Wii Update 4.2 Tries (and Fails) To Block Homebrew 520
marcansoft writes "On September 28, Nintendo released a Wii update, titled 4.2. This update was targeted squarely at homebrew, performing sweeping changes throughout the system. It hardly achieved that goal, though, because just two days later a new version of the HackMii installer was released that brings full homebrew capabilities back to all Wii consoles, including unmodified consoles running 4.2. However, as part of their attempt to annoy homebrew users, Nintendo updated the lowest level updateable component of the Wii software stack: boot2 (part of the system bootloader chain). Homebrew users have been using BootMii to patch boot2 in order to gain low level system access and recovery functions (running Linux natively, fixing bricks, etc). The update hasn't hindered this, as users can simply reinstall BootMii after updating (it is compatible with the update). But there's a much bigger problem: Nintendo's boot2 update code is buggy."
Read on for more details.
"Boot2 had never been updated in retail consoles until now. During BootMii's development, its authors noticed that Nintendo's code had critical bugs and could sometimes permanently brick a console by writing incorrect or unchecked data to flash memory, so they decided to write their own, much safer flashing code. Now, Nintendo has pushed a boot2 update to all Wii users, and the results are what was expected: users are reporting bricks after installing 4.2 on unmodified consoles. Nintendo is currently attempting to censor posts and remove references to homebrew. It is worth noting that the new boot2 does not attempt to block anything or offer any additional protection or functionality. Its sole purpose is to simply replace current versions which may or may not have been modified with BootMii. Another interesting tidbit is that Nintendo is not believed to have any method to repair this kind of brick at a factory, short of replacing the entire motherboard."
Why is that legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have buy a machine, not a license. If you want to open it, and mod it on any way you want. Is just a tiny mountain of chips and transistors. You could break it in pieces and use it to fix your refrigerator. Any law that let the creator of the machine perpetuate this locking trough anti-user changes sould get a fine, and any law that help then do that, sould be reverted, and the legislators of these laws be kicked in the ass with a boot.
Re:Why is that legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's legal because the same people who invented the DMCA invented other laws too.
Until they push these insanities to the point that they get a revolution from the bottom.
Re:Why is that legal? (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean from the top.
The people sit at the top level of authority, and that power flows downward to the state government, then the continental government. By revolting the people are merely taking-back the powers/rights that were illegally stolen from them by the lower levels.
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>>>Your conjectures are nice, but they're purely theoretical
Not at all. I don't know about your country but in the U.S. the "people are at the top" principle is the foundation of this society. To say otherwise is to believe the lies of the politicians, and thereby make yourself a serf and them the ultimate masters. Don't just voluntarily become a serf.
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Too bad it turns out the people with guns are the ones that are the most happy to hand over their rights, just so long as they get to keep their guns.
Re:Why is that legal? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Why is that legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
What you're telling people to do is fraud, which is a felony. The serials won't match, so the switch can be detected trivially. Congratulations, you've incited people to easily-detectable crimes. Not very smart.
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>>>fraud, which is a felony.
Yes turning people's consoles into bricks IS fraud, and both the U.S. and EU governments should drag Nintendo into court and rape them for millions of dollars in punishment. BUT until that happens (if ever), we the people have a right to replace the consoles that Nintendo turned into trash, just the same as you have a right to shoot someone who stabs you in the stomach. It's called self-defense - protecting yourself from getting screwed.
Yes, but Nintendo has a defense that Average Joe Sixpack doesn't have -- a large team of attorneys and enough money to throw around to shut up anybody attacking them.
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Look, I don't think it's wrong to do what you describe. If I did, I would have said so. I said what you did was stupid, which is another thing entirely.
If you were going to do something like this, it would be smartest to do it in person and with cash. The paranoid could buy in one store and return in another. This unfortunately shifts some of the load onto the retailer; if you bought your console at a big box store you can go and do this at the same kind of store with a fairly clear conscience IMO. After al
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Actually your proposal is even dumber because you defrauded a store *in your own state* and *without the protection of Visa/Mastercard* to back you up, plus your standing *in their territory* where a security guard can grab you and drag you into a backroom for interrogation. My proposal which I did about a year ago when Sony bricked my HD Radio, and with no consequences, offers several layers of protection:
- interstate lines
- U.S. post office delivery confirmation ("Yes we returned the console")
- the law i
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Actually your proposal is even dumber because you defrauded a store *in your own state* and *without the protection of Visa/Mastercard* to back you up, plus your standing *in their territory* where a security guard can grab you and drag you into a backroom for interrogation.
[blah blah blah]
Escalating the dumbness scale:
- interstate lines
That makes you guilty of Interstate Wire Fraud [wikipedia.org] under 18 U.S.C. Â 1343 [cornell.edu], a crime investigated by the FBI and prosecuted in a United States Federal Court. Not a trivial offense.
- U.S. post office delivery confirmation ("Yes we returned the console")
Congratulates, you've now committed Mail Fraud [wikipedia.org], which is the parent of Interstate Wire Fraud, and carries the same penalties.
- the law itself which states - if the consumer can provide proof-of-return, then the business must refund the money
What specific law are you referring to? There's no law I'm aware of that requires a business (or any other entity) to refund your money for the return of som
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Legal fraud. Nintendo and their like have followed the rules of civility: they hired lobbyists to write the laws. If you want to counter their fraud with your fraud, then you need be civil too. Where's your legislation-writing lobbyist? Because without that, the only other tools you have at your disposal are your votes and persuasive words to get other people to vote too, and I think we all know how that works out: it's too much of a hassle for anyone to bot
Re:Why is that legal? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why is that legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem is, the law does not say you cannot mess with your electronics, the law says you cannot bypass security measures in place that protect the intellectual property of the item you are messing with.
That said, I agree the law is stupid, vague, and consistently abused to stifle innovation and peoples rights, but currently, it is the law, and while I would love for it to be repealed, the odds of that ever happening are very very slim.
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Re:Why is that legal? (Score:5, Funny)
But modding Wii consoles harms nobody.
That's what they said about Skynet.
Also why are they doing it? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not aware of it even being used for piracy. I have the Homebrew Channel installed and it's great fun to play a few things on, plus occasionally turn the Wii into a media player.
IIRC it can be used to play out-of-region games. Which is a GOOD thing.
What exactly do they have to gain here?
Re:Also why are they doing it? (Score:5, Insightful)
They want to enforce region locking, or they wouldn't have implemented it to start with...
Region locking hurts legitimate users, and is used to screw them out of more money... Region locking should be illegal. It does absolutely NOTHING to benefit the consumer.
Re:Also why are they doing it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Region locking can help consumers (Score:4, Insightful)
The only real advantages to region locking are for the producer of the product. They can put up different price points for different markets and prevent consumers from tapping into a different market (region).
Depends on how you look at it. If the manufacturer can't price discriminate between different market segments, they will price the product beyond the reach of a lot of people who might want it. In that case, region locking can actually help the (poorer) consumer, since they will be able to purchase a product that otherwise would have been too expensive for them. Meanwhile the manufacturer avoids the risk of arbitrage.
At least, that is how it's supposed to work in theory. In reality region locking is used for a lot more than price discrimination, and it's just pointless and annoying when the product isn't even sold in multiple regions.
Re:Also why are they doing it? (Score:5, Insightful)
coke with suger (Score:5, Informative)
Regional tastes have nothing to do with it.
American sugar producers lobbied and got a protectionist tariff on sugar that increased the cost significantly which made it cheaper for all the soft drink companies to switch to corn syrup. Elsewhere in the world sugar is cheap enough that it can be used with out driving up the cost of the product prohibitively.
My sister went to Korea some years ago and the coke there also was made with sugar. It's pretty much only in the US that corn syrup is used. Heck, in South America they use sugarcane as feed stock for the ethanol plants to produce fuel for cars.
Re:coke with suger (Score:5, Informative)
That, or the fact that The USA has high subsidies [wikipedia.org] for corn.
As a Mexican, I also prefer Sugar-sweetened Cola. I have tried the Corn-version of the drink and it tastes weird. I also read somewhere that cane-sugar is more healthy than corn-syrup [citation needed].
Re:Also why are they doing it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Also why are they doing it? (Score:4, Interesting)
We used to have a huge tariff on sugar, that is. I believe it was lifted in 2006.
Coke gradually switched from sugar to corn syrup during the late 70s/early 80s. By the time New Coke came around, Coke products were made exclusively with corn syrup. Snopes has more details in its New Coke [snopes.com] article.
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It's not just a Texas thing - you can find the Mexican Coke in some standard supermarkets (specifically, Wegmans) even up here in central Pennsylvania. I bought some not too long ago - it was good stuff. And it's not just people who are used to having that kind who buy it. Clearly people are willing to pay a premium for it, and buy enough of it that it's worth keeping in stock. I'd imagine people would be willing to pay a premium for video games from other regions as well if it was possible to play them....
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THIS is the point of region locking. In some regions, that $50 disc is sold for the equivalent of $5. The region locking isolates each region so that shit like this can happen.
So let me get this straight - you think it's ok for vendors to prevent you importing their products in order to get them cheaper, but at the same time offshoring their workforce in order to get it cheaper?
They shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways - if a vendor wants to take advantage of the global employment market they shouldn't be allowed to restrict the global product market.
Re:Also why are they doing it? (Score:5, Informative)
Well it is. I was at a buddies house, he had a USB HD plugged into his Wii, all kinds of games on it. Apparently the Mario Galaxy he downloaded had a few bits flipped somewhere in it's image so he played it all the way to the last few planets and then couldn't finish it. Some of the games he actually owned so... I think it's great to be able to back up games to a HD and play off them. When you share the Wii with someone and they get up to play Wii Fit every morning... and I'm working my way through Zelda. Swap swap swap.
Also he had this media center software running on the Wii, sorta like having XBMC or something. Then he uses his iPhone to change the tracks, watch movies, etc... pretty sweet.
Nintendo should just sell a media center channel and let millions of Wii owners plug HDs into those babies.
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They don't release pirated software but they do release tools that can be used to play coppied roms from a USB drive, and the main thing i've seen them used for is emulators which must require "illegal" roms for the snes/n64 games you play.
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It can also be used to play legal ports of games that have been open-sourced - for example, Doom and Quake have fabulous ports on the system (the Wiimote makes a very interesting interface for Quake).
But Nintendo doesn't want that, either. Nintendo has always had a bug up their ass about "piracy"; they claimed the "security" chip in the original NES (which was actually about stopping companies from Tengen from making cartridges and was the reason you got the "blinky blinky" power problem so often) was to wa
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Umm, it's far, far cheaper and I already have one set up under the tv.
I don't want to go spending more money when I already have something with a tv output, an optical drive and wireless networking. It doesn't do it better. It does it at the same time as being a wii and for no more money.
On another note... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why is that legal? (Score:4, Funny)
Someone will have to confirm this for me, but I'm pretty sure that on the box of the original Xbox, it states that you don't technically own the hardware, but have been given a licence to operate it which can be withdrawn at any time (if you don't agree then don't open the box etc.)
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I'd love to see that one tested in court...
Re:Why is that legal? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is zero chance of that passing muster in a courtroom. They just slapped that on there to discourage people from prying.
If you don't like it... (Score:2)
If you don't like it, then don't download and install their free firmware updates.
You can get all huffy and jump up and down on your soap box all you want. But the reality is, you bought some hardware and it needs some software to operate correctly. You can choose to play games offline only, or you can choose to plug it into the internet and collect your free updates that maintain support with Nintendo's network while at the same time attempts to prevent you from using homebrew.
If you want to do homebrew ga
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I don't have this problem on mine. I suspect you're doing it wrong.
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Re:Why is that legal? (Score:5, Informative)
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Because traditionally they make consoles at a loss. Would you prefer to pay $500 for a hackable Wii? It may seem like they are just spoiling fun but if they couldn't make money off games the Wii itself would never exist. Expecting non-hack users to foot the bill for the hackables isn't fair as well since some one has to pay to develop and manufacture them. Either you will or your neighbor or there won't be anymore Wii's. Ugly truth of the matter.
It seems almost like a socialist or communist (in US terms) concept. Isn't that illegal as well in the US?
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Re:Why is that legal? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that happened to me. I had to go to the hospital, too.
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Re:Why is that legal? (Score:5, Informative)
An AC modded +3 Insightful for spouting nonsense ? Wow, just....wow !
Nintendo has always made a profit on its raw hardware.
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If Nintendo sold Wiis at a loss (which they don't, IIRC) and discovered that everyone is now using them only for homebrew, they wo
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What you would prefer that instead of seeing $200 dollars on the sticker, it should say $500 TCO? They aren't lieing about the price, they aren't lieing at all, have you ever heard anyone at Nintendo suggest you could do more with a Wii than use the software they make available?
If I can give someone x for 1 year at a cost of y, knowing that the typical user will generate y profit per year for 3 years it makes perfect sense (and is not remotely immoral
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Look at it this way. I bought a wii for homebrew. I then bought 4 controls, 4 nunchucks, 4 classic controllers, 4 game cube controllers, etc. Then I bought some wii games that I thought were neat (zelda, mario, etc). There are new games out there that I might buy (the new metroid re-release, etc).
I also buy virtual console games before using my downloaded roms because a lot of those virtual console games have been modified to fit my TV better and I want to support nintendo.
However, if this update bricks my
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And if you want to be able to buy virtual console games and use the features of homebrew?
DRM (Score:2, Interesting)
This is to updates as DRM is to using stuff. It's all a big commercialistic manipulation attempt. People don't like to be manipulated. Thus it fails miserably. There's also that warm fuzzy feeling when the hacked version solves bugs too:D Bonus "learn your lesson" points if they have to replace the bricked consoles (which, under most consumer law, they should).
When will they learn? (Score:4, Insightful)
It costs them a lot of money to try and stop modding etc, when they will fail every time.
Waste of time, money and reputation.
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Re:When will they learn? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well they dont really fail. Sure, someone finds a way around it. But it gets harder to get the homebrew working again. I updated to 4.0 before and didn't know you couldn't get all the homebrew working again. I tried to downgrade a few times, but it failed always (and I followed the guides closely). Then I just forgot about it and didn't try again.
So in that case they won. And I'm pretty computer knowledgeable person myself, it would be even worse for someone who isn't.
Two words: Virtual Console (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll fess up. I've got a SD card in my Wii with old NES games, and I run Homebrew Channel and FCE Ultra on my Wii.
Mind you, I own most of the games (SMB games, Mega Man games, TMNT2, etc) on NES cartridges. I do have an old NES, but I just can't be arsed to drag the thing out, wire it up to my TV and spend 10 minutes wiggling cartridges until they work. And I couldn't be arsed to buy games I already own on Virtual Console so I can play them again. Even though they're only $5/game, it's a principle thing.
But
Nintendo's Response (Score:5, Informative)
Hello,
Some of you have reported problems with your Wii console after updating to the Wii System Menu 4.2. The symptoms most people are describing usually occur when the Wii has been modified. However, some of you also mention your system has never been modified.
We'd like to help get your system working properly again. If you're experiencing problems with your Wii console after downloading Wii System Menu 4.2, and you believe your system has not been modified, please give us a call. If we find that you have a normal system and the update caused your system to not work, we'll repair it at no charge.
Please call our Customer Service Department at your earliest convenience, 1-800-255-3700. We are open 6 AM to 7 PM, Pacific Time, 7 days a week.
Thank you,
NOA_Tech_Jane
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Sounds like a scheme to get sued
There fixed that for you. Honestly, doesn't that sound like they just admitted they knew this update would damage people's systems? Can you say class action? The warning they give does warn about save games being lost, but doesn't seem clear to me about systems being completel missing Or did I miss that somewhere?
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Dear Nintendo, (Score:5, Interesting)
Please stop making me cry.
Sincerely,
Your loyal non-modding customer.
P.S. Please spend all this time and effort addressing the cheating hackers plaguing the Mario Kart Network instead.
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P.S. Please spend all this time and effort addressing the cheating hackers plaguing The Conduit instead.
Re:Dear Nintendo, (Score:5, Interesting)
We often look at the past with rose-tinted sunglasses.
When we were children, some of us grew up with Nintendo. The NES gave us incredible gameplay. We fell in love with the company.The SNES brought even more to the table. Many of us are also plagued by the Tetris theme, thanks to the Gameboy.
Unfortunately, the reality is much more bitter. Nintendo has done some pretty rotten things since the very first version of their system. Whether it was the 10NES lock-out chip, their censorship policies, their anti-competitive attitude (which landed them fines in the European Union in 2002 thanks to how they ran their business from 1991-1998), Nintendo has a long track-record of "doing evil". We only never realized it because, at the time, most of us were children and only cared about getting that next fun game.
Compared to the way things were then, all of this is unsurprising.
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Compared to those two companies, Nintendo is still an angel!
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So was Azrael and look where he ended up...
Think while MS and Sony are demons, Apple, Nintendo, Google are all well along the path to being fallen angels.
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Game Genie. They tried to sue them into the ground more than once, iirc. For something that merely redirected or altered memory contents.
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THIS.
Why all the effort to fight homebrew, instead of the rampant online cheating? They don't need to lock the platform down, just some freakin' checksums would be a step in the right direction.
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Note that the cheating is done trough Homebrew software. And thus blocking homebrew could help in stopping cheating a bit. But stopping homebrew is like trying to stop the sun shining, the people who are working to hack the Wii are smart and persistent. And those people don't do it for the cheats or the piracy, they just want an open platform to toy with.
Cheating in online games is always hard to beat, but the current state of the Wii is like early counterstrike and UT. The games are not build with cheat pr
So, as someone with the homebrew channel installed (Score:2)
What's the best course of action here?
I don't have BootMii installed at present.
Re:So, as someone with the homebrew channel instal (Score:2)
Hit them in the wallet.
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That's easy, I haven't bought any for about six months anyway.
I meant, is there a way to avoid a bricking of the nintendo products I already own?
Re:So, as someone with the homebrew channel instal (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So, as someone with the homebrew channel instal (Score:5, Informative)
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They force you if you want to use the virtual console. Buying VC games only works if you have the latest release.
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one datapoint (Score:2)
installing 4.2 worked fine on my (unmodified) Wii.
William
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Yeah I am updating mine now. I wonder if we are slashdotting the nintendo update servers right now?
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Update completed. Power cycled it after the update and it came up okay.
Re:one datapoint (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, it's going to work fine for [b]most[/b] people, but the bricking rate is still going to be much higher than normal. The boot2 flashing code isn't completely borked (I've successfully used it to flash early versions of BootMii 10-20 times), but the fact of the matter is sometimes it'll botch. I'd expect a sizable number of bricks, much higher than for "normal" system updates.
What year is this? (Score:3, Interesting)
No checksums before flashing? Really?
Even at launch I was hearing about bricking problems. Glad to see things are improving after taking in all that cash.
Sitting on the fence (Score:3, Insightful)
We (Parallel Realities) have written a bunch of games and I was recently looking into porting these onto the DS and Wii via Homebrew, because I think people would enjoy playing them (on the move in the DS's case), so I'm all for Homebrew.
What I am against though is modding your games machine just so you can download the games off the web without having to pay for them, which I think is what Nintendo is actually annoyed about.
However, getting around region locking does mean that one can play games only released in Japan (or the US if you live in Europe). In this instance I could understand a gamer's frustration and why they might download it off the web (because they can't a company willing to ship overseas).
Re:Sitting on the fence (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just that either - I go on holiday to various places around the planet. Sometimes I go into a music or games shop whilst I'm there and buy one or two things to take home.
Why should I not be able to play them when I get home?
And yes, some games (the original Katamari Damacy, for instance) are not released in some markets and as a result are hard to get hold of, even if you've soft-modded the console to play other regions.
It often seems to me that the benefits of a global economy are reaped by companies by employing labour and sourcing materials where they like, but they try their damnedest to stop consumers doing the same.
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About the region locking: I used to live in Japan, and my kids have many Japanese games for the Wii. Now that we live in Canada, we were faced with not being able to play any games sold here. I got a chip that makes the Wii region-free, but to make Rock Band work, I had to replace the entire OS with the North American version (it can still play Japanese games, thanks to the chip).
We've never played games that we haven't bought or rented, so the only effect of trying to kill homebrew, to us, is to potentiall
Re:Sitting on the fence (Score:5, Interesting)
FWIW, 4.2 is reported to completely kill modchip region-free functionality. If they've done what I think they've done (started to check the region on the TMD, which is cryptographically signed), region-free via modchip is dead and won't be coming back.
They can probably recover at the repair depot (Score:2)
It is highly likely that they can recover the box in the repair depot. You can flash chips without removing them from the board if the board designer was thinking intelligently. In my company's HW dev labs they re-flash bricked system boards all the time; they can also do so in the factory. If we couldn't fix RMA'd sysplanars, field flashing bugs would be a complete and total disaster.
SirWired
Re:They can probably recover at the repair depot (Score:5, Interesting)
You tell me how they do that. Not software - the ROM bits have no recovery functionality. Hardware? Massive props for you if you can find any kind of JTAG or similar port on the board, because quite a few people have wasted lots of time trying and failing to do so. As far as we can tell, they preflash the NAND chips before soldering, and I'm not aware of anyone who hasn't just had their motherboard replaced after this kind of unrecoverable brick.
Here's [marcansoft.com] a pinout diagram of the Hollywood with everything that's definitely not a recovery port marked. Let me know if you find any flashing/recovery functionality on the remaining pins ;)
Re:They can probably recover at the repair depot (Score:4, Informative)
Their system doesn't appear to be designed to accept external driving of the flash. The Hollywood boots and tries to talk to it as soon as you power it on. External NAND flashers need to overdrive the Wii's outputs very hard to properly do their jobs. As far as we can tell, the control outputs to the NAND Flash do not have tristate capability (they always drive hard high or low, even when the system is uninitialized or idle). The NAND power rail is also the 3.3V Hollywood power rail, so it is impossible to power the NAND Flash without powering up the Hollywood.
Nope, pretty sure that's not how they do it.
Re:They can probably recover at the repair depot (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know about their hardware engineers, but my opinion of their software engineers has been steadily decreasing. Call me a dickhead if they want, but they fail at almost everything they do as far as system programming. Their system architecture is archaic and they've locked themselves out of many of the features and improvements that their compatitors are able to add. They tried twice to stop a certain savegame exploit and failed disastrously - yes, there were critical bugs in the anti-exploti code, as small as it is. I've disassembled a lot of their code and the list of WTFs would span hundreds of pages. Their "secure" IOS security is dismal. They implemented a homebrew crypto layer and completely screwed up the very core of RSA verification, resulting in the very first exploit to run homebrew. They appear to have never heard of things called "code reviews". They're using a scheme of forking IOS for each minor addition that makes it very difficult to maintain security fixes in the future, nevermind that older games will never get new features or improvements. Then there's the hugely botched boot2 update that this article is all about, and which they clearly didn't test well enough (I mean, come on, we can find it with a handful of Wiis and some minor testing and they can't?). They have to resort to stupid hacks like copying SD channels to NAND to play them because they never even attempted to develop an even slightly sane storage layer for IOS - access to everything goes through different APIs. The division of functionality between ARM and PPC code is chaotic: the USB stack is in IOS, the Bluetooth USB device driver is in the PPC but the Keyboard/mouse drivers are in IOS, the Bluetooth stack is in the PPC while the TCP/IP stack is in IOS, half of the SD driver is in IOS and the other half in the PPC, the NAND filesystem driver is in IOS but the FAT filesystem driver for SD is in the PPC, etc. The WiFi drivers are notoriously unreliable (Broadcom is probably to blame for that). They left in DVD-Video mode code and functionality that is what enables softmods - and when we tried to report it to them them before Wii piracy via homebrew existed, they harassed us and refused to let us speak with an engineer! Softmods, predictably, came later, when other people discovered that code.
As for their hardware engineers, they at least have horrible power management inside the Hollywood to blame for the WC24 heat issues causing GPU failures. The software guys also helped, though, by making IOS have a busy-wait idle thread. IOS uses 100% of the Starlet CPU during idle mode, while the fans are off and the system is slowly getting cooked.
Again, feel free to look for a flashing mechanism too, but our experiences and attempts, evidence from people who send in their Wiis for repair, and our generally bad opinion of Nintendo's engineers all point towards there not being one.
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Good luck breaking the massive ground planes that connect every ground together.
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And what you're trying to say is...? Do you see a socket anywhere? I don't know about you, but we've never seen a repaired Wii with obvious signs of SMT reworking. Using a chip clip to program in-system is problematic and deinitely not the way the system was designed; see above reply.
Re:They can probably recover at the repair depot (Score:4, Interesting)
And again, I'm saying we've looked for JTAG all over the place and can't find it. The Wii has a gazillion test points, yet none of them seem like candidates for JTAG. There's a set of 8 cutely arranged testpoints going straight to Hollywood, but those turned out to be a debug GPIO port (I've used it to drive an LCD display and the like). Everything else is spread around the board, and we've gone and mapped almost all of the Hollywood ball-out with no success. About the only thing I'd imagine they could have pulled off to throw us off would be to spread the JTAG testpoints around the board using traces buried into the inner layers, but I doubt they're that smart.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You can flash chips without removing them from the board if the board designer was thinking intelligently. In my company's HW dev labs they re-flash bricked system boards all the time
Those boards weren't designed to prevent modding. No, I bet Nintendo has to replace the whole circuit board containing the flash chip due to their own paranoia.
How About Punkbuster Instead? (Score:4, Interesting)
How about some anti-cheat measures? Playing online Mario Kart is still fun, but it is less fun when there's some griefer with infinite red shells.
they convinced me (Score:5, Funny)
I had a modded Wii and I was prolifically downloading Wii games for free from all kinds of pirate sites at Nintendo's expense. It all changed as soon as this patch came out, it suddenly turned me from being a dirty pirate to a legitimate customer! My pockets which had previously been devoid of anything other than pocket lint are now somehow filled with cash that just materialized out of thin air. I use that money to buy games legitimately, giving the company the profits it deserves. Their share prices have quadrupled in the past 3 hours. The company is worth more than Microsoft now. Hot Japanese anime girls are waiting to blow all of the company executives who came up with this wonderful anti-piracy patch that fixed everything.
This is what they've been waiting to hear... let's lie a little bit so they can feel good about wasting millions of dollars on this patch.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If they don't like it, they're idiots. They make a profit on Wiimotes, why would they be against using them on computers?
Re:If it's bricked and they Nintendo can't recover (Score:5, Informative)
They just reauthorize those games online on your new console (via the serial numbers). When the system is totally bricked you lose your saves. They only notice homebrew or warez when they get "bricked" consoles that display an error message (which indicates System Menu operation), which they can usually fix by reinstalling stuff with their rescue mode DVDs and a small "flag" tool inserted into a memory card slot to put the menu into recovery mode.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Waninkoko has released a new build of his SD/USB backup loader for the Wii. This loader will allow you to play backups from an on screen menu using a USB mass storage device or SD card."
^^^^ That should get you on your way. I'm a big fan of not having to use physical disks to play games and when I heard the USB hard-drive would load games faster than the physical disks - I totally wanted to do it.
It didn't work for me though. When I ran it - it didn't recognize my USB drive. The advice I was given was '
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You're confusing homebrew with warez. Homebrew usually works pretty well, and HBC has a near zero chance of bricking your console. Applicaions vary in functionality and robustness, but they're safe since they're just applications that won't modify your console.
Loaders, on the other hand, besides typically illegal (they like to ship around chunks of IOS), are very dodgy and unreliable. System modification is required to install loaders, so it's an inherently risky activity. About 50% of the reports of perman
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Homebrew is home-made software. Homebrew for the wii is software for the wii that wasn't produced by an officially licensed source.
When someone writes a 'loader' that loader is a homebrew application. Whether or not it is available via the homebrew channel.
The homebrew applications I've used (media players, and emulators) were all quite buggy and have locked up my wii many times. The usb loader I've got also seems buggy as it fails to recognize my USB drive. But either way, nothing about a loader requir
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Much like the myCube [youtube.com], that light confirms that it's off. ;)