HackMii

Hello friends! I’m glad to report that (as mha reported earlier) we’ve surged past 600K installs of the HBC, worldwide.

We’ve always believed that the HBC is a valuable tool for development, especially with the convenience of being able to use Wiiload to load code over the network. Some of those 600K users out there have written us to say that they are Licensed Developers ™, and have reported that recent versions of the Hackmii Installer have been able to install the HBC on development hardware (NDEV, RVT-R and RVT-H) using e.g. Bannerbomb. We have taken pains to write code that can install in as many environments as possible, and to our knowledge, our code is generic enough to work on development hardware and to load binaries produced with Nintendo’s tools (on any hardware); if this isn’t the case, please file a bug (e.g. on our bug tracker).

We are once again planning to be at CCC with a table downstairs in the Hackcenter, and we hope many of you will stop by to say hello!

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a year or two know that I’ve been fascinated with figuring out how Wiis are made at the factory. The driving reason is that if we can figure out how Wiis with blank flash chip are programmed at the factory, we could possibly wipe bricked Wiis and fix them.

Well, we never found that, but occasionally some hint poke up. Nintendo has gone out of their way to call out a specific message — Insert Startup Disc — and has declared that there is a problem with the “operating system” and let it be known that they very badly want to replace it. As with things like the iOS “diagnostic mode”, this generally means that a unit escaped from the factory without having completed all testing and programming steps. This can give a rare glimpse into factory steps normally concealed from us.

Searching online for information about this has been rather frustrating. Occasional articles from late 2006 show in-store kiosks displaying a blurry “Insert startup disk” message. A few private conversations have alluded to the fact that the few thousand Wiis that were sent to game stores with this disc, but nobody has been able to cough up a disc for me to examine (or at least an image of one!).

Fortunately, an alert member of assemblergames caught an auction on eBay for a broken Wii displaying our mysterious error message. (Thanks Paul!) He bought it and sent it to me to look at, and here are my findings.

Background

Stepping back a moment, the reason that this is strange is that the very lowest levels of the system — boot1, boot2 — can’t even talk to the DVD drive or the video output. IOS can talk to the DVD drive, but only at a very low level, and only in response to IPC from the PPC — there’s no way for the system to bootstrap itself with a blank flash, or with boot1 and boot2. You absolutely need PPC code running, and if you have that running, you might as well have the whole system menu running. It also probably means you have to either have a boot2 that can read an unencrypted NAND filesystem, or it means you have to program each chip individually with a key from a database using a flash programmer before soldering it down — an expensive and complicated operation, in comparison to flashing one image to all chips or programming a unit with test pads.

The only possible reason I could imagine for doing this would be that the flashing process has a long lead time — longer than pressing DVDs — and Nintendo therefore was able to ship these kiosk Wiis earlier by including a stub of a system menu that could install updates, and then making a few thousand in this state and shipping them out with these discs. Let’s take a look at Paul’s Wii.

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We have always known that HBC is widely used. We’ve had some idea of how many downloads have been completed, and by sorting on unique IPs we could get an idea of the overall distribution.

Update: As promised. As of 2010-08-31 we have 266440 unique installations. System Menu 4.3 is catching up to 4.1 in the USA. 4.2 is still by far most popular.

Update 2: Comments closed for article. Too much OT/Other. For further discussion, start a thread in the forums. As of 2010-09-13 we have 339170 installations! 71% of all installs use 1.0.8.

Update 3: As of 2010-11-05 we had 593658 unique installations!

Since the release of HBC 1.0.7 (also covering 1.0.8) we have added anonymous usage statistics via your HBC’s User Agent header field. This allows us to more accurately see how many active Homebrew Channel installations exist in the wild. We would like to share these statistics with you.

To calm any potential fears from our users it’s important to note that we cannot use this information to track:

• Who you are
• What software you have installed (beyond the HBC and System Menu versions)
• Any kind of software / hardware modifications done
• … and so forth.

If you have any outstanding opinions about this, comment on this article.

During the first 24 days after the launch of the new hackmii installer we have counted 192708 unique installations! The number is probably slightly higher, as some Wiis are not configured to connect to the Internet.

Click the thumbnails below to enlarge the graphs.

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