HackMii

The annual Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) is always a bittersweet experience for me — I always go there with projects that I hope to work on (this year: SPMP, a TV Plug’n’Play version of Bejeweled with an SPG chip inside, a couple of DSis + TWLFPGA boards, SD cards and a logic analyzer to work on BootMii/SD card fail), and I almost never get a chance to work on any of them.  This year was no different, so I really should know better at this point.

We once again managed to snag a couple of tables in the Hackcenter for console hacking, and we did actually have a few consoles — mainly some Wiis and DSis in pieces.  Hardware was exchanged, and we looked at soldering the 50+ wires needed to connect up a twlfpga board to a DSi and just sort of gave up due to lack of lighting and the chaotic environment.   No, CCC is more of an occasion to meet old friends and make new ones.  I was also selling Proxmark3s that I had made for the occasion, and had the chance to meet some of the people behind that project.

There were plenty of interesting talks, and the nice thing about CCC (compared to the American conferences I’ve been to) is that you can watch them from home, either live via streaming video, or download the video in a variety of formats after the conference.  Here are some of the ones I considered to be personal highlights:

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Many of us are planning on attending 26C3 in Berlin in a few weeks — we hope to get a table again in the Hackcenter this year, but no guarantees.

We will not be presenting anything this year, sorry!  There’s not much new to report with the Wii, and we don’t have anything complete enough to show for the DSi.   Also, honestly, I’m looking forward to actually getting some sleep this year and seeing some presentations — I barely emerged from the basement for the last two years.

If we do get some space to set up, we’ll probably have at least one Wii, hopefully a DSi-hacking setup, and then you’ll get to see the rest of the projects that have occupied our time over the last year — lasers, all sorts of SunPlus devices, etc.  Should be good times.

Post a comment if you’re planning on attending.

To continue with the theme of my last post on updates and bricking:

I don’t have an actual explanation for any of the 4.2 bricking, and I suspect Nintendo doesn’t really, either — I don’t think they keep a copy of the NAND keys for each device, and I doubt they have any readily-available way of retrieving them.   As a matter of personal curiosity, I would be interested in doing a post-mortem on such a Wii myself.

If you have a bricked Wii that fulfills the following requirements:

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