How to get Mario Kart Wii scoreboard points after race into database

Question

I don't think this is even possible, but maybe I'm missing something. A group of us play Mario Kart Wii in the office. We don't play online, just a couple races. We often have tournaments where we play multiple sets of races over a couple of weeks and then combine the scores at the end. Instead of writing the final points down after each set of races I'd like to "extract" the points for each player from the scoreboard screen and into a database (probably MySQL). My question, is there a way to get the points from the Mario Kart Wii scoreboard screen? If so, I'm sure once I get the data I can find a way to place it into a database. I'd prefer not to totally hack the Wii, but I'm interested to hear if this is possible. Let me know if you need me to further clarify.

Thanks.

Answer 1

If the Wii's video output was to a computer, you could use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to automatically read the scores and put it into a database that way.

Answer 2

OCR is out of the question. That is way too complicated for this. I'm thinking I might just make an iPad app to handle the scores.

Answer 3

Here's a wild suggestion. Take a picture on the Wii tv screen with a cell phone. send the image to a computer and use OCR to extract numbers. This may be more trouble then simply copying down the numbers and entering them into a spreadsheet /database yourself.

Just entering them into a spreadsheet or database may be your best bet here. Maybe loser has to enter the figures ?