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Wii Hacked for Better Homebrew Games
arbourp writes to mention that hackers Michael Steil and Felix Domke have demonstrated a way to hack the Wii that makes running homebrew code much easier. "The hack advances the possibility of running homebrew code with access to full system resources on the device, not just programs that Nintendo has sanctioned. Such games might be developed to run from a DVD drive, at least in theory. No such games are available as yet and Nintendo may respond by attempting to revoke compromised encryption keys. However history shows such countermeasures are likely to ultimately prove futile."
Just to point out they use Star wars as an entry point, however on its own the game is wicked and you can use your wii-mote as god intended :)
liqbase
I would love to be able to use my Wii as a media server. If they would just add support to the photo channel to play H.264 videos, and support a usb hard drive or smb share, then I would be set. I don't really need a fancy interface. I just want to be able to play videos on my wii. Even without a hard disc, I would accept only using SD cards for watching videos from, if only I could play h.264 encoded videos.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I don't really think it's that bad for Nintendo. Since they actually make money from the console, and this would just add an extra selling point, it would just mean more profit for Nintendo.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That post really needed some more to be organized into coherent paragraphs, but I'll answer anyway...
is it because of the "scene" or is it because you "can"?
Yes, it's because they can. They enjoy the challenge.
When you have broken the system security to release your own homebrew - then what? Challenge over?
Yep, and then you move on to a new challenge. In reality, though, breaking the system security is just one of the first steps to making homebrew software; there are still many challenges left.
Now realize this my friend - why not create your OWN hardware with your OWN challenges?
Because that's a different kind of challenge, and not as fun to some people. Why don't you forge your own plate armor? Or learn a new language? Or study Tai Chi? Those are all challenges, but they're different and appeal to different types of people. Some people -- the people who are working on this kind of project, in fact -- think that breaking a system's security and making homebrew software is much more fun than making their own hardware.
Point is - whatever you end up doing - make sure you use that time you got - wisely - otherwise you're technically just wasting your time doing it!
If you spent your time having fun, is it really wasted?
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
No they told you exatly how they did it.
The keys are stored in protected memory. This memory is not accessable under normal conditions, as the gatekeeper chip disallows access to this. When the Wii is used in GC mode, this chip is disabled, but so is addressing to the upper regions of memory, so you still can't address it properly. BUT if you use a small peice of metal and join some of the address bus lines, in order to address higher addresses, these keys can be recovered.
Watch the video, very interesting.
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I don't really see it as bad for Nintendo. The PS1 was easily hackable, and it did extremely well. The PS2, not quite as hackable early on, but with the release of HDAdvance and the Mr Brown code exploit, it became easier to hack than the PS1. Don't forget about swap magic. The PS2 has done so well that Sony is continuing to sell and support them. The XBox was another relatively easily hacked machines, with early plugin chips, later solder chips and soft-modding. It also has done extremely well (although Microsoft did take a big loss, but that's their fault for selling at a loss; they still did well enough to move on to the 360).
N64? Hard to pirate, didn't do very well. The only real exception to this is Sega's Dreamcast, which was very easy to pirate/run homebrew, but the failure on that machine had more to do with Sega's marketting issues, game library, and previous failures with the Saturn and Genesis 32x and CD systems. Sega was in trouble long before Dreamcast rips.
The Wii is already popular with the older and casual gamer crowd, and that population usually wouldn't go through the hoops involved in a hardware or even software mod. I only see this as a win for Nintendo, despite the fact that they will try to squash it.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Which is why the XBMC Team is porting the software to Linux. It's actually quite a good ways along now. It doesn't have a final release scheduled for anytime in the near future, but the beta versions are VERY impressive. I know several people who are using it as a stable home media server and are using 1080p videos (Albeit with multi-core Intel systems with hardcore hardware.)
It's being designed with Ubuntu in mind and already has very good hardware support.
They are working on a direct port right now and as soon as they have that stable, they are going to start adding features like time shifting, video recording, etc...
One of the things that make consoles so attractive is that they are standardized hardware that so many people have in their homes. Development can be targeted for this specific hardware - to take advantages of its unique features.
Here is my home page.
All I want is the thing to ignore the region on the disc so import games work.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Nintendo hasn't done much to stop DS stuff. The first hack of the DS worked by putting a pass through device into the DS slot. You'd then insert a regular game into that pass through. It would let the regular game card start the boot process and load the main executable, then when the DS asked the card what memory address execution should start at, the pass through device would intercept it and specify an address in the GBA slot memory space. You'd write your homebrew to run off GBA flash carts.
One DS firmware update modified the boot code to reject startup memory addresses that weren't in main memory.
The only other change Nintendo did with an affect on homebrew was to make it so the firmware could only be modified if you shorted a jumper. But that wasn't an attempt to prevent homebrew, that was just preventing bad code from bricking the DS.
Sorry. I think I mixed up some words there. Maybe it would help if I described what I'm using.
What I have right now are a couple of low end server machines running Linux Ubuntu, with RAID 1 redundancy. (I'm up to 4+ terabytes.) They each have a gigabit Ethernet card, running through my network router. I've got a wireless router, but it isn't really fast enough for multiple media players, so I have wired connections to three media PC's. The first is a Xbox with XBMC. The second is an XBMC Linux Machine and the third is an older windows media center pc which I'm going to convert to Linux as soon as I get a new motherboard and processor. Currently the only one that can handle high Def video is the Linux box. This works because it's the only one hooked up to a high def TV instead of just S-Video.
I'm planning on adding a dedicated media collecting computer to record TV shows off cable. (Currently, I'm just using my main computer to do video capture.) I'm still in the process of writing some software to automate the process of recording, stripping commercials, labeling and moving the videos to my media servers.
I've got a full collection of almost 1000 DVD's ripped to my servers, almost half of them TV shows. I'm in the process of adding some HD-DVD's to my collection but not in to much of a hurry since only one TV is worth playing them on.