While screwing around with my Wii last night (har har!) I apparently went brain-dead and forgot that I don’t actually own an EDTV, I have a mere widescreen standard definition unit. So I clicked on the option to jack up the picture output to 480p which my television doesn’t support. I had somehow thought that I’d either get a confirmation screen before the Wii made the change or that it would have asked me to confirm the resolution actually worked and then kicked me back down to what it was before if I didn’t respond. I waited about two or three minutes and the picture stayed blank.
Not good.
Not only was the Wii outputting a signal that my television couldn’t use, but I couldn’t see it to change it back. Doing a quick Google search didn’t turn up much in the way of helpful advice, but I was able to get it back to normal, and here’s how I did it.
Step 1: Unplug your A/V cables from the back of the Wii.
Step 2: Turn on the Wii
Step 3: After a few seconds push any button on your Wii remote to connect it to the Wii and start up the Wii menu
Step 4: Plug the A/V cables back in
Step 5: Without having your cables plugged in, your Wii will have booted into 480i mode, immediately go into the options menu and change it to the correct option
You could also replace the component cables with the composite cables that came with the Wii, start it up, change the settings, and then swap the cables back again, but that’s a whole lot of unnecessary work for the same result.