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Nintendo Announces Wii Wireless Router
CVG reports that Nintendo has announced a wireless router, the purpose of which is to "streamline the process of getting your console online." It will be released later this month in Japan. No word was given regarding when the rest of the world will see it. Pictures of the router are available at Famitsu, though the text is in Japanese. 1Up also points out statements from Nintendo execs discussing the limited storage for the Wii. They say there will be a "better solution" than a hard drive.
There will probably be a homebrew solution for backing up and restoring channels before Nintendo introduces their solution, if not already.
Of course Nintendo will probably not like it, since you know... piracy. Though the channels are probably encrypted or tied to the console or something like that.
The router should be a better option than the wifi dongle. That thing was a bit invasive. I don't like having 1000 network connections in my Network Connections dialog that I only use rarely. VMWare, Bluetooth, Hamachi... I'd also like it if my protocols would reappear in network connection properties so I could set my DNS servers, and I'd really like it if my old nVidia drivers would stop BSoDing, or the new ones wouldn't completely break OpenGL, and if TF2 would stop randomly disconnecting me from servers with an error code noone seems to know how to fix. We all have our dreams.
Oh yeah, I really didn't like how the dongle forced ICS on. That seemed unnecessary (and it was... I got it working with ICS off when I bridged the dongle's network with my LAN).
WII Lanparty in the works.
would be if they would make it possible to read games right off of the SD card directly without having to transfer them back and forth.
See what I did there?
Of course Nintendo will probably not like it, since you know... piracy.
One stance: "Homebrew is piracy. Every download of Lockjaw is a lost sale of Tetris." But who would agree with that stance?
Are you referring to the Nintendo DS, which still supports WEP only (as far as I know)?
The Wii has supported WPA from the get-go. The Nintendo Wifi USB Connection (now discontinued), supported WEP for the DS because the DS supports WEP only. Many sites recommended it as a cheap and easy way to activate and deactivate a quick wifi network for your DS without stepping the whole network down to WEP (although I'm unable to tell if it uses WPA for Wii-only communications when using the default Nintendo application).
As it is, though, the Wii is plenty happy to connect to a WPA or WPA2 network.
As for better than a hard drive, I'd imagine that simply fixing the firmware to allow for "merging" the internal flash and a simple 4GB SD card would work just fine.
Yes I was refering to the DS, sorry I should have specified, my bad. Yes the Wii does indeed play nicely with my WPA2.
The WiFi dongle I have running on a VirtualBox guest and it's ok, still a little bit of an inconvience switching on and off a virtual or plugging/unplugging the device. At least it tries to lock it down to certain Nintendo devices.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
from the send-data-through-the-wiither dept.
Damnit, editors, stop spying on me! "Wiither" is the name I gave my Wii.
Soylens viridis homines es
Well, it's likely you'll be able to stick games on the SD cards. It looks like a much more "controlable format".
I mean, we all hate to say it, but we know it's going to happen. Every DRM can and will be cracked though, it's just about them making sure it won't be during a sales period...
Well, it's likely you'll be able to stick games on the SD cards...
Already possible on the wii. Although, you can also simply delete downloaded games, and re-download them later for no additional charge.
Both of these take some tinkering around, and some people might not consider either to be acceptable solutions. It would be very nice to use some sort of PC-based game server, you would be limited only by your PC's harddrive capacity. Although Nintendo would probably want to stay as far away from the PC as possible, for several reasons.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Since wireless on the Wii seems to work, is this supposed to be some kind of Snap server/router combo or is this one of those "ease" by way of giving the customer "choice" to increase "value" scenarios? If this is the latter, no thanks.
The Nintendo Wifi USB Connection (now discontinued)
Curious... they've recently reappeared in my local Game store (unless they just happened to find some in a cupboard somewhere)
You can store the games on SD cards, only you can't play them from it, which means to play games not on the actual Wii memory itself takes far too time and effort
If you buy one of their routers, it will come with 12GB of online swap space for your Wii's internal memory. To quote Nintendo's future explanations of the service: "Look, its better than a HD because there are no moving parts and we make nightly backups."
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
Actually, if you read the original interview (in spanish) here
it literally says:
"Estamos trabajando en una soluciÃn de almacenamiento y es especialmente importante en América, porque nuestros consumidores estan usando wii points para la consola virtual y Wiiware, y quiero que la gente tenga la expectativa correcta; nunca hemos dicho que sera un disco duro, ni hemos mencionado como solucionaremos esta cuestion, pero vamos a entregar una mejor manera de almacenamiento para los juegos, de la que hoy tenemos"
The important part says:
"We have never mentioned how we will solve this matter (storage), but we will deliver a better solution to storage than the current one."
It _nowhere_ confirms it WON'T be a HD (although you could _guess_ it won't be). Some news sites have even taken it as far as saying: "they will deliver a better solution than a hard drive" - which is nowhere near reality if you read the original.
I think they may provide a hybrid internet based storage. Basically, you can keep your most recently used stuff on flash, but the older and larger files get pushed onto a file server. It would be really cool if it was mostly (as much as doesn't affect playability of games) transparent.
If it's meant to help kids connect their Wii's to the internet it likely has an auto-pairing feature that will be introduced with an upcoming firmware patch. So in Wii system menu they just say 'Use Nintendo Wii Router' and it finds the closest one, generates a random encryption key, and automatically pairs with it rather than the current configuration required on both ends. The router itself may even only accept client connections from MAC addresses that are assigned to the Wii.
The switch on the back that changes it from router to bridge confirms that thing thing is most likely not manually configurable and will do all the encryption/pairing automatically.
I am confused though why this was designed as a router and not simply a Wii access point? Surely most home users with broadband already own some form of router/switch they could just plug it right into, and the fact it has no built in switch seems to go along with that model.
This doesn't look interesting to me but all the kids/moms/non-techy people out there who don't know how to configure their home Linksys or DLinks will find something like this useful.
Every DRM can and will be cracked though
Can? Probably. Will? Not so much.
Like others pointed out, it's been possible to store games on SD for a long time now. Nobody's cracked the protection on those yet. You can't copy them, and you can't create your own and load them onto a card. Same goes for the Wii game discs.
There's plenty of DRM schemes out there that haven't been cracked. It's the ones that are added onto an insecure format as an afterthought that are easy to get rid of, like copy-protected CDs, or the lucky few that are just badly designed, like CSS on DVDs, that fall.
Looking at the product page over at Nintendo, it would appear this device uses Buffalo Technology's AOSS solution. The Wikipedia entry describes AOSS as "AOSS (AirStation One-Touch Secure System) is a system by Buffalo Technology which allows a secure wireless connection to be set up with the push of a button. Recent AirStation residential gateways incorporate a button on the unit to let the user initiate this procedure.".
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Duh, they already have this feature. If you delete the game file, you just have to head to the shop channel and download it again for free.
You still have to keep the save files, but they take up like one or two blocks.
The games can be copied to SD cards. Admittedly, nobody has properly cracked the DRM on them, but it's easier to install a homebrew emulator and put an unprotected ROM file on it.
you can install the Internet channel from a WAD file
So why can't I install Doom from a WAD file?
"They didn't lift a finger to do something about home security."
Unlike the DS, the Wii supports WPA2. Not even the Xbox 360 does that.
Or store the data on a computer hard drive located elsewhere.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not many.
Just WMP's DRM, and even then it was reverse-engineered a long time ago, and likely solved "officially" by the MPlayer/ffmpeg team.
I wouldn't doubt that there's "cracks" for the Wii's SD card DRM that just haven't surfaced yet. There's a lot of ways to keep things under wraps on the Internet.
It's just, nobody really cares about breaking some forms of DRM... And yeah it's too bad you can't play off the SD cards yet. Maybe it's a speed issue? =/
I wouldn't doubt that there's "cracks" for the Wii's SD card DRM that just haven't surfaced yet.
That makes no sense whatsoever. There's no reason at all to keep something like that hidden. The only thing it's good for is fame, and you don't get that by shutting up.
It's easy to make strong copy protection on custom hardware. Just use public-key crypto and keep the keys in hardware. That's what the Wii does, and nobody's managed to touch it yet. The only things we have so far are cumbersome workarounds using bugs in games, and hardware modifications, neither of which in any way attacks the algorithms used.
But you don't get raped by new kids who ruin everything by attraction a big company's attention.
It's only a matter of time before somebody hits the Wii with hardware equipement.
Or alternatively, makes a better emulator. Dolphin can boot Wii games. Doesn't get passed the main screen but can boot 'em. There are ways to get the "WiiKey" which is from what I can understand the encryption system.
There are already modchips for the Wii. No need to crack the SD encryption.
... the Puu?
Nah, that's a sh*t name.
Do as you would be done to.
Try coming up with your own ideas, shitface.
No idea comes out of nowhere; everything is derivative of something. Linux is derivative of UNIX. GNOME is derivative of Mac OS and Windows. Animal Crossing is Harvest Moon without the speed-up.