(sorry, I didn't know where to post this, mods feel free to move this.)
I have some backups that I made of Wii discs and want to play them on the real console, can I just throw them on a disc and play without having to homebrew or anything, considering that because they are original they still should be signed, this just would save me the hassle of installing stuff and possibly bricking my wii
No, that is impossible. You would need a modchip or homebrew.
yea, JosJuice is correct. It would take hours to do so too so you wouldn't bother doing so either. stick with emulating
It wouldn't take hours, but the necessary homebrew needed to read burned discs on a real Wii is practically the same homebrew necessary to read disc images from a USB hard drive.
(I did this for a single Japanese GameCube game before Devolution was ever a thing since I simply never could get DIOS-MIOS to work properly even with a 32K cluster 2GB SD card and whatnot)
I think you should order a copy of the game to play on your wii. (You will need to anyways because there is no other way to turn games into wii discs) I know that will be dumb but thats the only way to fik your problem
Protip: if you have an earlier model Wii console, then it's very difficult to brick it as long as you do the homebrew channel and then bootmii installation first before anything else (this will require an SD card however, and having a specific SD card dedicated to bootmii is ideal).
Thing is, on earlier Wii consoles you can install bootmii to a portion of the Wii console called "boot2" which is basically isolated from the rest of the system's internal memory and is initialized before the main bootup sequence. This lets you create and recover from NAND backups even if you end up installing weird borky custom IOS that messes things up (for loading from USB, custom IOS is all that's needed to be installed).
It is worth mentioning that, at least for loading GameCube games from a USB drive, you don't actually need anything more than the Homebrew channel...well, this is at least true for Devolution (which requires access to the physical disc anyway) - I'm unsure about Nintendont.
Using an SD card is an option, there is also FlashHax and str2hax (I used str2hax) which is the easiest in my opinion. Though you will require an SD card to load apps...