HackMii

21 responses so far ↓

• 1 Jayden // Jun 30, 2009 at 4:49 am

  I love your nerdy posts. Where else would we get this interesting information?

• 2 niko86 // Jun 30, 2009 at 5:50 am

  I’ve been waiting for awhile another great post Bushing, thank you.

  I may not understand nor appreciate all the information in this blog but its does make for a great read. More please and soon!

• 3 ahnold11 // Jun 30, 2009 at 7:01 am

  Lol, I don’t envy you. It’s a tough job trying to educate the masses (the never ending battle against ignorance 😉 Hopefully this will explain that all the IOS/code comes from a common place/foundation and so any fixes introduced to 1, ultimately get introduced to them all. In the case of boot-2, those fixes are largely irrelevant.

  It is entertaining though to read about people’s crackpot theories regarding Nintendo’s “slick schemes” to make the Wii “unsoftmodable”.

  Great job on the blog all together though. Initially I just wanted to try out a little homebrew on the Wii, but ended up fascinated by all the work you guys do here. The particularities of the Wii’s inner workings makes for a really interesting read.

• 4 emailtoid.net/i/0eae7f19/… // Jun 30, 2009 at 10:36 am

  Great post, very interesting read. Love this kind of “techno babble” 🙂

• 5 tech3475 // Jun 30, 2009 at 10:49 am

  I always enjoy these “nerdy” posts. In fact i think there should be more.

  I am always interested in how the consoles work or how they were hacked (enjoyed the conference at cc, thanks for posting it).

  Thanks again.

• 6 Muzer // Jun 30, 2009 at 11:16 am

  I haven’t really been paying attention recently. What is all this unsoftmoddable wii crap I’m getting glimpses of?

• 7 xeron // Jun 30, 2009 at 1:12 pm

  Don’t apologise for nerdy posts. Those are the ones I always hope to find when I visit the site!

• 8 noir // Jun 30, 2009 at 1:56 pm

  IOS generally stands for Internal Operating System. Interesting post, look forward to the next.

• 9 Henkka // Jun 30, 2009 at 2:28 pm

  Also love your nerdy posts.. Waiting for actual information about these “unsoftmoddable” wiis.. Is that only going to be bother for the pirates or something? Is this the LU64 thingy I saw at some of the less respected sites on wii community?

• 10 darksamus // Jun 30, 2009 at 3:52 pm

  I agree with Jayden. Any addition knowledge about the Wii is appreciated, nerdy or not. After all, we are on the outside looking in: Team Twiizers is privy to far more about the Wii than most of us. So please, nerdy-post to your heart’s content.

• 11 Louise // Jun 30, 2009 at 4:46 pm

  The table only needs an “Estimated cost in engineering hours”. Or would that be evil? =)

• 12 Zetetic // Jul 1, 2009 at 1:27 am

  I second Jayden.
  Please sir, can I have some more.

• 13 Suigintou // Jul 1, 2009 at 1:31 am

  I second that emotion.

• 14 stan423321 // Jul 1, 2009 at 5:11 am

  Interesting… but if “boot”s are just stripped versions of each other, why aren’t boot1 and boot2 merged? I understand that boot0 must fit a very small unrewritable memory cell. But then what the hell does b1 do? It is already checked for authenticity by b0, right?

• 15 Sonic4Ever // Jul 1, 2009 at 10:29 am

  There’s probably no point in knowing what I ask but I’ll do it anyway: What does “viper” mean?

• 16 bushing // Jul 2, 2009 at 4:15 am

  @noir: Interesting. This certainly would qualify for that name (“Internal Operating System”), since it’s completely hidden.

  @stan423321: boot1 has to be able to fit within the first 48 pages of flash (so, 96K). It also can not be upgraded on existing Wiis, so if there are any bugs in it, they’re kinda screwed (c.f. BootMii).

  boot1 can’t read the NAND filesystem; it only knows how to read boot2 from a specific set of blocks in NAND.

  I have a theory — with little evidence — that they pre-program every NAND flash chip with boot2v1 and an unencrypted NAND filesystem containing just IOS4 and the text-only “NDEV” menu (1-2). They install some of the system titles (newer IOSes, etc), and then at some point they run a program that encrypts the entire filesystem with the per-console unique key and then upgrades boot2 to v2 (or v3 or v4). I am still searching for that program — but it would explain why we’ve never seen boot2v1 anywhere and why IOS4 is never used.

  @Sonic4Ever: I suspect that “Viper” may be their codename for what we call “Starlet” — the ARM core inside their “I/O Bridge”.

• 17 someone // Jul 2, 2009 at 9:03 am

  As I worked out the dates of various hacks/homebrew/exploits I thought I’d post them to save other people the effort…

  28th December 2007 – 24c3 – “The State of the Wii”
  10th Feburary 2008 – Twilight Hack
  26th February 2008 – Trucha Signer
  14th March 2008 – Freeloader
  24th May 2008 – HBC
  10th July 2008 – PatchMii
  12th August 2008 – DVDX
  28th December 2008 – 25c3 – “Wii Fail”
  30th March 2009 – USB Loader
  12th May 2009 – Banner Bomb
  13th May 2009 – BootMii

  They might have had more success with forcing people to update if they simply stopped them playing online unless they update to the latest version instead of adding insignificant new ‘features’ (apart from perhaps the SD card update) and asking them to update…

• 18 abraxo // Jul 2, 2009 at 12:01 pm

  I remember a previous post here that mentioned bc in passing, but IIRC at the time its function was unknown. What is the purpose of bc?

  I have a couple of other questions which I might as well ask while I’m posting. There are crashes that occur with some reliability on some GameCube games when played on a GameCube which do not seem to occur when the same titles are run on the Wii. I’m sure it is almost impossible to know for definite without investigating further, but is there anything obvious in the Wii’s architecture that would account for this phenomenon?

  As an extension of this question, would it be possible to patch a Wii’s firmware in such a way that remote debugging of GameCube games might be achieved? Would you have to settle for something lame like just printing out all the system calls, or does the ARM have sufficient jurisdiction over the PPC that you could do better than that? (I know you could do some of this with a GC emulator, but I’m curious anyway.)

• 19 zeldarocks // Jul 6, 2009 at 3:36 pm

  @abraxo, I suspect you are right about Gamecube games that would freeze on the Gamecube now work fine on Wii without any crashes, one such exanmple would be the Zelda Collector’s Edition for Gamecube, where Majora’s mask suffered from random freezing at any tine during the game. Now when played on Wii, the game plays fine, without any crashing issues whatsoever.

• 20 Respect // Jul 22, 2009 at 12:28 pm

  Hi. Sorry if isn’t the correct place to ask this question, but I bought Wii very recently like 2 weeks a go, and I can’t install the bootmii on boot2 :\ and I don’t want to instal on IOS. Anything to do?

• 21 Daverball // Jul 26, 2009 at 11:53 pm

  @Respect: Sorry pal, but if you read recent posts and the FAQ then you would know, that you have an incompatible boot1 version, which will most likely never allow you to install it as boot2.

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