Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo Blocks Homebrew Installation
ElementC writes "Sometime yesterday Nintendo uploaded the latest Wii system update. This update quietly patches a few bugs that allowed the installation of both homebrew and warez apps. Currently installed apps such as the Homebrew Channel and the video DVD library, DVDX, are reportedly not affected. Those not installing this update are blocked out of the Wii Shop channel and in the future may be blocked out of certain games. Team Twiizers cracked the last update within about eight hours. They're already on the case. Readers familiar with the architecture of the Wii will find the list of currently discovered changes interesting."
It renamed Wii Points to Nintendo Points, and added clearer warnings about what controllers you have to own in order to play a game before you purchase the game.
8 hours is significant because I believe for that update, Nintendo had something like a three or four month development, testing, release schedule.
It was actually a half year cycle. Nintendo released IOS37, and it got a few months of production testing. Then Nintendo released IOS30 and IOS31 with the signing bug fix backported from IOS37, and it also got a few months of production testing. Now we're seeing the signing bug fix in every IOS major version.
Did the update actually do anything to the Wii Shop Channel (other than making it inaccessible without the update)? Or was that simply a ruse to get everybody to apply an update that is really designed for a totally different purpose?
Many systems that work with an online service have a policy that you must have the latest version and if you don't it'll be upgraded first, even those where there's no such ulterior motive to be found. I think it's mostly a case of ease of testing and support, rather than test a huge range of versions all they need to know is that build 23425 of the client works with build 5435 of the server. If someone calls support and have a problem with the service, everything is where you'd expect things to be in the latest version. Of course to them it's not a downside that things like homebrew are blocked either, but I don't think it's the main reason.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
DVD Player. Wow, I can avoid spending $30 on a dedicated DVD player, AND get more wear and tear on the DVD drive motor.
I think the draw of playing DVD-Video and DivX video on the Wii was supposed to be the fact that a DVD player takes shelf space (especially in Japan and other locales with overpriced real estate), and you need an extra set of five cables going into your switch box.
I believe games that require an update will come with the update on the game DVD as well. Mario Galaxy was this way.
You are all a bunch of idots.
Every TV since the rise of consoles, pretty much, has been capable of running NTSC signals, or even PAL signals using a 60Hz refresh rate.
You'd be hard pressed to find a TV that had ports on it for attaching a console that couldn't flip between different systems at will based on the input signal.
The distribution rights tend to be the thing that really slows down the release of games, videos and music in a region - it's almost never a technical problem any more.
That's essentially what happens.
The PSP hackers (Dark Alex in particular) pretty much know every trick Sony has in their arsenal. The only unknown is which particular bit Sony is going to try in each time (what the particular decompression keys will be for example). Making a new PSP custom firmware for these guys is really pretty straightforward; they unpack the firmware, doublecheck their CFW code against the new code, doublecheck any newly-appearing functions, and release the patched version that pretty much patches the same bullcrap stuff that's just been in each official firmware release since 2.00.
It's the companies that are reacting - they "patch" for the repairs the "hackers" have made to restore proper function to their Defective-By-Design products. With this latest bit, I fully expect we're going to start to see PSP-style custom firmware installations for the Wii that begin to open the platform up more fully and allow it greater flexibility to be used to its fullest capability.
That was me. I did it.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
To the best of my knowlege, there is nothing wrong, legally or morally, with format-shifting games you already own. In order to be strictly legal, you need to do the ROM-dumping yourself rather than downloading ROM images someone else has already dumped. Running an emulator is totally legal -- this was tested in court back in the early 90s when the first console emulators came out.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.