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Wii Homebrew Takes Several Leaps Forward
Croakyvoice writes "Fans of Homebrew on the Nintendo Wii can celebrate with an explosion of releases
today, in just a few hours there has been a release of a proof of concept version of Linux for the Wii, an MP3
Player, the Super
Nintendo emulator Snes9X has been ported and a converter that converts Gamecube Dol files into Elf for usage on the Wii (Which opens up a multitude of emulators and homebrew games and applications). A tutorial on how to get homebrew working with the Twilight
Hack will help those interested."
I understand Grandpa brewed his own during prohibition, and though he heard rumors that the police were polluting some brewer's beer with Wii, he said tey never got hold of his brew.
Can you Wii while you're leaping? I mean, without getting wet?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Nintendo is sure to be pissed, or wii'd?
.. it wouldn't surprise me if their next system update doesn't block this too. Though the main difference between this and the 360 exploit would seem to be that the Wii doesn't, as yet, force you to update in order to get online. The part of this that interests me the most is the SNES emulator - hopefully this might cause Nintendo to look at their pricing plan for the Virtual Console games. Seven quid for an unenhanced SNES game seems a bit pricey.
Have to commit Seppeku.
...they're getting there. Meanwhile, game programmers have been working with the (admittedly limited) Opera Browser to produce games designed for the Wii. WiiCade is even paying for games now, something which you won't find out of other homebrew ventures.
:)
It's not a perfect solution, but it does work, and it works well enough to play some pretty cool stuff. And you can even get paid to perform your hobby! How cool is that?
Disclaimer: I am associated with WiiCade. So take this with a grain of salt.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I don't care about an SNES emulator. I just want a Divix player.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I bought that Zelda game along with Red Steel when the Wii came out (yup, i preordered in a COMET in the UK). I played it for maybe 5 hours (not straight, at different times) and got really bored. The first two hours is a really boring tutorial and the next hours are so monotonous that I just stopped playing it. It has been gathering dust since then. I was thinking of trading it but with these news I do not think so!)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
It seems that their attempts to host a website on a Wii has failed.
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
that the users can finally play games for their vintage gaming systems free of charge.
Linux + mythfrontend + wiimote sounds like a pretty killer multimedia option. And that's just the first thing that came to mind.
There seems to be a weird message on http://wii-linux.com./ Anything related?
If 7 dollars is too much for an unenhanced SNES game, what do you think a fair price is, 6 dollars? They can only go so low. I spent 7 dollars on a McDonald's value meal at O'Hare this weekend. I spent 6 bucks on a coffee this morning. THOSE are outrageous prices. Getting to play ActRaiser/SMW/Mario Kart/etc. again sure as hell gives me more value for my dollar than that Big Mac did. If you won't get 5-7 dollars worth of enjoyment out of it, don't buy the game.
I won't care until I can run this off of my SD card plugged into the Wii, as opposed to needing an SDGecko to go through my Gamecube Memory card port. Until then, ZZzzzZZZzzzzzZZ
I've been considering trying to hack my Wii just to get DVD playback. It's a nice little box already hooked to my TV with a DVD drive. I don't know why Nintendo won't do it in a legit way. I'd even be willing to shell out a couple dollars for it.
Yeah, if you're jonesing for standard resolution videos only
Sounds great to me. I don't have HD, nor do I plan to upgrade any time soon (I have no desire to have my livingroom dominated by a 40"+ monster, and given the viewing distances in my livingroom, HD would be a waste on anything smaller).
"Wii Homebrew Takes Several Leaps Forward" ... I was expecting a footwear-related hack.
If you want to run HOMEBREW games, and not downloaded pirated Wii games, then 50 bucks for an SDGecko + the cost of an SD card. No it won't. Get an Xbox(Original, not 360) or PSP if you want a system with an active homebrew scene already established.
Yeah, but the Wii looks a lot nicer than most old computers.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If you put in a hardware modchip, there's stuff that allows you to playback DVD's, but it'll kill the laser. Wii wasn't built for constant reading of a disk.
I think you mean "milkshake".
how to invest, a novice's guide
I'm going to have to agree with you. The improvements provided by 40"+ TVs and 1080p resolution have been negligible at best (IMHO). Only gaming really benefits at this point, but that's why I have a PC and a 360 hooked into my "HD" monitor.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Linux + mythfrontend + wiimote
Or you could you know, just use the wiimote in any linux distribution... just as a standard bluethoot device...
I *knew* someone would post something among those lines... hehe
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I'd be happy to play regular DVDs on my Wii. A DivX player is icing on the cake for me!
In fact I've got a socket A SDRAM based microatx board I've been eyeing on putting into an old NES shell. Granted, it won't fit perfectly, might have some junk in the trunk... Maybe a 2600 shell would be better, meh. The point being you can put that old hardware in anything you like.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
.. I said 'pounds'. The actual cost of buying a SNES from the Virtual Console, if you're in the UK, works out as a total of eleven dollars. So we're paying over the odds compared to the US anyway.
360s support divx natively as of the latest Dashboard update, so if you want a Divx player one of the easiest thing to right now is to just buy a cheap 360 (about the same price as a wii) and stick em on a USB flash drive or external HD or something.
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Not me. I have 3 DVD changer, a PS2, and an HD-DVD player.. Yea I know but I got it for $98 and it is a really nice upconverting DVD player as well.
The last think I need is to play DVDs on the Wii. None of my players play DivX so that is the functionality I want. If it could play them over the network even better!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You mean like any ~$50 regular DVD-player that already does DivX. Why spend 3 times as much on something the person obviously is not interested in?
... can it run Vista?
No?
Awesome.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
How are they going to stop it? It's a exploting a buffer overrun in the Zelda save game loading code. What are they going to do, issue a firmware update that prevents the Wii from storing Zelda saves?
It has built-in wireless, comes with a remote control, is small and pretty, and now with a bit of luck hopefully it can run mplayer. That means DVD and stuff from your media server. I have a whole bunch of anime on my PC upstairs which I'd prefer to watch on the big screen from the sofa instead. Linux on Wii will make that possible.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
higher res tv is much better to watch no matter what the viewing distance. wether the price tag on current sets is worth it to you is a different matter.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
But does it run ...
It does? Sweet.
A properly configured microatx board destined for recycling would do all that and more with a few addins and a nice case. Hell my 360 pulls all the media files I need from my PC in the office, all with no modifications. Like I said, I applaud the work. But I still fail to see Wii as viable for playing anything but games.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
He did say "quid", which would put it at more like $14 USD.
"higher res tv is much better to watch no matter what the viewing distance"
If you believe that, you don't understand the physics of human vision.
Wonder if the twilight hack can break region locking so euros can actually get Smash Bros Brawl this year!
Uhh...he said 'quid' - common parlance for 'uk pound sterling'.
Seven of whch equal around 13.50 of your US dollars...so yet again we are being ripped off royally over here on 'treasure island'.
BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.
The PS3 has been running Linux on its Cell CPU's PPC core for several releases now, including several official Ubuntu PS3 releases. Sony does lock out the RSX graphics chip to Linux, but the Cell's 6 SPUs (pipelined DSPs) are wide open for development. And now that developers have ported video drivers to the SPUs, the PS3 is a hot little multimedia PC. I watch downloaded 1080P HD videos (and regular upsampled MPG/WMV/AVI/etc) right on the same 50" HDMI TV I surf the web (and watch Blu-Ray discs) and program with. And when Sony releases the PlayTV 2-channel DVB TV tuner for PS3 next month, I expect my Linux PS3 will beat TiVo at its own game, too.
The Wii is just getting started as "homebrew". Its HW isn't nearly as screaming as the PS3, nor as designed to be open for Linux. Hacking it sounds like a fun toy, which is why people buy the Wii. But the PS3 is already starting to be a Linux platform more interesting than even its gaming. A few more leaps forward on the PS3 and the Wii will look so 21st Century.
--
make install -not war
Why lol'd? A 550 P3 with 1gb of ram and a 7xxx nvidia card should easily be able to surpass whatever Wii could accomplish on running linux/media center kit. Unless of course I'm vastly over estimating the video acceleration from nvidia.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
It's not the laser that would die, it's the motor. Normal DVD reading requires that the motor step up and down its speed depending on the track being read. The Wii works differently. Instead of stepping up and down the disc velocity, it keeps the disc speed constant and steps up/down the decoding rates on the disc. As a result, GameCube and Wii games get a higher transfer rate near the edge of the disc.
;-)
(My understanding is that one of the classic optimizations for the GameCube was to organize the data on the disc to provide the highest transfer rates during game loading.)
This design is why GameCubes had very few drive failures in comparison to the PS2. Nintendo builds systems like tanks.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The firmware gets involved when the save file is copied from the SD card to the internal memory. Since the save can't be copied off the SD card directly, they can just verify the save before they copy it. Alternately, the games probably use an API from firmware to access save data. They could special case accesses from RZD* and verify at that point.
No, Xbox1 and XBMC was the killer app. Wii cannot compare with what XBMC was 3 years ago.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
no strawman arguements like "if i view a 51cm screen from 10m away it looks the same".
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
because its easier to slap together old kit? lol
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
I am not questioning your desire to get a new TV, but I find it somewhat contradictory to think that your living room would be "dominated" by a 40+" TV, but yet the room is too large to get any benefit from HD on a smaller TV. Especially in my experience where I went from a 27" SD set to a 46" HD LCD and the TV is actually less "dominate" than the old TV. It is pretty amazing how the flat panels can actually blend right into a room, much moreso than older CRTs.
Interesting.. I guess this is what's called Constant Angular Velocity
As I recall the P3's weighed in at around 60-80 watts at the wall. The Wii uses 19 watts at full load.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If 7 dollars is too much for an unenhanced SNES game, what do you think a fair price is, 6 dollars?
If shipping and handling of a physical product were involved, I would say no. However, we are talking about ROMs that are a fraction of the size of songs that you would find on iTunes that apparently make Apple and others money at being sold at $.99 a pop.
Obviously, bandwidth isn't the issue here.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
> Linux + mythfrontend + wiimote sounds like a pretty killer multimedia option
Assuming a decent radial menu system, maybe. Most uses of the Wiimote I've seen in games have treated it like a mouse, making you aim at buttons, which is about the last thing I want in a remote.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
A P3's bus speed and clock speed would bottleneck the hell out of the video card and 1 gb of memory. I'm just saying that although the WII's hardware stats don't seem all that great its actually pretty powerful with its IBM PPC Broadway core and ATI Hollywood gpu.
BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.
Argh ... that's most uses i've seen in non-games. Like pre-game UI stuff, or browsing. Most of the UI elements don't even obey fitt's law, so you have to make sure you fit the cursor arrow inside the button box. Awfully clunky compared to just pushing a button.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Uh, 40" negligible?
I've got a 50" 720p and it looks better by a LOT. Even bluray stuff (1080p source downscaled) looks wonderful. Once you go blu....
Yeah, its nice how DivX has finally gotten some love. The latest PS3 update also turned on DivX support (can stream it from a DLNA compliant server also :) ).
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Since when is debunking hyperbole a straw-man attack? And why do so many /. trolls think that calling something a strawman is the equivalent of an anti-Godwin automatic win?
I could give a rat's ass about the price of the Virtual Console games. I bought a Wii so I could play the old games from my childhood, and I knew the price points when I bought in. What I didn't know was how pathetically slow the release of classic games would be. I really don't care about some obscure NeoGeo game, Nintendo, just hurry up and release all the best selling SNES and N64 games.
Now that there is an emulator on the Wii, maybe Nintendo will get the message that if they don't hurry up and release the games I want, I'll just pirate them.
Seriously, when will media copyright holders learn that if they want me to buy their products legally, they need to actually sell them when I want them? I mean, seriously, the least give release dates so I know that I'm not waiting in vain.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Your money well spent? $7 leads to a lifetime enjoyment video game. Or $7 which leads to a heart burn that turns into a heart attack and diarrhea from Mickey-Dees.
That depends a lot on how you define 'not as good.'
There is so little being produced on television that I would want to watch that it's irrelevant to me. Maybe in a decade or so there will be enough _good_ HD content to make it worth the investment. For now, I'll let the 'early adopters' subsidize development.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
I have a 42" screen which i sit about 5 feet away from, and i also have a projector which can make a much bigger display (never measured it)...
I can sure notice the difference between regular TV, the interlacing is horrible and deinterlacing can cause artifacts... 480p looks a lot better, but it still looks a little blocky even from 5 feet away.... 720p looks nice, and i cant tell the difference between 720p and 1080p at that distance. I refuse to try 1080i as i hate interlacing.
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Yes, yes it is. If you don't have old kit lying around two things come to mind, go ahead and use your Wii like that and what the hell kind of /.'r are you? I kid, I kid... :)
But if you do have old kit, such as I do, enough to build 3-4 computers. Then it makes much more sense to build a dedicated media center or linux box out of that.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Well for one I have a Wii already. Also I don't want any more devices hooked to the TV right now.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
well with that ideology then they'd both do fine as general computers.
BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.
Yes I find HD content to be very negligible in terms of improved picture quality with currently available media and broadcasts. Keep in mind this is all very subjective. But I still stand by my opinion that HD video content only becomes worthwhile at 40"+. And even then I don't find it to be all that much better. With the exception of NFL games, which I don't watch very often anyways.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Or physics in general, for that matter.
wasn't there a guy right before new year who was able to sign his own code? (something about transfering all the ram through the controller ports).
Why hasn't there been any news on that?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
You know, suprising as it seems, the VC is not actually that big of a rip-off (depending on the title). Cost analysis has shown that it can be cheaper to byt the VC versions than their physical counterparts, especially for rarer titles. So while it seems like they are overpriced, with many exceptions (mainly the popular games), it can be cheaper to buy it off VC than used - not to mention the developers/publishers of the game get some money in that case.
Just because you don't like the truth, does not make it false.
I have an admittedly low end "HD" display in that it is 32" and 720p. Content from an upscaling DVD
player or my Media Center box both of which have HDMI connections looks pretty good.
I was stopped in my tracks at Fry's this weekend by a Sony 52" 1080P LCD display
connected to a Bluray player. That stupid tap-dancing penguin movie literally looks
like an entirely new title. And this is one day after seeing a friend's similarly sized
Sony LCD projection display with HD-DVD content. There is no comparison. The latest gen
high contrast LCD flat panel are totally teh seksay. Now to spend my tax refund on it before
the wife can protest.
Sure, the poster was wrong about the distance issue, but in normal viewing situations, HD resolutions make a lot of sense for TV and movie watching (not to mention the increased audio quality).
I've seen the charts that show the supposed ability of the human eye to distinguish certain resolutions, and they all fail to take into account how the brain processes the signal over time as your eye moves (giving you a much higher resolution of vision).
Sure, if you watch a 17" screen from 10' away, its doubtful you can tell if its running at 640x480 or 1920x1280, but you wouldn't watch TV like that in the first place, would you?
Under most circumstances, I can't imagine (these days) configuring myself a MythTV like box without HD output capabilities.
PS, I use a PS3 with its DLNA UPnP features to watch my downloaded / ripped shows and movies in HD or upscaled on a 30" 1080i CRT.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
*the heros won, 1st time round
*they know why theres a polar bear
*americas next top models actually comes round your house every week
*fox news is actually fair and balanced**
(in order of plausibility)
Does anybody really think the crap they watch on TV is improved by HD?
**The only time i want to see bill Oriely in HD is in his coffin (just to be sure the idiot is actually dead)
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Fine with me. I haven't yet laid out the piles of money I'd need to upgrade my mythbox to HD. But I do have a Wii :-)
It's overpriced compared to free, which is what lots of people have had for years while waiting for legitimate ways of playing the older games.
As a Wii developer I am amazed by the progress of the homebrew community. It's hard enough to get a devbox up and running with the official Nintendo SDK, complilers, utilities, manuals, and sample code; but to do all of it without any of that information at hand is just unbelievable. On top of all that, using a toolchain that doesn't include a devkit for quickly testing builds must really take a huge amount of dedication. Hopefully Nintendo recognizes the best of the homebrew games and offers authorized developer status to the creators, it'd be great to see the better titles make it to WiiWare.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
That's the exact same reason I refuse to wear glasses. With my 20/25 vision I can see just fine at reading distances.. I sit only 5ft from the TV, and I can see roadsigns just fine to just within the legal mandated viewing distance. Sure, they tell me I'd see 50% better with correction, but in my view it'd just be a waste.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Tell us then, why wouldn't they?
Please, oh please, please, puh-leeeeeze, somebody with the free time and passion please port MAME and SCUMMVM to the Wii.
Now that would rock.
Perhaps it will beat Duke Nukem Forever.
And I'd have to buy a PC, get a video card with TV-out, get that working with my TV which means fiddling around with modelines and god knows what else, and in the end, to get a cool, low-power, fanless setup, it'll probably cost more than a Wii.
:)
I *knew* someone would reply with something like that.
This exploit is equivalent to the MechAssault exploit on the XBox, I believe. The only way to patch it is to release a patched version of the game disc, and even then the old version will still work.
I could be wrong on this, as I don't know exactly how the Wii's OS interacts with the games, but this is my understanding of the way things work.
I am not questioning your desire to get a new TV, but I find it somewhat contradictory to think that your living room would be "dominated" by a 40+" TV, but yet the room is too large to get any benefit from HD on a smaller TV.
Simple:
a) My livingroom isn't just for watching TV, therefore I don't want it taking up a large amount of space.
b) The layout of my livingroom is such that the viewing distance from the couch to the TV is large, while the actual available space for the TV is small, thanks to things like a fireplace, and pieces of furniture other than a TV and couch (yes, believe it or not, some people have livingrooms like that!)
I'd like to see you fit that old hardware, including a DVD drive, in something the size of a Nintendo Wii. The Wii is about the same size as most PC DVD drives, not even counting room for the actual motherboard, and power supply.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Everything linked in TFA has been out for a while, now. As in, I remember reading about all of them... the soonest would be about 3 days ago. And they were all relatively old then, too. I did the Twilight Princess buffer overflow on my Wii last week just for fun.
Your ad here.
Good lord, 5' from a 42" TV? Yikes... I sit a good 10-12' from a 27" TV and that's plenty close enough for me, thanks. Are you one of those guys that likes to sit up front at those giant-screen megaplex theatres, too? :)
can you even see the entire 42 inch screen from 5 feet away? That's like sitting front row in a movie theatre. How is that even comfortable for you?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I guess that's why GameCube has so much better load times than PS2 and XBox. Being the owner of a GC, I don't know how anybody put up with the atrocious load times of the PS2.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That's very true. Go see a movie. That's $12 for 2 hours of entertainment. $10 for a copy of Mario64 or Zedla OOT is a much better deal than most of the other forms of entertainment. It's $5 to rent a movie at most places now. Download Excitebike, and you'll probably get much more enjoyment.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Of course, the right price is what the market will bear. So by increasing the supply of free games, the market bears only a lower price.
Sounds unethical, but dammit, I own all the SNES carts I like. some I've bought more than once. I'm not paying $7 for yet another copy. I can play it on my PS3, thanks much, streamed from my media server along with many other games to Ubuntu on the bigscreen. MAME, NES, N64, SNES, Atari, Genesis. Old games should belong to the public domain, not Nintendo. But for the convenience of a fresh copy, I would happily pay $2.
Granted, I'm not being realistic. And Nintendo is doing a better job than Sony with the old downloadable games. But the PS3 is so much more open than the other systems it's not even funny. Not sure this is helping the bottom line for Sony at all, but it's helping reduce my frown-lines!
Dunno about that, XBMC (XBox Media Center) is a pretty cool thing, and would love something similar for the wii... I don't want to replace the Wii OS, but to be able to port some online games, like super mario war, or other stand alone games in a linux boot dvd, for use on the Wii would be pretty cool.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Oh yeah? I don't even HAVE a TV!
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I was worried about how small children would handle a DS but it appears that the normal failure mode for the things under rugged conditions is theft.
Definitely an awesome feature, which I've used dozens of times since it came out. Great for streaming from the network.
:( I still have to burn my anime and play it on my XviD-capable DVD player.
But, it still has some way to go. FF and RW can stutter off the network, understandably. Worse, the 360 cuts off the edges of anime, regardless of which zoom function you use. I don't know if you've ever watched anime, but the edges are where they put the subtitles, goddamnit.
I hear X-Box Media Center is great, though.
New message from Nintendo -- you can now update your Wii Menu to version 3.2. "Once installed, if a Game Disc is inserted into the Wii console and an update is required, a notification message will be displayed across the Disc Channel alerting you to update your system." "After February 26th, those who have already done the update will not need to update again." Who didn't see this coming?
unless your 1/2 blind, standard def is not as good as high def. end of story.
No, not end of story. Human vision doesn't work that way.
no strawman arguements like "if i view a 51cm screen from 10m away it looks the same".
If I view a 60cm screen from 3m away it looks the same, and that's a far more realistic scenario than the one you describe. HD is a waste for most of the population: anyone who isn't a home-theater nut.
I'm involved fairly closely with the creators of the original exploit, so I know a bit about Wii security.
The way it's currently implemented, as soon as we start hacking the firmwares they put out, we've effectively won the battle for current consoles. Wiis contain a separate security ARM processor unofficially dubbed the "starlet". It is here that all of the interesting security takes place, and it is also responsible for most of the wii-specific hardware that the gamecube lacked. Ultimately, the consoles carry an unmodifiable boot ROM which loads an also unmodifiable boot1 bootstrap loader (unmodifiable because, although it sits in flash, it is checked against a hash stored in OTP memory). Boot1 is buggy. Boot1 loads Boot2, and we'll probably start hacking boot2 and the next step (the actual operating system and drivers that run on the starlet). This is going to be similar to the PSP scene, most likely: Nintendo will put out updates, but we'll work around them. We can also modify the existing firmware to prevent updates from happening.
However, new consoles can come with an updated boot1 (the OPT hash is programmed at the factory). Those might be impossible to hack the same way. However, the OS is buggy and other hacks can be found.
Their next system update may block this, but people just have to hold off until hacked firmwares come out. Worst case, you can always apply the hack to current consoles by directly modifying the Flash memory in the Wii.
All this only applies to the security system though, and the bug that was used for the demo at 24c3. It is rather unlikely that Nintendo will patch the Zelda bug (which is what we're using to boot current homebrew, not the meaner more powerful 24c3 bug) from firmware somehow, so there is a very good chance that we'll always have options for booting homebrew. Besides, we can find exploits in other games, easily. The 24c3 bug lets us get total system access, but even if they lock that out in newer consoles, we can still get homebrew running via game exploits.
A-hem. Go to someone's house who has, say, a 32" HD LCDTV (or Plasma). Look at something that is NOT HD on the television. Now, play something that IS in HD (a Blu-ray disc, HDTV channel, whatever). Now, within any REASONABLE distance, if you don't have terrible vision (like, needing -4.0 or more contacts and not having them)...you WILL notice a difference. And I know he said "no matter what the viewing distance"...but let's just do it in reasonable distances...unless your living room is HUGE then you won't be viewing it from far enough away to be considered unreasonable, and if your living room IS that big, then go ahead and buy yourselfa 60+" television because you have the room for it.
If you're not worried about HD then, an Xbox running Xbox Media Center with the MythTV addon script and the standard Xbox remote will do you quite well. Modded Xboxes are so cheap now it's ridiculous.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Sitting 6 feet away from my 40" TV is about the equivalent of sitting in front of my 20" PC monitor in terms of filling my vision. It's nice if you like to enjoy a good movie, especially in HD...
But if you move up to 3 feet, a 40" would sure be like a cinema front row. (I ended up with front row at one of the Star Wars S.E. and I couldn't see both edges of the screen within the frames of my glasses. It was surprisingly cool, given that it was an eye-candy loaded movie that I'd seen before, but I clearly prefer a bit further back if possible...)
If you can even stand watching a screen larger than 28" in SD, you must either be in Europe, or blind.
A few years ago, visiting the US, I walked into a few electronics stores. I couldn't believe how horrible the picture look at anything above a certain size (about 28-30"). I mean, the individual lines on the screens were clearly enough visible for easy counting!
Of course, a LCD/Plasma could help with the visible-line issue, but those weren't common at the time.
(Now, 720p vs 1080p is another story, except for games that needs lots of space for HUD/etc...)
"If 7 dollars is too much for an unenhanced SNES game, what do you think a fair price is, 6 dollars? "
And this is what I hate about software, I own many said games games already. Technically I still own the liscense to play the game, so why exactly should I have to pay for it if I can provide proof of purchase? Saying Nintendo loses money or some other crap is just a bunch of BS. They have oodles of cash since the Wii is successful, emulation proves people will work and give away their work for free. After all emulators are not easy to make and yet people make them because they are fans and most importantly so that they can have access to the games they purchased if in sometime in the future the hardware company goes belly up or stops selling/supporting replacements.
Right now consumer rights for digital stuff is in the dark ages, you would never sell someone a car they couldn't fix or modify, yet we do that with software and I hate it. When you see great stuff like Freespace 2 SCP http://scp.indiegames.us/news.php
It just makes me angry that old games can't be updated to work when they break because of new hardware and newer OS's, etc, because of closed source bs. Hence the emulation seen, there's DOSBOX which has been around for a while, but doing other 'newer' games is more complicated.
Why? What's the point, it can't do X. Recylced microatx... PIII with more.... Why??
Because wii can!
This whole thinking for everybody is getting hard, have enough trouble thinking for one!
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Sorry, still to expensive for some of those old games, maybe 10$ for 3 of them would be nice or something.
They are still getting a 10$ transaction but the user gets to chose his 3 games.
Sure 7$ a pop is still selling but I'd think they would be likely to sell many more at more reasonable pricing.
The 360 won't play DivX 3 files, though, and there are plenty of those remaining out in the wild. I had to install TVersity to get my 360 to play all my AVIs, and it's still not as good as Xbox Media Center. XBMC on the Wii would be a killer.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
That's what you get for eating at an airport. In Chicago.
I think you're forgetting the fact that the games put out on the Virtual Console are all ROMs of titles released years and years ago. Nintendo can charge nothing for them if they want and still not lose money on them as they already paid for the games' development (and made profits) back in the day.
Certainly the titles licensed from people like SEGA and Hudson bring a certain amount of licensing costs that Nintendo's own games don't have, but even those titles are simply digital distributions of code that would otherwise just be lying around on a hard drive taking up space.
Financially there really is no bottom limit to how much Nintendo could charge, but based on the success of their current VC system, the prices they are currently charging are not too high for the majority of gamers despite the fact that these games can be acquired with little effort for free via piracy.
In short, don't expect Nintendo to NOT drop prices based on the idea that they can't profit with lower prices for these games, but at the same time, don't expect a price drop in general simply because people find their pricing quite reasonable.
I don't know, I think that actually works a lot better than pretty much any other remote control scheme. No need to look at the remote, you've got all the controls on the screen.
Well... loading up Twilight Princess to hit a buffer overflow before you can boot the machine or switch between Wii games and media library is damn inconvenient.
All i want is Scummvm on my wii then i will be happy.
Because crying "straw-man" is fad used by unfortunate individuals trying desperately to sound intellectual. It's a term that is used mostly by people who don't appreciate the meaning. Those who do, rarely see the need to bother.
However there's no way they could sell as many ROMs at 1$ a pop as Apple can sell songs at 1$ a pop, a game lasts much longer than a song and you only need a handful of them unfinished. Also the number of games that will sell well is much smaller than the number of songs that will sell well. I'd say every artist releases an album about as often as a game company releases a game, there's both more music artists and dozens of songs per album.
If every game was 1$ you'd just buy one of those 20$ cards and can buy pretty much everything you care about for that, no?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
(you've got thousands of console games in original? Wow, that's a lot of money. Don't go around expecting everyone to have that, though)
Most people didn't buy all the games or consoles they might have wanted to play and getting them legally now isn't easy or cheap, on fleamarkets you'll easily pay the same for a game as you would for a VC download but the physical cart can end up defective. I got ROMs on the Wii for consoles I haven't even seen in stores. Pretty much anything besides SNES or Gameboy games is impossible to find now (granted, the Gameboy isn't available on the Wii yet). While it's not great if you have everything already the vast majority of people don't have everything.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
What license? Did your games come with an EULA or something? Mine didn't, just a notice that the data on the cart is covered by copyrights and trademarks, probably some patents too. This whole EULA bullshit may have made people think of software as licenses but without an EULA you just bought a physical copy you can use, nothing more, nothing less.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I believe that Nintendo just released a Wii update (v4.3) is this the previous update you're referring to which blocked Freeloader?
Exactly my problem! I have a very long living room, whith one side being made up my panorama windows. After trying a huge number of configurations, I ended up with a solution based on a projector that projects a 90" image - but I'm viewing it from my couch at a distance of 7 meters. I don't believe for a second that a HD projector would give me a significant improvement in image quality.
True - this would be a pretty interesting in theory, but overall, I can imagine this would be much better if it were homebrewed on 360 or PS3, just because the hardware is far superior. I like the Wii, I own a Wii, but I have to admit, it isn't nearly as powerful as its competitors. Good thing It doesnt have to be :-).
A-hem. Go to someone's house who has, say, a 32" HD LCDTV (or Plasma). Look at something that is NOT HD on the television. Now, play something that IS in HD (a Blu-ray disc, HDTV channel, whatever). Now, within any REASONABLE distance, if you don't have terrible vision (like, needing -4.0 or more contacts and not having them)...you WILL notice a difference.
Uhuh. Let's see, I went here, threw in a 32" TV, and according to it, the "Maximum Viewing Distance for HDTV(Fully resolved 1080i; 1920 x 1080)" is... drumroll... *4 FEET*. Yeah, that's right, the furthest you can sit from your TV is four feet if you want to fully resolve, and thus actually see, a 1080i picture.
Sorry, that ain't happening. The viewing distance from my couch averages around *10* feet, and to fully resolve a 1080i image, I'd need a *72* inch TV, at least. Of course, one doesn't need to *fully* resolve the image, but I'd still need something far larger than I would ever tolerate in a space that is *not* meant to be solely dedicated to television watching (nor does it have the space for anything much larger than a 36" widescreen TV, in any case, due to the way the space is laid out, not to mention the presence of things *other* than a TV).
There is a very clear difference between HD and SD tv, a difference that anyone can see.
Only on very large screens at relatively short distances.
HD has more detail and colors are more vibrant.
The colors in HD are not inherently more vibrant. What you are seeing is either a result of proper screen calibration, digital transmissions (something not unique to HD), or a simple placebo effect. To be perfectly honest, I suspect it's a combination of all three, and something easily doable in SD.
As for "more detail," again that only matters for very large screens at relatively short viewing distances. With a longer viewing distance or a smaller screen, the added details are too small for the human eye to recognize. While this is not exactly basic biology or optics, it's still not outside the realm of a high-school course.
I always wanted to know what a $6 milkshake tasted like.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I know some VC titles are bound to sell extremely well for 7-10 dollars, for example SMB3, mario kart etc... But they could offer some package deals that would attract more buyers to the less popular titles. Maybe packs of 10 snes games for 30 dollars. Even a subscription-based system that would grant access to all VC titles for 8-10 dollars a month might work well.
Wasn't HD invented specifically for use in smaller Japanese living quarters where the viewers typically sit closer to the TVs that we do our here in the US?
Pretty sure that is somewhere in the general narrative of HD.
Also, now that HDTVs are 16:9 the diagonal measurements are so different than the old 4:3s that it is almost worthless to compare.
For instance my 50" HDTV is really only 36 or so inches tall. Where as the old 4:3 TVs it would be like 50" tall.
Its like apples and oranges. People get scared off by the size, but they aren't really appreciating the perspective.
You also are right on when you talk about the ambiguousness of a LCD or plasma TV at home on the wall. They days of the room filling home theater are long gone.
"Its just milk and ice cream, right?"
Really? Because I've mostly seen it used appropriately here. And it is appropriate, in a debate, to point out when the other side is unfairly depicting your position. Whining about other people's use of the term 'straw-man' is a fad used by unfortunate individuals whose argumentation strategy consists of little more than straw-men, improper generalization, and ad-hominems.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I run an s-video cable out to my television for when I just can't be bothered to burn something onto DVD. Most any videocard nowadays seems to have s-video output.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I never said that you would fully resolve the distance of a picture. I just said to see a noticeable difference. And trust me, at 10 feet, you can STILL see a noticeable difference. I promise. I've done it, on more than one occasion.
Why spend 3 times as much on something the person obviously is not interested in?
DivX is a container format. Codecs are changing rapidly. If you have no possibility to upgrade/download/modify your DixX player you are screwed. Yesterday for example I had to downlad "an upgrade" (?) for the Audio. Don't ask me what, I know almost nothing from that part of the computing world. The "offical" DivX player was installed on my laptop a couple of weeks ago.
Now that Nintendo has announced the expansion of WiiWare to include new games and third-party developers, I'm a little less obsessed with hacking the Wii.
Although I like the idea of Virtual Console games, I haven't bought any yet... I don't really want to play games with a GameCube or Classic controller, I want to play games with the Wii controller! I've felt for months that Nintendo was squandering some big potential. I think being able to buy games designed for the Wii (using the Wii remote and internet connections and etc.) will REALLY improve the system.
Of course, I wish all kinds of luck to the hackers. What they are doing will also only make things better... I doubt Nintendo will ever actually give us any kind of real media playing support for example, and homebrewers will hopefully come up with some really cool stuff.
Not to mention the fact that a P3 system will use up to 30W just for the CPU (depending on clock speed), probably as much as 100W or more depending on the components inside, whereas the wii maxes out around 18W and can sleep at almost nothing and resume instantly.
everything in moderation
It';s an automatic disqualification of the point, as should any logical fallacy.
Most people aruond these parts only have one point, so it can default to a win.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I sit about 6ft away from a 46". Its very comfortable to watch :)
Not even close to "sitting front row in a movie theater". I'd say it's just about right actually.
I'll second that... XBMC rocks, though I rarely use it these days. (Mostly due to the fact that I've invested over $4k into my "toy" pc that is now hooked up to my TV/media center)
XMBC can play HD however, and the xbox can do HD (At least 720P) however the poor old 733MHz processor can have trouble decoding some formats in HD.
"Did your games come with an EULA or something? Mine didn't"
Yes actually they did, you technically don't 'own' the game only the liscense to play it, it's the same thing as a EULA essentially, I know if I dig through my old nintendo games I'll something like the EULA.
I'm actually looking to consolidate. I don't have an upscaling DVD player currently (just an normal progressive scan one), so I'm not going to miss it if my Wii played my DVDs instead.
:)
If the Wii did play DVDs, then I can get rid of the stand-alone DVD player and have one less item hooked up on the entertainment stand. I'm all for that
Pick a pen, and fake sign the disks yourself http://www.elotrolado.net/noticia_Trucha-Signer--Wii-totalmente-hackeada_14458
That's the same way the Dreamcast's GDROM worked. Same with the optimizations -- I remember that if you burned your pirated games incorrectly, you'd end up with a poor-performing game...
Those were the days, backing up my Dreamcast games over a serial connection... waiting 4 days or so for a transfer to complete... walking in the snow up hill both ways...
While the system did use CAV for GDROM discs, the real secret to GDROM was that it was just a CDROM with no error protection. By reclaiming the extra bits normally used to recover from scratches and smudges, GDROM discs were able to hold a lot more data than regular CDROMs. Of course, they were also one of least resilient media EVER created. There are games that practically have to be pirated because it's too hard to find an original disc.
GDROM was quite possibly one of the worst formats ever. And I say that as a Dreamcast fan.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Interesting, I've never seen any form of contract in any console game except Phantasy Star Online and that was just the online play terms of use. Grabbed the box of Metroid Prime 3 Corruption at random, the manual doesn't mention the word license at all, only says that using the game with illegal hardware voids the warranty and that the game is subject to copyright. Even tells you "thank you for buying this disc". Next sample, Megaman X for the SNES. No license again, only a copyright notice and the warranty again. Where exactly did you see anything like an EULA?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Oh, so thats why my 3 year old DivX-movies, and a lot of new ones, still works on my one year old DVD-player. Thats rapid.. Most DVD-players play DivX version 5 which most movies are encoded in, a lot play version 6 which some are made in. Unless you buy a real budget player without checking the versions, you shouldn't have a problem.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
If you're looking for cost effectiveness you might take a look at DLP tvs. I've got a rear projection DLP. $900 (+$100 rebate to nflshop.com) for 50" of 720p goodness.
What the fuck Burger King did you find that you can get a Whopper, fries and a drink (was it water?) for $2? That goes for around 5-6 dollars in Colorado.
Chrono Trigger is a close second, but yah, Secret of Mana is, imho, quite literally the Best Game Ever. I haven't played through any other game nearly as often as Secret of Mana. And while an emulator gives you the benefit of speed-up and being able to influence battles to the point of being invincible, having your pro-pad (shorter reaction times & auto-fire ability) on a real SNES is still better. Richard, who taped the music when riding the dragon just before the sky castle appears so he could listen to it more often
Note to self: If you c&p text into the browser, make sure you mark it as plain text..