Comments on: IOS: history, build process

By: Daverball

Daverball — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 06:53:33 +0000

@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.

By: Respect

Respect — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:28:03 +0000

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?

By: zeldarocks

zeldarocks — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:36:43 +0000

@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.

By: abraxo

abraxo — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:01:30 +0000

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.)

By: someone

someone — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:03:48 +0000

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…

By: bushing

bushing — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:15:24 +0000

@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”.

By: Sonic4Ever

Sonic4Ever — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:29:12 +0000

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

By: stan423321

stan423321 — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:11:58 +0000

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?

By: Suigintou

Suigintou — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:31:02 +0000

I second that emotion.

By: Zetetic

Zetetic — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:27:23 +0000

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