Hacking Wii U Hacking & Homebrew Discussion

[jc5504]

For sure, these are what I'm excited for.I'm also going off what we could do on the wii, were we able to get custom characters on the Wii?

Custom characters, fonts, tracks, music, pretty much anything. MrBean and Chadderz paved the way for a lot of that.

(Sorry for formatting and errors, I'm a new user and I'm on mobile)

 

[FPSRussi4]

Custom characters, fonts, tracks, music, pretty much anything. MrBean and Chadderz paved the way for a lot of that.

(Sorry for formatting and errors, I'm a new user and I'm on mobile)

That was a part of what I was going off of. Welcome to the forum!

 

[Deleted User]

ProjectSm4sh and Mario Kart 8 CTGP U hype.

 

[ShadowOne333]

I still can't tell why some of you say that there is no interest in developing homebrew for the Wii U.
I don't know, but maybe you are underestimating how many gifted coders are out there and willing to test their skills and further improve them with challenges.

Take a look at the 3DS scene.
I can remember back in 2012 that no one really cared, until Gateway came along.
Add to that Ninjhax, and we already had emulators developed for the main must-have consoles (NES, SNES, GB) in less than two weeks

I mean, sure the ones directly involved with the exploits and decryption of the system are well counted, but don't underestimate the number of programmers out there, neither underestimate their will to improve and outdo themselves.

 

[Vappy]

Fail0verflow's point has never been about a lack of interest from regular homebrew devs - it's a lack of interest from devs with the ability, interest and time to make a usable homebrew toolset. The 3DS has 3dbrew, with over two years of contribution documenting the system, and ctrulib to actually write and compile software for it. The Wii U has neither of those, so if an exploit were released, how are you proposing people make homebrew for it without any documentation or an open SDK?

 

[Theeze]

With the PS3, we shared everything. It was an experiment, to see if the community could handle building a homebrew community without handholding. It couldn't - all we got was warez tools, waninkoko bricking consoles, and a lawsuit to deal with for naught. That was pretty much the signal that homebrew on home consoles is going downhill.

Homebrew on home consoles had a reasonably good run - one generation (PS2/Xbox/GC) happened when security was in its infancy, hardware was still simple enough to understand, and the hardware required was "free" or affordable. Then the Wii really peaked, since the community could leverage most of the GC work, there were even more free exploits to serve as an entry point, and persistence was easy. The 360 was a good example of what was to come security-wise, and the PS3 a good example of what was to come complexity-wise. The community couldn't handle those - even when exploits appeared, all that happened was piracy. Now we're in the next generation, and it's time to admit that consoles have become too complex for small teams of homebrew developers to truly understand. The only potentially saving point is that both the Xbox One and the PS4 are "basically" PCs, so if you can just take over the console completely, you could throw a desktop OS on it and maybe reuse most of existing drivers developed for PCs. But with the ability to buy a comparatively powered HTPC for a similar price as a game console, and things like smart TVs taking over some of the use cases (there's a good reason why some of the most popular homebrew apps for PS2/Xbox/Wii were media players), the interest just isn't there.

If you want to prove me wrong, feel free to bootstrap a proper homebrew community and development tools. If you want warez, go fuck yourself.

Who said I wanted warez? I just find it ridiculous that you hide things from the scene. How is keeping things helping in moving things forward? How can any scene move forward, if it's originators keep it to themselves and don't release anything?

You assume I'm after warez, I buy my games and support the devs. You know what they say about assuming right? As for the PS3 scene, it ended in a stalemate once Sony patched the so called "Epic Fail" and nothing since then was released. Everything was kept under the radar.

Going back to the piracy topic...The fact that warez is always in the back of your mind when someone says something that goes against your thoughts is ridiculous. I respect the work you piut into it (believe it or not) what you guys have done and I understand the risks, but don't act like your tight lips were helping the scene in any way.

 

[FPSRussi4]

I'm talking about the fact that there is next to no worthwhile homebrew for the PS3, and most of the community revolves around warez. What little there is (the usual emulator ports, one media player, and a few games) seems to be secondary to CFWs with warez support, warez loaders, and support tools like file transfer apps, and warez is basically the first thing that came out.

Were you guys terrified that you'd enable piracy on the Wii U?

 

[Deleted User]

At least we've been open with everything we're working on. You all have been silent since the beginning after those little snippets when you were hacking it. I'd rather others know what's going on without letting Nintendo hinder us then just going silent and expecting others to do the same work you did. It's the same attitude - "prove you're worthy and maybe we'll help you". But I digress, drama is utterly useless.

The only thing you can really do that the average user would be interested in is decrypt any of the Wii U ISOs the "scene" has released.

How does one go decrypt any Wii U WUD/ISO? Decryption software?

 

[NWPlayer123]

How does one go decrypt any Wii U WUD/ISO? Decryption software?

Currently there is only DiscU (which doesn't work) and a semi-complete version with Dolphin from forever ago that doesn't utilize the common key. I've been really lazy in writing a script to do the same thing. I think I'll work on it right now in fact. brb

 

[marcan_troll]

Who said I wanted warez?

Nobody? There's a reason why the last sentence in my post was in the form of a conditional.

As for the PS3 scene, it ended in a stalemate once Sony patched the so called "Epic Fail" and nothing since then was released.

Sony didn't patch anything; they couldn't. We said you could always hack existing consoles using a hardware flasher, and that's still the case. The only thing they get credit for was the lv0 wrapper trick to hide newer firmware keys until the bootldr keys were dumped (which was admittedly cute - and we were *really* close to dumping the bootldr keys ourselves, but failed and missed an exploit that in retrospect was staring at us in the face; had lots of fun trying though). After the bootldr keys were dumped that became moot too. As for anything that was developed after our release; don't look at us, we released what we had and let the community roll with it. If the community couldn't handle it or chose to not develop things openly after that, it's not our fault.

Going back to the piracy topic...The fact that warez is always in the back of your mind when someone says something that goes against your thoughts is ridiculous. I respect the work you piut into it (believe it or not) what you guys have done and I understand the risks, but don't act like your tight lips were helping the scene in any way.

The point of the tight lips isn't to help the homebrew scene. The point of the tight lips is to not help the warez scene where the alternative is unlikely to lead to a reasonable homebrew scene. What none of us want is to release everything only to have a barrage of warez loaders show up next to the token half-assed ports of Doom and Snes9x and nothing else. If everyone and their mom didn't want piracy, and warez loaders weren't an order of magnitude easier to write for modern consoles than a proper homebrew SDK, we would gladly release everything and let things take their course. But we don't want to be the enablers of trivial piracy for yet another console without any legitimate use cases.

Remember, every single home console after the PS2 was hacked for homebrew* and those hacks were later abused for piracy. If the way things looked it were likely that we'd get a healthy homebrew ecosystem *before* piracy tools showed up, we'd gladly release everything in a heartbeat. It just doesn't look like that's what would happen. At all.

*Drive hacks notwithstanding (they're a different category entirely).

 

[comex]

Who are you again? No one loses from releasing it either, do they? If there's no harm in keeping it for sport, there's no harm or loss in releasing it either. The fact it was kept in secret for two years means releasing it won't make it any worse. How have I improved the scene? How have you improve the scene?

In theory I lose because the Wii U is in enough trouble already without everyone pirating games; I'd hate to think that I was responsible for making that worse. But yes, the facts that (1) two years have passed and (2) crediar had already somehow extracted game files and someone else had a kernel exploit, opening multiple avenues to piracy without this key, imply that there is not much harm anymore, and are why I was originally planning to just tweet it, before being (for the nth time) talked out of it, convinced instead to send it privately 'for now'. As I said on Twitter, I am much more annoyed about the way the leak happened than the actual outcome.

Back in the Wii days people keeping things secret drove me up the wall, regardless of their reasons for doing so – that was half my motivation for writing my own stuff in the first place – and that part of me has changed very little; in this situation I was never really happy with secrecy, just at a loss for anything better to do. So I wish everyone the best of luck, and hopefully we all gain from interesting game mods. (I've already posted semi-trollishly here before regarding how much I adore Project M.)

 

[the_randomizer]

In theory I lose because the Wii U is in enough trouble already without everyone pirating games; I'd hate to think that I was responsible for making that worse. But yes, the facts that (1) two years have passed and (2) crediar had already somehow extracted game files and someone else had a kernel exploit, opening multiple avenues to piracy without this key, imply that there is not much harm anymore, and are why I was originally planning to just tweet it, before being (for the nth time) talked out of it, convinced instead to send it privately 'for now'. As I said on Twitter, I am much more annoyed about the way the leak happened than the actual outcome.

Back in the Wii days people keeping things secret drove me up the wall, regardless of their reasons for doing so – that was half my motivation for writing my own stuff in the first place – and that part of me has changed very little; in this situation I was never really happy with secrecy, just at a loss for anything better to do. So I wish everyone the best of luck, and hopefully we all gain from interesting game mods. (I've already posted semi-trollishly here before regarding how much I adore Project M.)

Contrary to belief, piracy only contributes to a very very small percentage, don't believe for a second that it kills consoles, that's never happened before, and that's not gonna happen now. There are still people who wish to use it for homebrew, like legit homebrew. Didn't kill the 3DS, DS, PS1, PS2, PS3, Wii, GBA, etc etc. It was bound to happen, and the fact people are so upset about the leak is not surprising, but it's no reason to be hard on yourself, man. You weren't responsible, no one knows who leaked it anyways, probably better that way. As they say, shit happens, leaks happen, it was inevitable, but don't beat yourself up over it. Piracy isn't gonna affect the Wii U much, if at all. We need to have an ecosystem for the Wii U homebrew, now we're one step further.

Why were you talked out of it, because some hackers were cowardly about it? Screw them.

 

[santaclaws429]

don't believe for a second that it kills consoles, that's never happened before

One word... Dreamcast.

 

[daicon]

...

What none of us want is to release everything only to have a barrage of warez loaders show up next to the token half-assed ports of Doom and Snes9x and nothing else. .

...

To be fair, you'd probably see a ton of very cool things like mods/custom content for Kart, Smash, and 3D World.. Maybe aid in preserving the online components of Wii U titles, etc.

I don't care about piracy, I just hope at some point in the future you release for the sake of some of those things alone.

It's not my place to say, but I'm personally just interested in the controller hardware's potential for home theater use and DS/3DS emulation, Gamecube/GBA link-cable shenanigans..

 

[the_randomizer]

One word... Dreamcast.

Myth, actually, and unsubstantiated http://gbatemp.net/threads/piracy-common-myths.344858/ Sega's bad marketing killed the Dreamcast, we're done discussing this. Piracy doesn't kill consoles, end of discussion.

 

[daicon]

Myth, actually, and unsubstantiated http://gbatemp.net/threads/piracy-common-myths.344858/ Sega's bad marketing killed the Dreamcast, we're done discussing this. Piracy doesn't kill consoles, end of discussion.

The first utopia boot disc came out only like months before the Dreamcast was officially announced to be discontinued.. If you wanna prove that piracy kills anything you'll need a new example!

May I suggest the ZX Spectrum?

 

[the_randomizer]

The first utopia boot disc came out only like months before the Dreamcast was officially announced to be discontinued.. If you wanna prove that piracy kills anything you'll need a new example!

May I suggest the ZX Spectrum?

Dude, please, we need to drop this topic from the Wii U hacking forum. I'm done discussing piracy, I want to talk about Wii U hacking.

 

[FPSRussi4]

Dude, please, we need to drop this topic from the Wii U hacking forum. I'm done discussing piracy, I want to talk about Wii U hacking.

I agree.

When the exploit drops, can we hack the Wii U to enable piracy?






That was sarcasm to any would-be white knights.

 

[santaclaws429]

Myth, actually, http://gbatemp.net/threads/piracy-common-myths.344858/ Sega's bad marketing killed the Dreamcast, we're done discussing this. Piracy doesn't kill consoles, end of discussion.

I was around in the Dreamcast days. the console was getting lots of praise on sites and in magazine's.(yes everyone read maggs in those days) all my buddy's including me would order Pirate dreamcast games online. everyone was doing it. it got that bad no one would publish games for the dreamcast anymore. (look it up) But all in all it was the huge security flaw that killed it.

 

[endoverend]

Dude, please, we need to drop this topic from the Wii U hacking forum. I'm done discussing piracy, I want to talk about Wii U hacking.

If that's not what you would like to discuss, then why don't you come up with something else productive about the scene that DOESN'T involve piracy? It is part of the discussion, especially in this scene. There's literally zero ways to keep the topic off piracy so i suggest you stay away if you're going to get flamed up.