Eluan’s port of Quake to the Wii as based on the GC Quake port by Peter Mackay is now up to version 0.03. There are new features installed here, and you can check out the changelog below:
* Simple on-screen keyboard
* View locking so that you can aim freely without turning
* TV overscan adjustment working for the GX build
* Simple, ugly brightness control
I just wrote a new version of sendtowii, more info of sendtowii can be found here! This version no longer uses batch files but it comes in exe form, you also don’t have to have wiiload installed before use.
Instructions:
- Run the .exe
- Enter your IP
- No realy, thats it!
You do not have to download wiiload or set any variable as described in my previous post, this exe will do EVERYTHING for you.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, if you don’t trust it and want to see the source than you can request it in the comments.
Note: You might have to restart Windows for this to work, but probably not 
According to joystiq.com , a 19-year old German homebrew programmar named “Fuzzy” is working on a portable Super Smash Bros. game for the DS titled “Super Smash Bros. Rumble.”
As shown in the videos, a whole lot of work still needs to be done, but it’s a great idea for homebrew users, and Smash fans alike. He also has a blog with a demo link inside.
http://ssbrumble.blogspot.com/
Enjoy!
An astonishing 232 years ago America declared independance, have you declared yourself independant from Nintendo yet? Or in other words, have you hacked your Wii to run homebrew yet?
Also, if you’re not going to, please post in the comments about why you’re not going to.
Before doing anything homebrew related, always read the disclaimer located in the first comment.
My previous post explained how to install and use Wiiload, allthough its a very nice application it kinda sucks that you have to use the command prompt everytime you want to send something. Thats why I and a fellow homebrewer decided to create a very simple installer to add a “Send to wii” option to the Windows shell.
Simply download this file, extract its contents to your hard drive, and run setup.bat. After running my installer you can either do right click>send to wii or simply double click any .elf or .dol file to send it to the homebrew channel. Please note that you’ve got to have wiiload properly set up in order for this to work, my previous post will tell you all about this.
Disclaimer
If you are unfamiliar with the term “homebrew”, I advice you to go read my first post, located here. If you would like to know about the risks of homebrew, then please go read my second post, located here. If you have yet to install the homebrew channel, then please read my instructions, located here. I will in no way be held responsible if following the instructions I give or the recommendations I do leads to broken Wii’s or any damage in any form. Allthough I’m very confident that won’t happen, it needs to be said. If you are confident you have a sufficient amount of knowledge about the matter, then please enjoy the read.
In my previous post I wrote about installing the homebrew channel and how to install a game called “Scogger” for it. Assuming you managed to pull it of, this post will go into detail about how the homebrew channel works, and I will give instructions for a special application called “Wiiload”.
Assuming you’ve allready been playing around with the homebrew channel for a bit, you must by now have noticed that a lot of care has gone into its look, feel and layout. This is immediatly noticed by the great banner and the stylish menu. You’ll notice the infrared pointing works fluently and is better than in most games. The homebrew channel has the ability to list 3 applications per page, and the amount of pages that can be created is probably close to unlimited. It also allows you to see the applications logo, revision, author, title, short description and long description. It’s also capable of returning to the Wii menu by the click of a button.
What you probably didn’t know yet is that it uses some pretty advanced networking functions. These include automatic updates and application loading over lan. The autoupdating feature works like a charm, everytime you enter the homebrew channel it will contact a server and check if there are newer versions available, if there aren’t, you won’t notice a thing. If there are, you will be prompted with a changelog and the question whether you’d like to update or not. If you accept it will automaticaly download the new installer and run it. This works very fluently and makes sure you only have to do the installation process once.
It also happens to be possible to send applications from your PC to your Wii, meaning that you can also run homebrew that isn’t on your SD card! The program you use to send homebrew to your Wii is called “WiiLoad” and it was also created by the authors of the homebrew channel. The installation process is rather easy, so I’ll explain it here in a few steps.
To begin using the Wiiload function you have to start the homebrew channel first and make sure its connected to the network.
Assuming you know your way with the command prompt, click “start” (bottom left corner) and then “run”, now type “cmd” and hit enter. In the dosprompt go to the folder where you keep your .elf and .dol files and run “wiiload filename.exe”. So if you’re in a folder containing a file called emu.elf you’ll cd in there and run “wiiload emu.elf”. This will send it to your Wii and your Wii will now run it.
If you’re not comfortable with using the command prompt my next post will explain a simpler and cleaner way to do things.
Right, before you do any of this please read my previous post, located here. If you still want to go on after reading that, then please follow further instructions. If you’ve completed these simple steps you will have the twilight hack and the homebrew channel installed, and therefor you will be ready to enter the wonderous world of Wii Homebrew. This tutorial assumes that you do not have a modchip installed.
First off, what will you need:
We’ll begin by installing the Twilight Hack, for more info on the Twilight Hack check my first post, located here.
The Wii will now copy over the Twilight Hack of your region to the Wii’s internal memory. Once it’s done doing that, you should be ready to go.
Now you’re all set and ready to go! If for whatever reason boot.elf will not load correctly, reformat your SD card and follow these steps once more. If everything went fine you can remove all those files from your SD card, as they are no longer needed.
Now that you have the Homebrew channel installed, I will also give instructions to installing applications for it. I will use the “Scogger” game as an example, please follow the steps once more.
Thats it, put your SD card back into your Wii console, boot the homebrew channel, and behold! Scogger has been added to the menu. In case you were wondering, the boot.elf is the actualy game itself, the icon.png holds the logo that the homebrew channel will use for it, and the meta.xml holds information about the application like a short description and the author.
If you’ve read my previous article then you now have a basic idea of what is possible with homebrew. Allthough it has lots of positive aspects, there is a certain risk to it. For starters, it isn’t realy clear whether this voids waranty but I wouldn’t be too surprised if Nintendo refuses to fix a wii with traces of homebrew on it (allthough most likely they will, judging by the amount of Wii’s they’ve fixed that had botched up solder jobs caused by modchip installations). This wouldn’t be that much of a problem if homebrew didn’t introduce a certain risk to your console, and like I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, it does. Executing homebrew on your Wii console will always have a certain risk to it, so be sure to only use homebrew from a somewhat “trusted” source.
The most comon risk with homebrew is bricking due to import games. As we all know some games have updates on them, but this isnt a problem as long as you update with games from your own region. However, if you decide to use homebrew software to enable your Wii to play games from other regions, you might get in trouble. If you update with a game from another region, you’ll get system software from another region, and your wii doesn’t like that. This might result in a loss of your settings screen, meaning that when you try to go to the Wii settings you get an error message. This is quite easily fixed by updating with a newer version of the Wii’s system software of your own region.
A problem with Wii homebrew is that it doesn’t have a recovery system (yet). This means that when you develop something, you have to be realy carefull, because if you do one thing wrong you can forget about your Wii. As opposed to systems like the Sony PSP the Wii does not have an equivalent to the so called “Pandora Battery”, for more on this specific subject I advise you to read http://hackmii.com/2008/06/your-wii-is-not-a-psp/. This also means that if someone wants to do harm to your Wii they can easily do that, because its so fragile and one wrong piece of code can do the trick.
The problems described above are all incidental problems, they weren’t intentionaly created by Nintendo. I will now give you a few examples of what Nintendo has done so far to try and stop homebrew and what risks this introduces. Nintendo isn’t realy known for trying to stop homebrew, if you look back at the gamecube days they did close to nothing to stop homebrew. However, now with the Wii they do respond *somewhat* more. If you look at what they’ve done against modchips, they’ve actualy done quite a lot. They’ve introduced I think about 4 or 5 drive revisions to try to stop modchips. Allthough in some cases this caused some setback, these new revisions were always compromised within weeks. For homebrew, Nintendo didn’t realy do anything against it until about a week ago when they pushed the 3.3 software update into the world. This version actualy checks for and deletes the twilight hack. However, it actualy doesnt do anything against people that have allready used it, so if you have the homebrew channel installed for example, this won’t give you any problems. Luckily for all the homebrew fans that have yet to take the plunge, within 6 houres the original writers of the Twilight Hack announced a new version that wasnt detected by the 3.3 firmware, the tech savy ones amongst you might want to check http://hackmii.com/2008/06/wii-menu-tp-hack-killer-analysis/ and http://hackmii.com/2008/06/twilight-hack-v01beta1/. This new version of the Twilight Hack was released about a week ago and I have to say, it works like a charm.
This basicaly means that every Wii, no matter what firmware it runs, can execute the Twilight Hack and therefor all homebrew. However, this also shows that Nintendo IS actively looking into the matter, meaning that we can expect some more bumps in the road. I will post a big warning sign as soon as Nintendo distributes anything that causes a risk to your Wii console, but up until that point, you can update your Wii console without any problems. The 3.3 firmware update didn’t just fix the twilight hack though, it also fixes the so called “trucha bug”. The trucha bug allowed for previously altered discs to be run, and this was mainly used for things like uncensoring Manhunt or so called “scrubbing” iso’s, in other words, this won’t present any problems for people that haven’t installed a modchip, since they can’t run these discs anyway. The problem on this one is that Datel also uses the “Trucha bug” on its Freeloader, meaning that with firmware 3.3 you can no longer use the Freeloader. However, there is a great alternative for this which goes by the name of “Gecko Region Free”. It is a homebrew application that you run, and then you insert your imported disc. This will completely ignore the update partition on the disc and make sure it runs on any region Wii.
The most comon fear that people have is that Nintendo will try to brick your console (or ban you from their online service ala Microsoft) if they find any traces of homebrew. Well rest assured, this most likely won’t happen. Why not? Because quite frankly, Nintendo doesn’t give a shit about you. Just like every other major company, they only care about money. As long as homebrew doesn’t cause any money loss for them, they won’t care. Also, if they decide to brick consoles all those Wii’s will be sent to their repair centers, which will evantualy cause them to lose money. But then why did they distribute the 3.3 update? Because due to some bad people homebrew also enables you to pirate things like VC and WiiWare games, which offcourse is a horrible thing to do.
If you’ve payed attention so far you now know that allthough homebrew will always present a certain risk, if you use it wisely it shouldn’t present any problems.
Well that’s about it for today, this was the last part of the introduction. My next post will be a step by step guide to installing the twilight hack and the homebrew channel. After that I’ll focus on putting great homebrew applications in the spotlights.
Once again, constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated.
To some, the word homebrew itself is enough to scare them away, to others its a great opportunity to make the most out of their gaming console. Although it does hold some risks and may in some cases be able to void warranty or cause a so called “brick”, if you know what you’re doing it can really spice things up. Many people think and argue that piracy and homebrew go hand in hand, but although homebrew in some cases might lead to piracy, this certainly isn’t the primary goal. I’ll start out by a simple and basic explanation of what homebrew actually is.
Homebrew is the term used for software that is “brewn at home”, or in other words, not designed by some fancy game designer but a do-it-yourself piece of code that was written by a hobbyist. For example, Nintendo does not want you to be able to play movie dvd’s on your Wii, this is probably due to licensing costs. The Wii is incapable of reading dvd’s because the software simply doesn’t know what to do with them. But hey…. what if some homebrew hobbyist decides to write his own software that IS capable of doing this.
This of course sounds awesome, but Nintendo just like any other company will try to prevent this. They try to prevent this by only allowing code to be run when that code holds the correct signature. This is a very complex process, but you can see it like this: Nintendo has a secret key, which they use to encrypt all of the games, channels and everything else that is ran on your system. This key is referred to as the “Private Key”. In order for these games and channels to be able to execute on your Wii, they need to be decrypted. This is done by the “Public Key”, this is a key thats known by every Wii. The public key can only be used to decrypt, not encrypt. The problem is that nobody (but Nintendo) knows the private key, so in theory you would not be able to run your own software because when the Wii checks for the right signature, and it isn’t there. Well, an arguably wise man once said “every security system can be compromised”. This has also happened with the Wii’s security system. Some pretty nifty hobbyist programmers found a bug in the check that the Wii does for the right signature to fool it into thinking there actualy is a correct signature ( while, of course, there really isn’t ). This allows for home brewn code to be run on your Nintendo Wii entertainment system.
After some months of development they came up with a user friendly form of this hack, known to the world as “The Twilight Hack”. This basically is a corrupted save game for Zelda Twilight Princess. The way this works is as that they copied a Zelda savegame to their computer, and they edited the horses name (which is stored in a string in the savegame) to be VERY long, then they fake encrypted it with their knowledge of the security bug, and placed it back on their Wii. Now, when the Wii loads the savegame and tries to load the horses name this causes a so called “stack overflow” meaning it doesn’t expect it to be that long, and crashes because of it. Well, everything that makes a console crash is a possible security flaw, and so was this one. By injecting code at that moment they were able to run code without the Wii checking its integrity. After weeks of development the hack was clean enough to be distributed into the world, so that people could run their own code. This was done by having people copy that savegame to their Wii, and then running Zelda while having an sd card inserted on which a file called boot.elf was placed. This file is the homebrew that will actually be executed. All Wii homebrew comes in .elf format, this is just the executable format that the Wii uses. Back in the gamecube days .dol files were used, and the Wii is still backwards compatible with .dol files.
Because they realized it is a bit annoying if you have to run the Twilight Hack every time you want to run a piece of homebrew, they decided to make a so called “Homebrew Channel”. After some months of development this channel was ready, now people had to load a .elf file through Zelda that installs the channel. This means people only needs Zelda once to install the channel. The homebrew channel allows you to run homebrew applications (using a pretty graphical user interface) from your sd card. The homebrew channel is also able to load .elf files that are sent to the Wii via your local network.
Right, that was your history lesson for today! I’ll continue by making a list of the most important things that are already possible, and whats still in the pipeline.
What can already be done using Wii Homebrew:
This is only a very short and incomplete list of the most exciting applications thus far.
These are the most exciting things that are currently announced and in development:
Alright! You now know close to everything you need to know about Wii homebrew! I hope you enjoyed the read, because there are more to follow haha. If you’re wondering who I am, I am WiiNintendo’s newest blogger and will be focusing on reporting progress in the homebrew scene, I’ll try to do at least 1 post per week.
My next post, probably tomorrow, will be about the risks and what Nintendo is doing to try to stop this madness. After that I’ll do a step by step instruction manual on how to kick things off.
Please excuse me if there are some spelling or grammar mistakes in this post, but English isn’t my native language. Also, if you have any suggestions for future posts please let me know in the comments!
