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Wii Recovery Dongle

September 4th, 2008 by marcan · 30 Comments

Apparently tehskeen took a month-old video, coupled it with a paragraph of reality and a paragraph of rampant speculation and nonsense, and made it into a news story. This is undoubtedly going to spread around as these things do, so I’m going to stop it dead in its tracks.

It’s not a pandora battery. It won’t help custom firmwares. It has nothing to do with upgrading or downgrading IOS. It has limitations. It only helps with certain very specific cases.

I’ll post details about it when the time comes, since it’s certainly useful to fix certain types of bricks, but for now don’t believe any random nonsense that you hear about it.

ED: tehskeen now replaced the second paragraph.
ED2: great, now it hit Engadget. Good job brakken.

Addendum:
Some specifics on what kinds of bricks this might fix (we have not tested all of these yet):
– If you can autoboot ANY disc and your problem is not a bad system menu (that is, reinstalling the system menu won’t fix it) then this probably won’t help. If your problem can be fixed (which it probably can), you won’t need this at all.
– This SHOULD let you fix the worst banner bricks (where you screw up the main arc and get a freeze on the warning screen, not after it), but ONLY if you have 3.2 or earlier, or 3.3 and the Twilight Hack (beta1) already installed, and in both cases you’ll need a modchip.
– This SHOULD let you fix any semibricks-turned-bricks (Opera 404 error on boot) but you’ll have to wait until a retail game comes out with a newer version if you don’t have a modchip or if you have 3.3 or newer.
– In general, IF you can see anything on the screen, AND you have a system menu earlier than 3.3, AND your system menu main binary (dol) and IOS are (mostly) fine (system menu data corruption is okay), AND you have a modchip, AND your hardware is fine, THEN you can probably fix it with this.

We haven’t tested these specifically, so please don’t take them as final.

ED3: To clarify, this won’t actually fix anything. It just lets you fix it, using homebrew tools and/or newer retail games, depending on what exactly you need to fix.

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forum and logs

August 20th, 2008 by bushing · 9 Comments

Just a brief note to those who haven’t already seen them:

  • #hackmii IRC logs up: bLAStY has set up his custom web front-end to view the channel logs from #hackmii at log.hackmii.com.  Search is coming soon!
  • New forums:  We have some newly re-designed forums at forum.wiibrew.org.  Come check them out!

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libdi and the DVDX installer.

August 12th, 2008 by Erant · 292 Comments

To all newcomers to Wii Homebrew:

Welcome! We hope you enjoy the wonderful world of homebrew software. Since this post is primarily about the DVD player in particular, and assumes that you are at least familiar with the usage of homebrew software on the Wii, we would appreciate it if you avoid asking general questions like “How do I run this on my Wii?” in the comments – replying to these questions is very hard and clutters up the already long comment list. Instead, you’ll find lots of information at Wiibrew. Short version: You will normally use The Homebrew Channel to boot Wii Homebrew. Modchip users with firmware version under 3.2 can just download the installer ISO and boot it. Users of firmware 3.3 or without a modchip will need a (legit) copy of Twilight Princess and a special hacked savegame that will let you boot the Homebrew Channel installer from your SD card. More detailed guide here. Thanks, and enjoy!

As you all know, I’ve been working on libdi (or the DVD Access library) for a while now. We had some problems getting it out to release because of the difficulties we encountered while writing the second part of this topic. The DVDX installer instead will install a small, hidden, channel on your Wii that allows you to read DVDs on an unmodified system. It is not an installer for a patched IOS. You may however need one, depending on your system.

Usage of this package is fairly simple. Run the installer.dol found in the package, follow the onscreen instructions, and you’re done.

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