Mod chip? I don't need no stinkin' mod chip!

October 31, 2008 3:25 PM

The Mother of all Wii Hacks: Early on in the life of the Wii, hackers discovered a bug in "Zelda: Twilight Princess" and exploited it to create the Twilight Hack. From that came the Homebrew Channel, a software browser, and even DVD capability.

Now comes the Wii Backup Loader: a way to run "backup" (aka bootlegged) games without physically modding your machine. It still has flaws. Proponents say you can create and play backups while preserving your original discs. Critics say it opens the door wide open for copyright infringement. Be aware: all of this hacking is risky because you run the risk of "bricking" your Wii.

posted by Brodiggitty (28 comments total)

Holy smokes. I rented Twilight Princess earlier this year to take advantage of the exploit to install some torrented Virtual Console "stuff" (purely as an academic exercise, you see).

Things have come a long way. I'll have to install all this new software and try the Wii Backup Loader. How you properly image and burn a backup of a Wii title?
posted by porn in the woods at 3:39 PM on October 31, 2008

Wow. First R4DS, now this.

Must suck to be Nintendo, right about now.
posted by paisley henosis at 3:43 PM on October 31, 2008

Wow. First R4DS, now this.

Must suck to be Nintendo, right about now.

Every console can be modded like this in some way. I don't know about the PS3, since I don't have one, but the XBox 360 can be modified to load burnt DVDs by hooking its DVD drive up to a SATA-equipped PC (pretty much every PC in the last 3 years) and rewriting the firmware. PSPs can be loaded with hacked firmware that can load game ISOs in a number of ways, the most ingenious of which involves modifying a PSP battery (the "Pandora" hack). Every console as far back as the original Playstation can be modified in some way to load things the manufacturer doesn't want you to load, and before that (in the SNES/Genesis era) people used cartridge copiers to burn downloaded ROMs to rewritable cartridges. The NES era was before I was knowledgable about this sort of thing, but I'm sure there was something similar for it as well. It's impossible to create a console that can't be hacked at all, and the companies know this, so they don't even try. They just correctly assume that only a small percentage of owners will bother/risk it (there's always a chance of bricking your hardware).
posted by DecemberBoy at 4:04 PM on October 31, 2008 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this, BTW. I have a Wii and a copy of Twilight Princess, but I've never bothered with chipping it because I don't play it that much. This sounds pretty easy to do, and no soldering required (although I can do that, I've chipped late-model PS2s which is probably the hardest console to modify), so I'll definitely give it a try.
posted by DecemberBoy at 4:11 PM on October 31, 2008

Every console can be modded like this in some way.

I know, it is pretty much unavoidable. But the R4DS opened the door for pretty much the easiest console games piracy ever, and this seems to be especially easy, too.

Sure, with a mod chip soldered on, or some complicated stuff like that, anything can run ROMs, but the easier it is to do, the more people will do it, and the more money the company will lose out on.

My point was just that, if this is as easy as it seemed from the bit I read, that a whole lot of people will be doing this PDQ.
posted by paisley henosis at 4:15 PM on October 31, 2008

Must suck to be Nintendo, right about now.

Yeah, what with the two best selling video game platforms of all time. They're doing a hell of a lot better than, say, Ford, whose products are even harder to pirate.
posted by GuyZero at 4:19 PM on October 31, 2008 [5 favorites]

I've had a chipped Wii for about a year and a pile of burned games — it'll be nice when someone releases a channel that loads ISOs from a USB storage device: lower latency, lower load times, little drive noise, no burning or swapping discs.

Apparently Nintendo is going to release an update soon to allow you to play VC/WiiWare directly from an SD card, since the Wii has so little internal storage.
posted by blasdelf at 4:25 PM on October 31, 2008 [1 favorite]

Mindy Kaling, of NBC's version of The Office, on pirating cars.
posted by basicchannel at 4:29 PM on October 31, 2008 [1 favorite]

Dark Alex's work on hacking the PSP deserves a mention. His custom firmware turns a good handheld into a great handheld. Being able to run ISOs off of a memory stick conserves on battery and increases load speed. The current firmware doesn't require a UMD in the drive when you're gaming, saving weight. He's even pointed the PSP Software Update towards his own site for maximum ease in firmware updating (!)
posted by porn in the woods at 4:35 PM on October 31, 2008

paisley henosis: "Must suck to be Nintendo, right about now."

Yeah, all those trucks delivering the enormous loads of money they're earning by having both the leading handheld and home consoles in the same generation has got to be a real kick in the nuts, too.
posted by Effigy2000 at 4:41 PM on October 31, 2008

Or, on preview, what GuyZero said. Heh.
posted by Effigy2000 at 4:42 PM on October 31, 2008

What annoys me is that, through the Homebrew channel, people are implementing things that Nintendo should have implemented. I mean, the array of things available in the Wii Shop is still pathetic. You can run MPlayer through the Homebrew channel. Why the hell hasn't Nintendo released a decent media player? I'd happily pay $10 for that.
posted by Jimbob at 7:01 PM on October 31, 2008 [3 favorites]

Jimbob - exactly, the homebrew channel recently enabled SDHC capability for the SD slot, which is something Nintendo should have done a long time ago.
posted by jeffmik at 8:06 PM on October 31, 2008

I like the idea that people are making neat add-ons, maybe making some things faster, more efficient. Hopefully Nintendo will find a way to embrace and work with it. I'm not particularly excited to see them suffer for it, though. They created something that turned out quite cool, and with some risk in taking the direction they did.
posted by troybob at 8:11 PM on October 31, 2008

I wish Nintendo would find away to embrace homebrew (though I'm sure they would need to figure out how to prevent people from using it for piracy). The R4 has some really cool music creation programs that wouldn't exist if it weren't for homebrew scene.
posted by drezdn at 8:14 PM on October 31, 2008

What's the real risk re: bricking? I'm tempted as HELL to do Wii Homebrew stuff, haven't purely because of this worry (well, that and we are and will be for a few months without WiFi).
posted by middleclasstool at 8:16 PM on October 31, 2008

Every console as far back as the original Playstation can be modified in some way to load things the manufacturer doesn't want you to load, and before that (in the SNES/Genesis era) people used cartridge copiers to burn downloaded ROMs to rewritable cartridges.

Actually, the Super Wildcard DX 2 used floppies and CDs (not pictured). Flashing cartridges is more of a handled (DMG/GBC/GBA/NDS) thing. I admit I'm always surprised when Nintendo's copy protection winds up being super weak.
posted by pwnguin at 8:21 PM on October 31, 2008

Another feature Nintendo should have implemented is DVD playback, which it turns out the system is perfectly capable of, to the extent that it's possible early plans for the Wii included a DVD viewer channel. Homebrew DVD access is done by installing a hidden channel to the console, called DVDX, which has DVD reading enabled. Once it's installed, other software can use it as a proxy to read DVDs. (The reason it wasn't implemented out of the box probably has to do with avoiding adding the DVD Forum's licensing fee to the cost of the system. It's the same reason the Xbox could only play DVDs when a special dongle had been purchased; although the hardware was completely capable of playing DVD movies, they would have had to have paid for a license from the DVD guys. By selling a small device that "unlocks" that ability, they could claim that the device itself was effectively the player. I've heard that the license fee is a percentage of the cost of the device, so a small gizmo that "plays" DVDs would carry a much lower fee than a console.)

On the weakness of Nintendo's defense measures to people hacking their console, as far as tech companies go, Nintendo's always been kind of odd. Almost like they're not really a tech company at all. They're always slow to add features, when they do add them they tend to be strange things like Check Mii Out and Everybody Votes, and they always take an extremely simplified approach to exposing the tech's functionality. They will happily err on the side of making a console or piece of sofware do less than it could, indeed far less, than make the interface even slightly complex.

Ultimately, Nintendo is a toy company that happens to make computer games. That attitude permeates their product line. I don't say this as a criticism, but it is a very different attitude than that of Microsoft or Sony. For a company that people tend to geek out about, they themselves are possibly the least geeky game company in the business.

I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear the bugs happened as a result of their developers not understanding the tech. It seems that the original bug that allowed the Homebrew Channel to be installed came about because of very basic flaws in the signature-checking code, flaws that made it so that an attacker didn't have to include an entire correct signature. It discarded a good number of bytes of the signature, and it also used a strcopy in the check, which halts when a zero-byte is reached in one of the strings. This bug was actually fixed in the most recent system update, fixed in all the IOSes (see below), but the HBC guys have discovered more bugs than just this, and had a new version of the HBC that worked with the new update within a week.

Especially interesting is their approach to making sure the system doesn't break in unintended ways when updated. Every Wii system has, stored on its flash chips, multiple redundant copies of the primary system software, called IOS. Most of the time when the system is updated, it doesn't actually replace any files. It just installs an entire new copy of the system software! When a disk or a channel is run, it can specify which version of IOS it's made for. So installing IOS21 won't change anything at all for all the games that run under IOS8. It makes a kind of sense if one is obsessive about quality control, but it's rather wasteful of the system's already-limited flash memory.
posted by JHarris at 3:40 AM on November 1, 2008 [4 favorites]

Wow. First R4DS, now this.

Meanwhile, yesterday it was reported that the new Nintendo DSi knows all about things like the R4 and will freeze on loading if one is thought to be in use.
posted by Servo5678 at 4:29 AM on November 1, 2008

I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear the bugs happened as a result of their developers not understanding the tech.

I don't think it's fair to say that Nintendo failed at security bugs because they don't understand tech. Microsoft certainly employed lots of tech people and still failed with the Xbox, and apparently even the 360. But with the GBA and NDS, it seemed like they didn't even try. When I first saw the RSA certified logo on the NDS I thought they were finally serious about piracy, but apparently that for the wifi or something.

And yea, it's a shame how hard it is to run software on their hardware. DSOrganize is really neat, and it's a tragedy that the splintered hardware leaves the DSlinux project bifurcated with a crappy command line version and a "extra RAM in slot 2" GUI version. It kinda makes me sad to see the DSi making improvements in capability but severely locking them down and I have zero expectation that the homebrew community will be allowed to publish software under the Free DSiWare section.
posted by pwnguin at 9:51 AM on November 1, 2008

Seconding Jimbob - DVD capability should have been a given. But I would happily pay a few bucks for decent programs. The PS3 has an great media interface and constantly releases free demos.

As for the REAL risk of bricking, installing the homebrew channel is relatively safe and perfectly legal. Bricking COULD happen if you don't have your ducks in a row, but it is unlikely.

The instructions on how to do it are clearly laid out on the Wiibrew page. Take your time and make sure the (very small) install files you have downloaded are not corrupted. Make sure you are running the right version of the twilight hack for the version of the game you have (this is all explained clearly). Be aware of what version of the Wii software you are running. If you ran the official update earlier this month, you may not be able to install the Homebrew Channel for a while. The authors are constantly overcoming the latest attempts at hole-plugging thrown at them by Nintendo programmers. For me, the risk was worth it.
posted by Brodiggitty at 10:31 AM on November 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

While being able to run freeware/shareware apps is a good thing, using mods like this to run copies of game software is still thievery.

Stop pretending you're putting it to the greedy companies. You're just low level, petty thieves. So many developers, artists and publishers put everything they are into their games and you're stealing from them.

That's all you're doing, stealing.
posted by AspectRatio at 10:55 AM on November 1, 2008

using mods like this to run copies of game software is still thievery

Please explain to me, using short, simple sentences, how (hypothetically) running a back-up I luckily made of my copy of Tony Hawk because my toddler scratched the original disk by playing frisbee with it is "thievery". I'm interested to know.
posted by Jimbob at 4:28 PM on November 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

Brodiggitty: If you ran the official update earlier this month, you may not be able to install the Homebrew Channel for a while.

As I mentioned in my (admittedly tl) comment, the Homebrew Channel people have overcome that problem. Beta 9 can be installed even with the new update.

Unfortunately, the hidden DVDX channel, which they're also responsible for, has not been updated, and they've made it clear that they'd rather work on another project, the forthcoming "BootMii," than fix it. Since they're refusing to release how they got the HBC to work again, and the source to neither the HBC or DVDX has been released, no one else can fix it either. While they've done good work so far, and I understand why they'd like to keep this stuff a secret (it makes it harder for Nintendo to block it), I do think it's better to be open with the code for these kinds of hacks rather than keep it under wraps indefinitely.
posted by JHarris at 7:08 PM on November 1, 2008

paisley henosis writes: Wow. First R4DS, now this.

Hey, the DS carts are awesome. My SO has 20 or 30 games for her DS, most of which she likes to play from time to time. Now, rather than having to haul around a crapload of DS carts and risk having them stolen along with the DS if something were to happen, she has convenient access to all of them wherever she goes.

And if some a-hole steals the DS, she's out the cost of a DS plus $50 instead of the cost of a DS plus a few hundred more bucks. I guess that is bad for big N's bottom line.
posted by wierdo at 10:17 PM on November 1, 2008

Oh, and the easiest piracy ever was the original Xbox. By far.
posted by wierdo at 10:19 PM on November 1, 2008

Oh, and the easiest piracy ever was the original Xbox. By far.

I'm pretty sure that award goes to the Dreamcast, which came more or less pre-modded.
posted by bertrandom at 10:57 PM on November 1, 2008

I'm pretty sure that award goes to the Dreamcast, which came more or less pre-modded.

Surely the older PSX models come in a close second, who needed only a cheat module in the expansion port to circumvent copy protection.

I understand why they'd like to keep this stuff a secret (it makes it harder for Nintendo to block it)

Amusingly, this means that Nintendo will have to find people to reverse engineer the HBC hacks, rather than be spoonfed the fix. I imagine it will take Nintendo game engineers far longer to do so than the experts attracted to reverse engineering Nintendo. Quite amazing how education can make a huge disparity in size and money dissolve.
posted by pwnguin at 1:44 AM on November 2, 2008