Wii locks comprehensively broken!
The locks on the Nintendo Wii have been comprehensively broken. Now, just by loading some code onto an SD card and sticking it into your Wii, you can unlock your console so that it will play homebrew games written by anyone, not just big companies that have paid big license fees to Nintendo!
Well, with the alpha 3 release of the TP hack, you can use your Wii’s internal SD slot! And you can survive without having to muck about with boot sectors and such. Just throw the .elf onto the root of your card, and you’re good to go. This is some pretty exciting news! Hopefully this thing continues to develop!Link
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Wow, there's something awesomely cartoonish and Snow Crashy about having to boot into the Zelda game and talk to a character to launch the exploit. I was expecting it to be just at the moment of loading the saved game.
Thats great, it's good to see people take back control of the things we buy and use them how we want.
I recently unlocked the potential of my $200 Canon sd1000 with chdk and now am able to do all kinds of cool things with it like shoot in RAW mode and control tons more parameters that your typical consumer digital camera is not able to. I can even run scripts,play games, read documents, calendar,depth-of-field calculator etc..
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
here is a set of some of my first RAW photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shannonpatrick17/sets/72157604095336885/
Is this a temporary hack or a permanent hack? Nintendo seems to be taking the line that you can hack your Wii but don't blame us if the hack + an update from Nintendo in the future bricks the thing.
Dammit, I have a Wii, but I have the Gamecube version of Twilight Princess.
Looks like it's back to the Dreamcast for me.
IRC - This isn't really a hack or a mod, you just trick a game into running code off the SD card. While a future update may prevent this from working, you aren't changing anything within your console to do it. This method is pretty much brick-free. Start flashing firmwares and that's a different story...
#5: It's not a mod, but it certainly is a hack.
"Homebrew games written by anyone." Yeah, I'm sure that's what this will be used for.
I love the idea of open development and letting the hobbyist community run their own software on their legally purchased machines. It should be relatively simple to obtain a development key to sign your game app so it will run on the Wii, in a perfect world.
On the other hand, I can see why Nintendo puts a few stopping blocks or parking posts for getting an application to run on any Wii console. Embedded systems quality control (in particular, Nintendo's) want to prevent turning their systems/consoles into a zombie that could flood the internal Wii network by hacking a not so securly designed third party game. Or a spam bot.
The high license fees don't make much sense to me, but it does make sense to establish accountability for software developed to run on any legally purchased machine (Sony, are you listening?)
Plainly put, I'm all for hobbyists being able to run their programs on their systems and they should be able to run code on their machines. It's accessing other machines that should be a valid concern. Sadly, there's a few points like multiplayer where restricting network access on some platforms like XNA could put a thorn in the side of many a game hobbist developer.
#7 & #8:
Apparently Team Twiizers have vowed to staying away from anything related to an ISO loader. So, yes, it actually will be used just for homebrew games.
Last I heard, you still need to get your Wii hardmodded to pirate anything anyway. So this alone isn't much of an enabler.
What's the point of putting Tetris in a Zelda game? If you're going to the trouble of hacking it, make it something useful.
@Chris Schmidt: Thanks. That's a neat way to go about loading your homebrew games. How easy is it to compile for the Wii if the official Dev Kit and license from Nintendo are expensive?
actully the dev kit is only $2,000 - $10,000 depending on how big your team is, considering sony's is $100,000 this is pretty inexpensive
I think that the effect of piracy upon console game has been greatly overstated. I've actually heard people say that it was piracy that killed the Dreamcast, which can play pirated CD-Rs. As a prior comment said, it certainly hasn't hurt the PS1, or PS2 for that matter.
Concerning the Wii, it's kind of amazing when I browse around Nintendo fansites and find people actually -applauding- (in that fansite way) Nintendo for its lockout system. They've internalized their concern over the fate of the company to such an extent that they prefer that their system has a system to prevent them from doing what they want with the hardware.
Nintendo makes some of the best games out there, but let's not forget that they are not all sunshine and roses. In the NES' heyday they played distribution hardball with stores to keep unlicensed games off of shelves, and they controlled all manufacturing of their own games and those of licenses and thus could cripple a company's sales if they wished.
The company experienced a great humbling when the Genesis beat them for a while in the U.S. marketplace, and an even greater humbling when the Playstation beat the N64 handily. It seems they're now more honest in their dealings with other studios, especially if their WiiWare outreach is legit. They've even started an open-source OS project, although they say it's for research only.
But they're still a major console manufacturer and software company, and that seems to inevitably leads to a conflict of interest between them and customer rights these days. They possess software patents, make use of lockouts in all their systems, regional lockouts in non-portable systems and system-locked DRM for Wii Virtual Console downloadable software. They make tremendous use, as most software companies do, on Non-Disclosure Agreements to keep information other than just trade secrets obscure. NDAs so saturate game development that even the press must often sign them to gain access to pre-release software. The Wii system software is updated frequently, but does not reveal in the dialog before the update what the update does, and the purpose of the last update, which provides no new features, is yet unknown.