HackMii

Notes from inside your Wii

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BootMii Checker

February 16th, 2009 by John_K · 53 Comments

We haven’t made an update on BootMii for a while but never fear, things are progressing. Part of what takes so long is figuring out what the edge cases are that could cause things to fail and in this regard we need your help!

We’ve developed a BootMii Compatibility Checker that we need as many people as possible to run on their Wii. This little utility will check your boot1 against a list of known versions and tell us if you have one that we haven’t seen. We’ve recently seen a few boot1 versions floating around that break BootMii so with your help we’re compiling a list of safe boot1’s to use in our installer so that you get a better quality BootMii.

Current stats: 428 reports of “normal” (compatible) boot1 (2cdd…), 22 reports of “variant 1” (4a7c…) and 40 reports of what I was calling the “Korean boot1” (f01e…). The latter will not be compatible with BootMii, and it looks like it’s not just Korean Wiis (or, as noted in the comments below, they could be region-changed Korean Wiis). Console IDs greater than 0x6000000 appear to be using the new “Korean” boot1, and the rest are using either the normal one or the variant.

What are you waiting for? Download and run Checker and do your part for BootMii.
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SCAM: HomebreWare and Wiiunlocker

February 15th, 2009 by marcan · 30 Comments

Those of you that already know the story regarding these and other websites may skip this paragraph. Several websites have, for a while now, been selling our Wii homebrew tools in conjunction with warez loaders, under the guise of “unlocking” you Wii. In doing this, they of course make all sorts of outlandish claims, such as full compatibility, avoidance of breaking the warranty, and an impossible ability to work through future updates. Needless to say, these warez loaders aren’t fully compatible, are slower than using originals, installing homebrew breaks your warranty (whether you manage to hide it or not is a different issue), and chances are the next Nintendo update will shut them down again (why, oh, why, are you taking so long, Nintendo?). They also seem to be making a pretty penny – we’ve heard figures of $8000 monthly revenue for HomebreWare. This doesn’t make us very happy, given that we’re making these tools for free. The two websites are located at homebreware.com and wiiunlocker.com (don’t link to them, they don’t need any of our PageRank).

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48UXP (sw)

February 12th, 2009 by bushing · 5 Comments

(This is the second part of a three part series. The first part described the hardware of this device; this part will describe the software / firmware that drives this thing, and the last part will document the modifications I made to the hardware and software to try to get it to do what I want.)

There are three different programmable devices inside the 48UXP:

  1. 80C32 MCU
  2. XC3030A FPGA
  3. Cypress EZ-USB FX2

Of these, only the 80C32 has nonvolatile code storage; the other two devices have their code uploaded by the client every time they are used.
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