Misc I think i just solved a 2 year old lost media disc hunt

throwawayaccountimade · Jul 13, 2026

I DON'T KNOW IF THESE KINDS OF POSTS ARE ALLOWED, BUT IF I POST THIS SOMEWHERE ELSE I WOULD PROBABLY GET BANNED OR UNNOTICED, WHICH IS WHY I'M HERE. PLEASE INFORM ME IF THERE IS A ISSUE.

2 years ago, this reddit poster got their hands on a Wii U menu changer disc, and when the reddit user dumped the disc, people got disappointed to see that the disc was encrypted and had no key provided, but I just downloaded the dumped disc to see if I could guess the keys for some reason (thinking it wouldn't work), so i made a common.key file with the dev common key and a fake game.key with all zeros (by runningprintf '00000000000000000000000000000000' | xxd -r -p > game.key, which makes a 16 byte empty game.key), but then JWUDTool was showing tons of output of successfully decrypting the files (the command i used wasjava -jar JWUDTool-0.4.jar -in game.wux -dev -decrypt -out "extracted" -extract all)
, and there is some stuff that looks like it might be interesting (like some mentions of cafe sdk 2.08.06, 2.08.04, 2.06.05, and smilar versions, meaning these might be prerelease apps), but from what i can currently see, they are probably dev signed versions of final system updates/system software installers for either updating devkits, or testing the software right before the console release. If anyone cant reproduce my decryption steps, i can upload all the decrypted files to archive.org.

MythraWasTaken · 2026-07-21T07:08:01+0100

Always Nice to seeing someone looking into preserving stuff! I will say unfortunately these aren’t new dumps you can find some on archive.org already, Wii U menu changers were also distributed with the SDK. We’ve also gotten them through the development CDN as well. The title key being all 0’s is expected.

As for what the apps are actually used for, it depends on which version you’re specifically dealing with. E.g. development kit consoles “CAT-DEVs”, don’t actually ship with a Wii-U home menu by default. However, sometimes you wanna do demo’s or press releases with them so you want to actually install (or remove) the Wii-U home menu. So this app did that. For the disc based versions/test kits CAT-R, it specifically acts like a firmware updater/fixer. Reinstalling all the titles necessary to get a specific retail/development mode of the menu on your CAT-R.

Depending on your specific SDK version it’ll have slightly different versions of the titles, but there’s no pre-release or hidden content here. Just development versions of the menus (not development as in “debug symbols”, and other useful data. Just development signed).

In general if you want to dig on these dev versions of titles that are installed, look at the actual SDKs on archive.org. This is because CAT-DEVs default mode read all their files from an attached PC. So in order to make that all work Nintendo distributed effectively most of the Wii-U filesystem with the SDK. So if you download an SDK you’ll see a “data/mlc”, and “data/slc” folders that map to all the titles that they load.

Misc I think i just solved a 2 year old lost media disc hunt

New Member

Member

Similar threads

Popular threads in this forum