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I don't care about an SNES emulator. I just want a Divix player.

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'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.