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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.
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)
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.
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.