HackMii

As you can see in the latest Wiimpersonator log, Nintendo has released an update for the Wii software — “Wii Menu 4.2”.

Nintendo’s release notes state, rather blandly,

September 28, 2009
Wii Menu 4.2
Unauthorized Modifications
Because unauthorized channels or firmware may impair game play or the Wii console, updating to Wii Menu version 4.2 will check for and automatically remove such unauthorized files. In addition, there are some behind the scenes enhancements that do not affect any prominently-used features or menus but will improve system performance.

That’s the best they could come up with? Seriously? This is almost as bad as the first update (3.3) they did to (try to) kill the Twilight Hack, which they justified with “an enhanced Mii channel”. Don’t update. Seriously.

For those of you that have already done so, or have pets, friends or siblings that updated your Wii behind your back, or just don’t like listening to good advice, you have the following to look forward to:

• Enhanced system menu — now with a new iplESMisc.cpp::DeleteTicketsForce function that runs after verifySavedataZD, upon every boot of the system. In addition to looking for the Twilight Hack and deleting it if found, it will now look for title-IDs DVDX and HAXX (the latter being the Homebrew Channel) and delete them if found.
• Updated boot2 — All Wiis that shipped with boot2v2 or boot2v3 (the first 30 million or so) will have boot2v4 installed. There’s no behavioral difference, here, but it will wipe out BootMii if it is installed as boot2.
• Updated IOSes — updated versions of IOS9, IOS12, IOS13, IOS14, IOS15, IOS17, IOS21, IOS22, IOS28, IOS31, IOS33, IOS34, IOS35, IOS36, IOS37, IOS38, IOS53, IOS55, IOS56, IOS57, IOS60, and IOS61. A new IOS70 is installed for the new System Menu to use. I haven’t looked at the changes in any depth, but they seemed to have fixed the IOS exploit we were using in the most recent HackMii Installer.
• Updated BC, MIOS and IOS254– I’m not really sure what the point of this was, but they probably just rebuilt everything to be safe. They could have used the opportunity to try to overwrite BootMii/IOS, but they didn’t (the version number is lower than that used by BootMii, so it won’t install).
• New stub IOSes installed as IOS222, IOS223, IOS249, and IOS250. This seems to be the only effort made to remove “unauthorized firmware” from the Wii. This may or may not actually work, depending on the version number used in the TMD of the already-installed version of IOS.
• Updated shop channel — this was probably just a routine update of the shop channel, and they probably stopped allowing the older (4.1) version of the shop channel to connect. This is the only actual “carrot” to entice you to update.

I’m surprised that they took the bold move of pushing an updated boot2 — I guess all of the cool kids are doing it these days. Their boot2-updating code (ES_ImportBoot) is not well-tested; they’ve never updated boot2 on retail consoles before, and in our testing we discovered that it often fails to write out ECC data for the new version of boot2 that it writes. We should expect to see some number of bricked Wiis from this; the code is so buggy that we decided to write our own for the HackMii installer. If you had BootMii/boot2 installed, it will be overwritten with the normal, stock boot2, but there should be no other harmful effects.

I’d advise everyone against updating; no good can come of it. I also do not suggest you use any “updaters”. We are currently testing an updated version of the HackMii Installer, which will be able to reinstall the Homebrew Channel, DVDX and BootMii (just as before). Indiana Pwns should still work; I’d imagine a new version of Smash Stack will still work. Bannerbomb does not seem to work in its current form, but it remains to be seen how it was blocked and whether it can be made to work again.