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... as usual.

Let's set a few things straight:

• Currently, there is no public method for reading DVD-Rs on an unmodded Wii.
• This isn't the first "Custom Firmware" (I hate that word) for the Wii. Not even close. Not even the first public one. Or, alternately, this isn't and there has never been a true wii Custom Firmware, depending on how you look at it.
• The "Custom Firmware" is only a small patch to the firmware that does two things: disable signature checks and disable a certain read restriction on the DVD code. What this does is let you use standard-format DVD-Rs (i.e. ISO9660 or Video DVDs) with the DVD drive on the Wii, but you still need a modchip.
• The difference between this firmware and the original is exactly 5 bytes. 4 for the DVD maximum read restriction (an unsigned int), and one code byte patch for the signature disable. Hardly earth-shattering.

We released a legal open source firmware patcher some time ago. Approximately three days before this purpoted "custom firmware" came out, svpe had added the DVD restriction removal patch to it (this was in response to an outright modification to an older firmware, released with the original code and hence illegally, by nitrotux, which he distributed with a disc dumper, but our patcher patches all of the recent versions of the firmware which use a completely different subroutine for the check, so the patch is different even though the result is the same). The first revision of Waninkoko's "custom firmware" was so hastily done that it was basically a PPF patch over the original firmware. Except it's encrypted. And he even changed the key. Hence, the patch was useless and he ended up distributing the entire patched-and-reencrypted file in the form of the patch (the entire patcher was 2MB, which is the size of the entire firmware). The fact that he made this trivial mistake makes me think that he did this very quickly and stole the patches from the open source patchmii (the DVD patch is identical except for the actual number involved in the restriction, and the signature check disable patch, which is relatively hard to find and there are several ways of doing it, is exactly the same). He later released a newer version without the blatant patch fuckup which is presumably legal to distribute now, although it still requires people to rip the original firmware from a recent game (whereas our open source patcher automatically downloads it from Nintendo's servers).

Now onto the news. Recently, we actually did figure out a way of reading DVD-Rs without a modchip. Since this can be used for piracy (and could potentially cause quite an increase in it, since a free simple non-warranty-voiding pirate-game-playing hack is very appealing compared to the current modchip situation), we have tried to contact Nintendo about it (privately and publicly). If they ignore us, then we'll probably release an open source library and tools that will let Wii homebrew read information from a DVD-R on any Wii, modchip or not.

For anyone trying to draw parallels between the PSP and the Wii, I suggest this article. As for the PSP emulator, I'll believe it when I see more than a single screenshot.

I know of at least a couple that were released before.

The build date on the update is March 6, before the Homebrew Channel and before an app to pirate virtual console/WiiWare games was released. If these things influenced their decision to actually release it, I don't know.

Interestingly, we just released a new version of The Homebrew Channel for the Wii (beta8), and someone reported that it causes their router to crash. We've switched to an older version of the Wii system firmware (from IOS35 to IOS21 - no, not the Cisco kind of IOS) in older to support users without the newest updates (this applies to all users though, since all versions / branches of the firmware are kept on the Wii), and I have a feeling that some kind of bug in the WiFi networking in this version is causing it. Wonder if it has anything to do with the Windows problems....

Installed it this morning and it's very polished, looks and feels like a real Nintendo made channel. A few bits and pieces aren't fully there (no vibration when going over buttons) but it's really well done overall, and has auto-update support and loads .elfs over LAN. Also, Team Twiizers is pretty sure that it's safe currently, and they're working on a fix for bricked Wiis. They've already got a fix for semi-bricked Wiis, which is pretty cool. If you want to read up on some of the background of Wii hacking, check out their site: http://hackmii.com/