HackMii

Notes from inside your Wii

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HackMii IRC

July 16th, 2008 by bushing · 12 Comments

There is still a wealth of work left to be done on reverse-engineering the Wii.  Off the top of my head, we still know very little about:

  • WiiConnect24
  • Opera on the Wii
  • Communications between the Wii and the DS (see e.g. the Nintendo Channel)
  • Huge chunks of IOS in general
  • other, uh, stuff

I’d like to try an experiment.  Most of you know that I idle on #wiidev;  as great as it is, it has become an extremely busy channel, and it’s become impossible for me to read through backlogs to find questions about the stuff I’m most interested — namely, reverse-engineering and working on the projects I’ve already mentioned in previous posts, this post, and the ones you out there think of.

That’s not a criticism of #wiidev — rather, it’s a realization that the purpose of #wiidev is a more general “how do we develop stuff on the Wii?” rather than “how does the Wii work?”.   I think it might be time to create a new channel.

#hackmii on EFnet will be dedicated to reverse-engineering the Wii.  And we’re going to run it with special, strict rules in order to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio.  Specifically:

  • The channel will be +m — only certain people will be able to speak (those who are given the +v voice flag).  All are welcome to come in and observe, but we really need to keep the chatter down to actual productive conversation for this to be useful.
  • If you want to be voiced on the channel, sit and lurk a while so that you understand the level of discussion on the channel.  When you have a constructive comment to add, message it to one of the ops; if they agree that your comment is a constructive one, they will +v you. (Do NOT ask for permission to ask.  This is a waste of time.  The goal of this is to reduce time-wastage as much as possible.)
  • Once you have a +v, we will trust you until you start misbehaving.  When that happens, we’ll probably just devoice you until you have something constructive to say (see above).
  • As far as actual rules — what is proper behavior vs misbehaving?  — I want to start out simple.  I expect everyone to act like adults, so we can start with only a few core rules:
  1. No “chatting” out of boredom.  Don’t announce your presence when you join the channel; don’t tell us you’re leaving unless you’re in the middle of a conversation. Don’t just start talking about lame shit just because nobody else is talking.  Silence is Golden.
  2. Technical talk only.  If you can’t code, this may not be the place for you.  (OTOH, we’ve had some great contributions from people who do not fancy themselves as disassembly gurus; reverse-engineering is more about a curiosity and a willingness to try things for yourself than about a specific skillset.)  Feel free to drop by and listen, however, and if you have good ideas, please contribute them (see above).
  3. Questions are okay, too — every investigation begins with a question!  However, we only want good questions — and we only want people who are willing to stick around and work on finding the answer to that question if none currently exists.
  4. You may have the best luck if you have an IRC bouncer, because many conversations will take place on-and-off over the course of days.  We will try to set up some bots to maintain +vs for people who get disconnected, and I hope to set up a publicly-readable log of the channel for people who want to go back and search to see what is known about a subject.
  5. I reserve the right to revise these rules and to ignore them whenever I feel like it.   This is my experiment, but I intend to put considerable energy into it to make it a great place to get some work done.

I’m aware that this may be a dismal failure, but at least I’ll be there hanging around 🙂

Tags: Wii

12 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Frozen // Jul 16, 2008 at 5:06 am

    This is a great idea. My favorite part of #wiidev was always watching the hackmii related conversations, but it’s become increasingly hard to filter out the generic coding chat which is less interesting. I look forward to seeing what comes out of this.

  • 2 WhoDares // Jul 16, 2008 at 5:23 am

    Maybe it’s time I get me an IRC client installed 😀

  • 3 teknecal // Jul 16, 2008 at 5:23 am

    Sounds good 🙂

  • 4 DtD // Jul 16, 2008 at 5:31 am

    Ah, that should be much more interesting to read than the ramblings on at #wiidev. Good idea Bushing!

    ~DtD

  • 5 Malcolm Parsons // Jul 16, 2008 at 7:36 am

    So, the talk I’m interested in is now in a new channel on a different network.

    Way to split the community guys.

  • 6 robertfisk // Jul 16, 2008 at 8:07 am

    Its the same network Malcolm . Still Efnet . this is all good

  • 7 Malcolm Parsons // Jul 16, 2008 at 8:36 am

    robertfisk: I’m in the other #wiidev, not on Efnet

  • 8 robertfisk // Jul 16, 2008 at 12:08 pm

    ah , sry . malcolm . You meant the good wiidev 🙂 Yupp ,then its a different network

  • 9 hotzenplotz // Jul 16, 2008 at 12:25 pm

    This is a great idea!
    I probably won’t be able to contribute much (although I studied computer science, reverse engineering is far away from what I learned :-p ) but at least I don’t have to read through all the (off-topic) chatter in #wiidev anymore.

  • 10 apinaumbo // Jul 17, 2008 at 2:02 am

    Could you guys enable the conference mode in #hackmii?
    It would be easily readable 😀

  • 11 bushing // Jul 19, 2008 at 12:57 am

    @apinaumbo: That’s a client-side feature. You have to turn it on yourself.

  • 12 hotzenplotz // Jul 20, 2008 at 6:28 am

    @Sai: Get whiite-linux and start irssi… works great 🙂

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