HackMii

As someone who has never cared for online advertising or shady “deals”, I’m baffled by the weird and wonderful world of on-line search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, and all that stuff. In case you’re new to the whole story, quite a few people are selling “soft-modchip” packs for the Wii via these channels, which bundle our free tools with free warez software and make tons of money. My opinion of sellers and affiliate marketers isn’t very high after the problems we’ve had with these scam products.

Alas, it appears that in this odd ecosystem products and sites are routinely sold and bought, and people can wind up marketing scam unknowingly. I suspect that quite a few of those people will just turn a blind eye and keep making a profit off of scams after finding out about the nature of their “product”. However, at least one of them did the Right Thing. I had an interesting e-mail exchange with someone who recently purchased a site advertising a few of those scam products off of eBay. He agreed to remove the references to the scam products and replace them with an informational page that explains how other sellers are scamming their customers. Thank you for doing the right thing :).

Click here to visit the site. Yes, I know that the information presented there isn’t 100% factually accurate, but the point is that there’s at least one seller who cares about these scams. I think he deserves being commended for his honesty and integrity.

It’s been quiet on the Wii front lately — Nintendo has yet to release any new updates in a while. Nothing new to report on the DSi front (… yet …). However, all hardware hackers need good tools, and it’s even more fun if you can hack your tools!

There seems to be a trend in test equipment to make artificially-limited models that have fewer features, yet only differ from their more-power cousins in configuration or software. A good example that has seen some coverage already is the Rigol DS1052E scope — see the most recent EEVblog on the subject, EEVblog #70 – Turn your Rigol DS1052E Oscilloscope into a 100MHz DS1102E (Hack). You can even buy that scope at ourmy favorite online cheap Chinese crap store, DealExtreme, for about $400.

I only wish I could get as enthusiastic on video about this stuff as Dave does — but I don’t see that happening soon, so you’ll have to settle for a writeup on LostScrews about how to perform an even bigger upgrade on the ZeroPlus LAP-C16032 Logic Analyzer (about $120 on Amazon — Zeroplus LAP-C 16032 Logic Analyzer Logic Cube — EUR 120 elsewhere).

Happy hacking! 🙂

Recently I was informed that Datel has released a new version of their Action Replay Cheat Cartridge that allows you to cheat in Nintendo DS games on a Nintendo DSi console. Knowing that Nintendo put quite some effort in blocking any third party cartridges from working on the DSi I was curious to figure out how they did it.

Before jumping in this article, I’ll give you a small warning that what is written here might be quite “techy” to some people. I advise reading lots of GBAtek (And maybe a bit of dsibrew) when you get lost. 😉

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