HackMii

Yesterday we had some server issues, and I took the server offline for a while. During this, I decided it was time to release a preview version of menuloader. Since I couldn’t write a post about it here, I just let it loose on the forums. Unfortunately, the resulting game of Telephone (somewhat predictably) managed to get a few things wrong as the announcement bounced from forum to forum, so I think it’s time to write up a real announcement, now that the server is back up.

Update: version 0.5 is up, which fixes some region free issues and includes a patch to disable updates. See below.
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In order to make legally re-distributable ISO images for the Homebrew Channel installer, we had to remove Nintendo’s copyrighted apploader code and replace it with our own; we based ours on the one from GC-Linux.  You may find the source and binary for it here:

http://static.hackmii.com/wii-apploader.tar.gz

Here is an empty “template” disc image that you can use in your own projects; it contains the above apploader.

http://static.hackmii.com/iso_template.iso.bz2

Enjoy!

Update: A new version of WiiScrubber is out that I’m told works fine with this template. The old one had trouble detecting it as a Wii disc, as it used the DiscID’s first character which isn’t the more common “R” in this ISO. For future reference, the best way of distinguishing a Wii image from a Gamecube image is probably using the disc magic instead (this is what IOS uses).

Note: this is not a backup loader, in any way, shape, or form. If you’re looking for a backup loader, please move along.

While Nintendo did reply to bushing’s open letter, he has not succeeded in establishing a conversation with an engineer about the issue. Furthermore, we have learned that they received and read at least two of the original three e-mails that were sent prior to the open letter, and decided not to reply (in fact, one of their replies was to one of the original e-mails, but only after the open letter was posted). Therefore, we can only conclude that they are not very interested in the issue.

As many of you may already know or have deduced, the bug in our open letter referred to a way of reading DVD-Rs (and Video DVDs) without the use of a modchip. Several people have investigated the bug independently, and they’ve gotten pretty close. However, we did discover an easier way of enabling this mode from homebrew, which, among other things, does not require any changes to IOS at all. This method is also relatively difficult to transform into some sort of backup loader.

Erant has been developing a library that uses this trick to enable DVD access for homebrew. We hope to release it this coming week, after a few details have been polished. svpe and dhewg have been working on a native mplayer port that uses this library to play back DVDs, which we hope to release as a proof-of-concept together with the library. We also have DVD-loading versions of snes9x and Genplus.

Non-modchip users will not need a custom IOS. Ironically, this method doesn’t work for users of some modchips. Therefore, these users will require a patched IOS using the well-known UnencryptedRead patch (the library will automatically use it if needed). We’ll try to release a somewhat more user-friendly version of patchmii dedicated to this task together with the library.