Hacking neek2o

  • Thread starter obcd
  • Start date
  • Views 299,705
  • Replies 1,533
  • Likes 5

obcd

Well-Known Member
OP
Member
Joined
Apr 5, 2011
Messages
1,594
Trophies
0
XP
432
Country
Belgium
Ok folks, for those who didn't knew already, we are making our project public today:

The official website of our project can be found here:
http://code.google.com/p/custom-di/

Our IRC channel is on irc.abjects.net #cdi.

The pre release topic was:
http://gbatemp.net/t...testers-wanted/

As usual, Xflak has beaten us, and support in modmii came out before our official release:
http://code.google.com/p/modmii/
The version you are looking for is 4.7.6 or anything higher.

Within this announcement, I would like to thank in no specific order:

Crediar for his wonderfull sneek package.
Overjoy for all the work and time he spent on it. He designed the framework for di wbfs support.
Xflak for supporting it in modmii and his help upon taking the last hurdles.
GiantPune for showing us the magic in bootmii ios, and even working it out when we failed to do so.
Scooby74029 for his support and attempts to fix problems.
Stfour for supporting it in postloader and letting us use priibooter as launch framework.
JoostinOnline for his artwork (I hope his book is finished by now..)
Lustar, the driving force behind wiitdb.com.
All our testers that supported us on irc. Not always with positive announcements :-)
Wintermute for his free development packages.
Nintendo for their cheap piece of hardware that is part of our hobby.
Many many others, from which we picked source code or simply ideas...Sorry for all those I forgot.
PM me, and I will edit this announcement...(This was a hurry job.)


So, what is our project?

I like to see it as an enhancement of Crediar's sneek project. It has a number of new features:

- It can launch backup games in wbfs format from a fat32 formatted drive.
- It can use an emulated nand in a subfolder of the drive, and not only on the root of it.
- It can switch from one emulated nand to another on the fly. So you can run a game in it's own
region nand.
- It has Uneek_usb_fs support. This means that homebrew can have usb access again with minor modifications,
using the isfs filing system.
- It can cooperate with bootmii. It doesn't launch automatically every time on a bootmii as boot2 wii.
- It's prepared for an usb only setup. In the near future, you wan't need a sd card anymore to use it.

For the noob's reading this, a little more explanation.

The wii contains an internal 512Mb nand chip that can be seen as the harddisk of a pc. It contains the
operating system of the wii and other files like gamesaves.

If something serious goes wrong with the wii operating system files, it's sometimes difficult to fix the issue.
A pc can be booted from a cd/dvd or an usb stick to fix things, but the wii doesn't have this luxury. In worst case
the flash disk needs to be reprogrammed with an external programmer. Deadly Foez is the specialist for this type of
repairs. A very important thing you need is the backup of your working nand, or at least the keys that are used to encrypt
that nand. Without those, your wii can become an expensive doorstop or paperweight.

Sneek and Uneek redirect the internal nand flash read and write operations to the wii sd card or usb disk.
Sneek uses the sd card and Uneek uses the harddisk. If something goes wrong, you can restore the nand folders on your sd card or
your harddisk with a pc, and things are running again. The DI module that comes with uneek replaces the original one that reads
games from a game disc, and reads the game data from the harddisk as well. So, it's possible to place a backup of your game on
your harddisk and run it.

The original nand flash only has a size of 512Mb. The emulated nand on harddisk can be several Gigabytes in size. So, you don't have
to erase gamesaves anymore to be able to install VC/Wiiware on your wii.

Pro's:

-Size of nand not limited to 512Mb
-Very brick safe as the original nand and it's ios aren't touched.
-Very good compatibility with VC and Wiiware. Some claim 100%
-Very good compatibility with Games.
-You can take your harddisk over to a friend with a modded wii and play your games like you would be playing them on your own wii. (including your gamesaves)

Con's that are solved or will be solved:

-Can't cooperate with bootmii on real nand.
-No homebrew usb access.
-Special game format. Games need to be extracted.
-HBC isn't running on it.

Con's that still exist:

-is a little slower than real nand as the drive acces itself is slower.
-some harddisks don't work very well with it.
-appears difficult to setup in the beginning.

I will now try a setup myself, so that I can write a HowTo tutorial.

Stay Tuned and fire your phasers... (I mean, your questions..)


17-11-2011

Today, I have update the sources on our googlepage. The main reason are some minor bugfixes.

-The system freezed with a black screen when either the games or wbfs folder were empty (default situation with a modmii setup)
-The system also freezed when there were no games in either the games or the wbfs folder or when those folders didn't exist.
-An invalid file or folder in the wbfs folder made the previous game appear twice in the game list.
-Added support for another game format in the wbfs folder

The dimodule.elf on our google svn page is still the old one. The new one can be downloaded here:

http://www.mediafire...6hhs3gs162s3t9h

Currently, your games in the wbfs folder need the following structure:

(Taking Wii sports as an example)
wbfs/rspp01/rspp01.wbfs
wbfs/rspp01.wbfs
wbfs/rspp01_wii_sports/rspp01.wbfs
wbfs/wii_sports[rspp01]/rspp01.wbfs
wbfs/wii_sports[rspp01].wbfs

We will ignore requests for other formats. I think we have most formats supported by usb loaders now.

if something changed to the games or wbfs folder, you need to rebuild or delete the diconfig.bin file.
if something changed to the nands folder structure, you need to delete the sneek/nandcfg.bin file.

Those files will automatically be recreated upon the next boot into neek2o

JoostinOnline made some icons for people using the launcher from the hbc, homebrew filter or postloader. You can find those here (Post #20):
http://gbatemp.net/t...for-developers/
GartimusPrime made one as well. Will upload it if he agrees.

24-11-2011

Overjoy posted nswitch1.0.rar on our google svn. It allows to boot into a uneek2o environment without the need of an sd card.
A small bug was resolved in the priiloader 0.7 installer. After it did it's work, it didn't return properly to the system menu. This is
hopefully fixed now. The priiloader.app stays the same.
 

obcd

Well-Known Member
OP
Member
Joined
Apr 5, 2011
Messages
1,594
Trophies
0
XP
432
Country
Belgium
@joostin

no, the application will be called bootneek. The project is called neek2o with sneek2o and uneek2o
 

mvgc3

Well-Known Member
Member
Joined
Sep 17, 2009
Messages
166
Trophies
0
XP
71
Country
United States
This sounds really cool! I can't wait for you to get your tutorials up so I can try it out!

Just a quick question though; in the "HowToNandSel" guide on the code page, it shows the "nands" subfolder structure as "nand1", "nand2", etc. Is it possible to name these anything? For example could you have "USnand", "WiiWare", "VCnand", etc? It's not really an issue either way, I'm just curious.

Anyway, like I already said, this sounds awesome! Thanks for keeping the Wii scene alive an kicking! :D
 

obcd

Well-Known Member
OP
Member
Joined
Apr 5, 2011
Messages
1,594
Trophies
0
XP
432
Country
Belgium
Yes, you can name those wathever you like. They are just examples. The main "nands" subfolder containing the others shouldn't change from name.

It was a shame sneek never received the attention it deserved. We hope things will change and people will start to like it on their wii's.
Only then we can say "mission completed..."
 

mvgc3

Well-Known Member
Member
Joined
Sep 17, 2009
Messages
166
Trophies
0
XP
71
Country
United States
Ok, I figured that was the case.

And I agree that it's a shame the NEEKs never became more common. I only use it for RB3, since .wbfs and pretty USB loaders are just a more convenient format for me. Once I get this set up I may just leave my SD card plugged in :)
 

obcd

Well-Known Member
OP
Member
Joined
Apr 5, 2011
Messages
1,594
Trophies
0
XP
432
Country
Belgium
@xflak, no big deal, I needed your program for my howto tutorial. So, it had to come first.
Overjoy found it kind of funny...Actual, me too.
 

impizkit

Lazy Lurker
Member
Joined
Apr 6, 2010
Messages
942
Trophies
0
XP
139
Country
Excellent work guys. I am now actually interested in neek, before it seemed to troublesome. Anxiously awaiting the tutorial.
 

Atlas_22

New Member
Newbie
Joined
Nov 11, 2011
Messages
2
Trophies
0
XP
2
Country
Only a minor problem with this I guess. Black ops / mw3 multilayer performance is unplayable, even more so then discex format from default uneek 168 (same wbfs and drive work without slowdown on usb cfg loader with d2x 53 or something). Otherwise nice work getting this running, love the live nand switching.
 

PizzaPino

Well-Known Member
Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2008
Messages
308
Trophies
0
XP
203
Country
Spain
Only a minor problem with this I guess. Black ops / mw3 multilayer performance is unplayable, even more so then discex format from default uneek 168 (same wbfs and drive work without slowdown on usb cfg loader with d2x 53 or something). Otherwise nice work getting this running, love the live nand switching.
maybe you should try this
http://gbatemp.net/topic/218725-sneekdi-quick-guide/page__view__findpost__p__3961755
it helped me with another game.
 

nintendowii

Well-Known Member
Member
Joined
Feb 28, 2011
Messages
166
Trophies
1
XP
1,200
Country
Germany
Only a minor problem with this I guess. Black ops / mw3 multilayer performance is unplayable, even more so then discex format from default uneek 168 (same wbfs and drive work without slowdown on usb cfg loader with d2x 53 or something). Otherwise nice work getting this running, love the live nand switching.
maybe you should try this
http://gbatemp.net/t...ost__p__3961755
it helped me with another game.
is this no add for a next release of neek2o?
 

Site & Scene News

Popular threads in this forum

General chit-chat
Help Users
  • A @ anotherthing:
    Online was free on the 3DS as well, and it worked well.
    +1
  • S @ salazarcosplay:
    I can't help but think nintendo switch online is the reason we did not get a gameboy/n64/gamecube
    mini classic edition
    +1
  • Xdqwerty @ Xdqwerty:
    @salazarcosplay, i think it would have been impossible to see anything in a gameboy mini
  • S @ salazarcosplay:
    well I meant that as a figure of speech
  • S @ salazarcosplay:
    they could just rerelease a modern gameboy
  • S @ salazarcosplay:
    like the pocket analogue
  • S @ salazarcosplay:
    but nintendo licensed
  • LeoTCK @ LeoTCK:
    dammit that thread got moved from offtopic to edge, well since that happened
  • Xdqwerty @ Xdqwerty:
    @LeoTCK, atleast it's still avaliable
  • LeoTCK @ LeoTCK:
    yes but it wasn't meant to be a comedy thread
  • LeoTCK @ LeoTCK:
    and edge of the forum is mostly comedy and games
  • LeoTCK @ LeoTCK:
    so I don't get why it got moved at all
  • Xdqwerty @ Xdqwerty:
    @LeoTCK, mods are probably hating you
  • LeoTCK @ LeoTCK:
    on most sites mods hated me, sooner or later, but usually over time I get either banned or the mods get used to me
  • LeoTCK @ LeoTCK:
    sometimes to the point of thanking me for my quick actions etc against spam and other stuff, but yea...its either they come to respect me or outright hate me
    +1
  • BigOnYa @ BigOnYa:
    If it's not game related, it will be moved to the Egde of the forum. Mods have moved a few of my threads also.
  • Xdqwerty @ Xdqwerty:
    @BigOnYa, it was in the off topic chat forum
  • BigOnYa @ BigOnYa:
    Well atleast they didn't delete it completely.
  • LeoTCK @ LeoTCK:
    hmm
  • Xdqwerty @ Xdqwerty:
    uoiea
  • LeoTCK @ LeoTCK:
    huh?
  • Xdqwerty @ Xdqwerty:
    Aeiou backwards
    Xdqwerty @ Xdqwerty: Aeiou backwards