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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
.. 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.
...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.
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!"
Linux + mythfrontend + wiimote sounds like a pretty killer multimedia option. And that's just the first thing that came to mind.
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 think you mean "milkshake".
how to invest, a novice's guide
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
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
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
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.