMI output include GCVideo DVI (Fujiflex, Pluto IIx, WiiHDMI) ($20 - $120), the Hispeedido HDMI mod ($50), and Retro GEM ($130 – $190). These are the most invasive and expensive mods, but offer the highest possible video quality (digital to digital). They don't really meet your requirement for the "cheapest possible solution" but I figured I'd mention them for completeness.

 

[Y2K]

The cheapest and easiest solution is a bunch of Wii2HDMI converters.

AliExpress ($3.26)
Amazon ($8)
ElectronWarp ($24)

These convert 480i/480p component to HDMI and are totally plug and play. If you set the Wiis to 480p mode, they should be lagless.

VGA patches aren't ideal for your usecase since they currently don't work on the system menu, and require an invasive hard mod.

Other options for HDMI output include GCVideo DVI (Fujiflex, Pluto IIx, WiiHDMI) ($20 - $120), the Hispeedido HDMI mod ($50), and Retro GEM ($130 – $190). These are the most invasive and expensive mods, but offer the highest possible video quality (digital to digital). They don't really meet your requirement for the "cheapest possible solution" but I figured I'd mention them for completeness.

This would be my suggestion too despite my numerous gripes with the cheap Wii2HDMI dongles. If you can find a bit more budget to eek out some quality though, Skent sells Wii2HDMI dongles that are much higher quality. They can be purchased at his storefront here: https://electron-shepherd.com/collections/all/products/electronwarp