Twilight Hack Defeats Wii Menu Update 3.3

Croakyvoice writes "Only days after Nintendo shipped Wii Menu 3.3, which stopped the Twilight Hack from working, the team lead by Bushing brought out a new version of the Homebrew enabling hack for the Nintendo Wii using the Zelda Game and a hacked save game."

Comments

open works better

[drDugan]

when will these companies get it - if done well, open systems work better in a globally connected world.

billions of monkeys typing on computers will inevitably create a small handful that can and will consistently break your closed source world.

Re:open works better

[mrsteveman1]

I don't believe what you just said represents 2 mutually exclusive paths, things can be open and stable at the same time.

Your lowest common denominator consumer isn't going to be screwing with the system, so the fact that its open and not locked doesn't affect them, certainly it won't suddenly make their system unstable, remember most people don't hack around in these things.

The real push here is to prevent any perceived piracy risk by preventing backups from playing.

Re:open works better

[dissy]

The vast majority of the people out there buying stuff just want to pay, plug, and play. That means standards, simplicity, and - unfortunately - lockdown. I have to call bullshit and a half on this line of reasoning.

Lets go with a famous slashdot car analogy, that happens to fit perfectly well.

My car's hood is not locked requiring a special key that only the dealer has.
I personally however am not mechanically inclined enough to do much more than check fluids in my car. I *do* take it to a mechanic to have it worked on. I am like your wii's lowest common denominator except for cars.

Now, add lock down. A special key is required to open the hood. Only the dealers have these keys.
Suddenly, every single person that liked tinkering under the hood is screwed. They have to resort to quasi-legal methods to do with their property as they wish. Those people know better than to call the dealer expecting a replacement when they know it was them monkeying with it that broke it.

I however am not affected by this change. My car still runs, and the procedure is basically the same, other than I have to go to the original dealer and get raped by their 10x higher prices, but since my usual mechanic wont have the key, i get screwed too in a way.

Leaving the wii unlocked to modding can't possibly effect the people who will not be modding it!
It only prevents those of us who want to do with our property as we wish, from being able to do so.

Re:open works better

[Brigade]

Wow .. you just described my absolute hatred of Apple and their philosophy.

What you have here is two distict, yet separate groups:

The idiot-proof, lowest-common-denominator, who wants things to work (and simply).
The more adventurous, possibly more knowledgeable individuals who like options.

I will NEVER purchase an iAnything. Why? Because I like to tweak, tinker, and have options. That's why I have an 8GB Nokia that uses a standard USB port to talk to any computer (and the phone says "What do you want me to be? A USB HDD? Maybe Sync with your phone software? How about a normal MP3 player?"), a Creative Zen for MP3s/Videos on the go, and a PC.

The problem with a locked-down, "Do it our way only" philosophy is it encourages laziness and contentment. How many of us got curious, or felt adventurous enough, to tinker with something technological (broken or not) just to figure out how it works (or even make it better or more suited to our needs)? Which, through trial and error, only encouraged us to venture out further and learn even more when our curiousity was piqued? If we never had the oportunity to break something or toy with the horizons on our own, we'd never be as knowledgeable in a technological fashion as we are. (Referring here to fellow /.'ers).

Re:open works better

[LS]

I have no idea how this got modded insightful. Saying that opening a system makes it unstable is like saying that removed locks from the doors of a house will make it fall down. The stability of a system is correlated with its quality, not whether it is open or not.

LS

Re:open works better

[PCPackrat]

This isn't lockdown. There are many tools available to read the diag codes from your car. His $20,000 tool and 2 modules covers most vehicles. But as an end user, you can buy a scan tool exclusively for your vehicle for under $300. If your vehicle is 96 or newer then it's OBDII and the tools are even cheaper as they have standardized the language cars speak.

Score

[Plazmid]

Hackers- 1 Nintendo- 0

Re:Score

[shird]

Wouldn't it be:
Hackers: 2, Nintento: 1

Re:Score

[puddnhead7]

Naw, it's,

Hackers: 10, Nintento: 01

Re:wdim

[New_Age_Reform_Act]

It allows you to run any type of code in the Wii, let's say, Linux.

Easter Egg

[ProdigySim]

Take note of the nice easter egg they left in for Nintendo to find:

The Twilight Hack Song
---------
This was a triumph.
I'm making note here:
HACKED AGAIN.
It's hard to overstate our satisfaction.

Team Twiizers
We do what we must because we can.
For the good of all of us, except the ones who pirate.
But there's no sense crying over every quick plug.
We just keep on trying while there's still one more bug.
And the homebrew comes back, and we make a neat hack.
For the people whose Wiis want new life.

I'm not even angry.
I'm being so sincere right now.
Even though they broke the hack and patched it.
And fixed IOS30.
And broke every fake signed disc out there.
As they failed it hurt because...
They were attacking homebrew!
Now these quick hack fixes have some beautiful holes,
So we found them fast and easily met our goals.
And I'm glad we got burned.
Think of all the things we learned.
For the people whose Wiis want new life!

Go ahead and patch it.
I think I'd like to have some fun.
Maybe you'll find an undisclosed bug.
Maybe that huge one.
That was a joke, haha, fat chance!
Anyway, this homebrew's great. It's also legal to use.
Look at me still talking, when there's hacking to do.
It might take three months,
but they'll patch this one too.
I've experiments to run, there's reversing to be done.
On the people whose Wiis want new life.

And believe me the Wiis want new life!
I'm busy hacking and they want new life.
I feel FANTASTIC and they'll get new life.
While you're dying they'll still be alive.
And when you're dead they'll still have some life.
STILL ALIVE,

still alive.

Re:They now charge for the Internet Channel

[EvolutionsPeak]

My gf and I bought a pair of handcuffs last week and I have to say that they are much more fun than my PC.

Re:They now charge for the Internet Channel

[Anonymous Coward]

I will say (and I will say it anonymously, as even the vaguest breath of this opinion is karmic suicide on Slashdot), your sense of entitlement is quite overinflated. You seem to be under the impression that anything with silicon in it must be open to hacking and supported in such a hackable state by the manufacturers . If you can't run $os_of_choice on it for God only knows what reason (you haven't run it enough on your PC?), it is not only Flawed(tm) but immoral.

Seriously. It's a game console. It's not a $250 shortcut to a PC. Why on earth do you (I mean you, specifically, apparently an ardent PC user) want a web browser on a console? You can't just use a console to play games and a PC to do work?

And if you ARE one of the elusive homebrewers who actually want to make new games for the Wii (not Yet Another Damned Emulator), you are aware that the Wiimote's had fairly stable drivers for most major operating systems for some time now? I mean, if you actually want to develop for the Wii's unique features, I can get behind that the whole way. It's just that you don't need to hack the Wii to do so.

Just my opinion. While everyone else is struggling to figure out how to play old games from their past consoles on the Wii (in addition to their PC, XBox360, PS3, etc, etc), I'm having fun playing Wii games on the Wii and doing work on my rather a bit open PC.

Re:They now charge for the Internet Channel

[Yosho]

For a while, Opera was giving away their browser for Wii users. Now you have to pay if you want to access the Internet using your Wii, and Opera is your only choice. There's been some talk about Firefox on the Wii but, as far as I can tell, that's all it is: talk.

You realize that Nintendo and Opera have always been perfectly up front and clear about their intentions with this regard, right? They had announced that Opera for the Wii would be free for only a limited time before it was even released.

Nintendo's intentions

[grantek]

You know, I don't think Nintendo were really serious about "blocking homebrew on the Wii once and for all" with this update. From what I've read the system files were datestamped months ago, implying rigorous testing and a philosophy above all of not bricking any wiis even where the exploit was installed. Given that effort, I don't think they could have been stupid enough to think they were permanently closing anything. I think it's just a token effort to say they disapprove of doing things the non-Nintendo way (a fair enough position if you're proud of your product), and maintaining a healthy level of FUD about third-party code that isn't based on any official API for the wii.

Re:What can you do with this hack?

[cigawoot]

Seriously. Because a lot of times "homebrew" is merely a code word for "illegally copied games" (oh, wait.. let's call them "backups", yeah.. that sounds much better).

If it allows you to write your own software for the Wii (is there an SDK publicly available?).. well, then we're talking and this is something to get excited about.

1) Homebrew doesn't mean "illegally copied games."

2) There is a sort of crude SDK out there, google it.

Please, before you open your mouth understand that not all homebrewers are pirates. We pay for our VC/WiiWare games (or just choose not to use the service). We just want to do MORE then what Nintendo is willing to do, like playing out of region games (Using Gecko Region Free) or other things as people write software, such as a POP3 email client, emulators, Doom, etc.

Re:What can you do with this hack?

[marcansoft]

Let's set thing straight. So far, homebrew on the Wii is an entirely different playfield from copied games. To play games on DVD-Rs, you need to hardware mod your drive, period.

Now, when you get to Virtual Console/WiiWare piracy, things get a little muddier. Unfortunately, if you can run homebrew, then you can effectively pirate VC games, because the terribly broken security means that you can pretty much just install them and they'll work. This might change in the future, when Nintendo fixes the problems.

Our (Team Twiizers') goal is to enable homebrew on the Wii, not piracy. We're not going to go out of our way to prevent piracy, but we also try to come up with methods of running homebrew that don't directly enable piracy. However, we can't work around the fact that, ultimately, if you can run unsigned code, then that code might be a game. We do have the advantage that pirates don't really have much of clue overall (so far), which is why we haven't seen a Wii ISO loader that can run games from an SD card yet. We sure as heck aren't going to write it, but if someone does, there's not much we can do about it.

As for homebrew, there is certainly a public, free, open source SDK available based on the GNU toolchain and an open source library to access the Wii hardware. In fact, most of the Wii's hardware is supported. Full graphics (though the API is mostly undocumented, it's all there), Wii Remote, SD card access, Gamecube pads, networking (WiFi or ethernet), USB mass storage, partial sound (no hardware acceleration yet), etc. See devkitpro for the toolchain and wiibrew for the community wiki.