Wii Hacked for Better Homebrew Games 196
arbourp writes to mention that hackers Michael Steil and Felix Domke have demonstrated a way to hack the Wii that makes running homebrew code much easier. "The hack advances the possibility of running homebrew code with access to full system resources on the device, not just programs that Nintendo has sanctioned. Such games might be developed to run from a DVD drive, at least in theory. No such games are available as yet and Nintendo may respond by attempting to revoke compromised encryption keys. However history shows such countermeasures are likely to ultimately prove futile."
Star wars entry point (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Star wars entry point (Score:5, Funny)
You do know that Steve Jobs has nothing to do with Nintendo, right?
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To play Sudoku in the snow?
hint hint (Score:5, Funny)
And the majority of these homebrew games look like retail games, except they're free.
Re:hint hint (Score:5, Insightful)
And the majority of these homebrew games look like retail games, except they're free.
Still, some people really are interested in real homebrew... Either learning to write it, or just using it...
Re:hint hint (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:hint hint (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBMC [wikipedia.org]
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/ [xboxmediacenter.com]
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The Nano has a chip that accelerates (or, more probably, completely does) decoding of H.264. I don't know if the Wii has a chip to do that or not. If the Wii has the requisite chip, then as long as you stay within the chip's specs it would have no problem. If it doesn't or your video doesn't fit the specs (bitrate too high, for example) it's be on the CPU. My guess is that the CPU couldn't play full screen video (My PowerBook G4 1.67 had trouble playing back anything above 640x480 H.264, so I wouldn't think
Re:hint hint (Score:4, Informative)
Try digging up a copy of the CoreAVC codec (assuming you're running Windows). My 2GHz AthlonXP went from stuttering on 720p H.264 files to playing them perfectly smoothly (~80-85% proc) with CoreAVC.
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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBMC [wikipedia.org]
Again with its hardware, the Xbox does not have enough resources to play MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) encoded videos with CABAC and deblocking if the video-resolution is higher than 352x288 pixels. If videos are encoded without CABAC and deblocking then the Xbox hardware can handle up to 720x576 pixels video-resolution. It is generally better to encode videos to MPEG-4 (like DivX or XviD) instead. Then the video's native-resolution can be anything up to 960x540 pixels (also known as HRHD resolution).
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Re:hint hint (Score:4, Interesting)
It's being designed with Ubuntu in mind and already has very good hardware support.
They are working on a direct port right now and as soon as they have that stable, they are going to start adding features like time shifting, video recording, etc...
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The Wii isn't much more powerful than an original Xbox, and in some ways is less powerful. There is no chance that it will be able to play high definition any better than an Apple TV can. (Meaning it CAN, but it's not pretty or fast. Anything with lots of colors or moving objects will bring the system to it's knees.)
Nah, a nice Linux box with good hardware is the wave of the future, as far as high definition personal home media distribution ser
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You're not actually putting all of your decoding hardware in one box in your basement, are you?
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What I have right now are a couple of low end server machines running Linux Ubuntu, with RAID 1 redundancy. (I'm up to 4+ terabytes.) They each have a gigabit Ethernet card, running through my network router. I've got a wireless router, but it isn't really fast enough for multiple media players, so I have wired connections to three media PC's. The first is a Xbox with XBMC. The second is an XBMC Linux Machin
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It would be great to pull up sky.fm or di.fm and listen to that on your home stereo.
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I have a Wii next to my stereo, already hooked up to the stereo. It would be nice if the web browser I have on that Wii would work like the one I have downstairs with the computers. I don't want to run wire all over the house.
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Tversity (Score:2)
- Configuration options are a bit limited (no choice of framerate, for example).
- My Wii is connected by 801.11b, which limits quality of the videos (from what I can tell). I have the video
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This is an off-the-cuff guess, but I imagine what's going on is FLV files get cached as they're downloaded so you can seek through them. If I'm right, you're probably stuck unless there is a way to get Opera to cache to an SD card or USB drive. (Given the nature of the console, that doesn't strike
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Slick interface, but the video is a bit limited.
I am dreaming of a Wii 1080p DVD+bluray+HDDVD box... The wii "OS" interface is about the only thing slicker than the Tivo IMHO.
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Yeah like Nintendo needs to worry about software piracy, since they only have the top selling console for the past year, having outsold both PS3 and Xbox360 consoles by factors of 2:1 [next-gen.biz], and they're the only console maker that actually makes a profit from the consoles [wikipedia.org], $49 for every console sold in the US.
So no matter how much software someone pirated Nintendo still made $49 off that Wii bought in the US.
Another one of these "generalization" comments? (Score:2)
You sound just like those congressmen who proclaim "p2p and the internet are just dens of piracy, we should shut them down and replace them with tv 2.0", then introduce monstrosities like the "induce act" and the DMCA
ever heard of XBMC?
Everyone I know used it on their moded xbox
It makes the token piece of #$@ they put into the 360 look like it was coded by lemurs.
I can't wait for at least one of these consoles to be fully opened to x
I'd be happy to sell you a question mark... (Score:2)
Who do you think you are really "proclaiming" the majority use of a system.
Just a regular guy who's not too stubborn or pragmatic to accept the obvious?
I'm saying piracy is common, not that everybody, or even the majority, does it. And I'm saying that the hardware manufacturers who make piracy easy (people who make things like R4DS, etc.) mostly stand on the shoulders of the homebrew community - and everybody therefore takes it for granted that homebrew = piracy - despite the fact that the homebrew folks generally want nothing to do with it. And so (news flash!) I told people n
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And the majority of these homebrew games look like retail games, except they're free.
Actually, the Wii has been hacked to allow pirated games for about a year (it was presented at the previous CCC). This new hack will eventually allow people to run unsigned code, whereas the previous hack did not. Basically all the old hack did was provide a way to trick the Wii into thinking that burned DVDs were originals (current modchips sit between the DVD drive and the motherboard to intercept the "is this DVD real?" signal), but the content on the DVD still needed to be digitally signed by Nintendo.
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Wii and homebrew (Score:2)
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Game consoles have never interested me, but I'd get one if it was hackable enough to run my own programs with full access to all the interesting bits of the hardware.
I suppose once I owned a game console, then I'd probably end up with a game or two. So maybe not bad news for Nintendo.
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Then get yourself a Nintendo DS (140) and R4DS(50). That how God's intended portable gaming should be: you can download and play rips of official games - including ones not released in your region; you can download and play homebrew games; you can play MP3s and DPGs (DS's version of MPEG1 video).
More games, cheaper than Wii, easy to buy (compared to Wii in US) and best of all - it's portable ^_^
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1) It bombed horribly in Japan. At that point in time, the Japanese market had a much bigger influence on gaming than it does now (EA & Ubisoft were much smaller than the are now, for starters, and MS wasn't in the market). Also, with Nintendo being a Japanese company, they generally care more about doing well in Japan than they do about the rest of the world.
2) It sold great for about 3 years, then sales slowed to a crawl. Lots of games were released for it early on, but develo
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Bad publicity is quite real, and is becoming more so all the time.
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He prattles on about the iPhone being "damned" and "not a good phone" sight unseen for months prior to its launch, describes various scenarios where an iPhone could result in murder, rape, or the death of teenagers, goes on at length about about a security holocaust facing anyone who might buy one, then declares that at the end of the year that the iPhone was "a game changer."
And what about John Dvorak? Neither have ever been right about anything, but it hasn't stopp
Smart Thinking (Score:5, Informative)
I love the way they did, it shows good ingenuity. If you watch the video, they explain that they can get into GameCube compatibility mode (what is used for GC style home brew) but that the ATI chip acts as a gateway to the extended RAM and other new neat stuff (SD card slot, BlueTooth, etc.).
By physically tying address lines on the memory chips, they could circumvent the address lock and read areas of memory they shouldn't be able to. Through this, they dumped the RAM though the controller ports (using them as serial ports) and were able to pick through it and start decoding it to find things like the signature that let them break out.
Very neat. I love reading about this kind of stuff.
It will be very interesting to see what people do with this. I never really heard about any interesting XBox homebrew, just running Linux and XBMC type stuff. Ditto with the 'cube. But the Wii should prove interesting.
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It's not better, just different :). In my case, I did it for the cost, which was almost zero (got the Xbox for free and modded it without a chip).
I've also had trouble getting video from computer to display properly on a television, as the la
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As for your link, that refers only to linux support, other homebrew applications (those made with the xdk) run fine on 1.6 machines.
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It was very interesting how they got homebrew running on the original xbox.
He narrowed down which chip the key might be stored on and knew where it needed to go.
He built a device which read the traffic on the bus while the xbox was booting up.
The key was stored in there.
He knew what kind of key it was because he got a ROM reader and disassembled the code.
After that he used a sliding window attack on the captured data and found what they needed.
Re:Smart Thinking (Score:5, Interesting)
One DS firmware update modified the boot code to reject startup memory addresses that weren't in main memory.
The only other change Nintendo did with an affect on homebrew was to make it so the firmware could only be modified if you shorted a jumper. But that wasn't an attempt to prevent homebrew, that was just preventing bad code from bricking the DS.
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Linux works out of the box on PS3s. The big problem is that it doesn't give the linux environment access to all of the 3D features of the PS3, which basically cripples it for any sort of game use (which is probably intentional.)
If Sony enabled access to the PS3's 3D hardware within Linux I would buy it in a heartbeat, because I'm pretty sure a good all-around media player would follow that would support 1080p content (the Xbox Media Center project already has a Linux vers
Pressed Disk (Score:2)
I understand they can revoke the encryption key with an update but if certain games only had one key, wouldn't revoking the key break the older games? And couldn't they just dump the memory again to find the new key?
From what Ive read so far on this hack. It seems it can be as eas
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USB. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:USB. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Botnet? (Score:2, Informative)
I can't wait for my Wii to get compromised. Awesome.
(Yes, I have a firewall, which - statistically speaking - is better than yours.)
Wired LAN (Score:2)
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Not Steil and Domke (Score:4, Informative)
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I am the one talking for about five minutes in the YouTube video; although I wrote the software that actually modified the disc image to run unsigned code, I had a considerable amount of help over the past several months from tmbinc, Sii, Costis, and adhs. (tmbinc was the only other one who attended the conference, and h
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GameCube HomeBrew Already Available (Score:2)
The breakthrough here is giving the GameCube HomeBrew Scene access to the Wii's unique features (Motion Sensitive Controllers shown in video)
Ah yes, it's just for homebrew (Score:2)
Homebrew has been on Wii for ages (Score:2)
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Btw. Nintendo still has not added scalers to their emus, so that the Virtual console is basically useless on many modern lcd tvs with older games.
The emus launched via SD launcher had them in.
According to rumors on the net there is a new version out which works again, but before I drop down any more money into Datels mouth I am going to wait how stabl
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I can't use a Wii controller on my PC.
Well at least without a soldering iron.
Re:Why a console? Why not your own breed? (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I've fiddled with the GBA and I'm looking into the DS. I haven't done any of the home consoles. I've done stuff on my Mac and on PCs for years and years and years, from native to Java. I've even fiddled with TI calculators.
It's just a different experience. There is no challenge in making a Mario style game on the PC. On a system that is more constrained (like a handheld) there is challenge. There are other attributes as well. I can take a game I make for the DS with me easily, where my Mac is a little heav
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Many times I've been thinking - why is it so important to break the latest console to work with your "insert-homebrew-here"? Is it because it's some hardware that most have been importing in to your homes? is it because of the "scene" or is it because you "can"?.
I don't know. Did Edmund Hillary climb Everest because he thought there was prime real estate up there?
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The keys are stored in protected memory. This memory is not accessable under normal conditions, as the gatekeeper chip disallows access to this. When the Wii is used in GC mode, this chip is disabled, but so is addressing to the upper regions of memory, so you still can't address it properly. BUT if you use a small peice of metal and join some of the address bus lines, in order to address higher addresses, these keys can be recovered.
Watch the video, very int
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DRM and Copy Protection Schemes are cancer.
My opinion, but no DRM ain't cancer, at least a great deal of the time. Insofar as I'm not allowed to backup my own physical media and use it how I want, yeah, it's a violation of my property rights (in my opinion).
Insofar as they protect content that is 'rented' temporarily, streamed or downloaded, DRM is gold. Insofar as they protect my right to sell my art without assholes taking it and giving it away fro free (or charging money for it, though this is uncommon in the US), DRM is gold.
I like being able
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Why do people bother with OS projects when they could invest their time in something useful like curing cancer?
Why do you bother with posting on Slashdot when you could invest your time in something useful like curing cancer, or even OS projects?
XNA Creators Club expires after 12 months (Score:2)
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At least with music, there is some genuine confusion. "unauthorized copying", EULA type agreements, etc. You have been licensed the right to the IP, which is the point that anti-DRM advocates post constantly.
No such thing happens. When you buy a CD you own a physical object which you may use in any way consistant with the law. You may not copy it, because that is against copyright law. Similarly, you may