Hacking '3x' drive speed.

[soonepoon]

well at the end of the day its just a crappy copy loader

might aswell spend your money on a modchip instead of wasting loads of dvds

 

[zidane_genome]

Ok, lecture time. Pay attention there in the back
.......................

The interesting part comes at state 0x7F. This is
the state that does the filtering between GC, Wii, and other discs.

Digging around a bit in state 0x7F yields this interesting bit of code:

ROM:0008AA43 movbu (0x40880C), D0
ROM:0008AA48 and 0xF0, D0 ! '­'
ROM:0008AA4B cmp 0xF0, D0 ! '­'
ROM:0008AA4F bne loc_8AAB5
ROM:0008AA51 movbu (0x40880C), D0
ROM:0008AA56 and 0xF, D0
ROM:0008AA59 cmp 0xF, D0
ROM:0008AA5B beq loc_8AA5F
ROM:0008AA5D bra loc_8AAB5


....................

Moving with the resulting codeflow, we see this occur:

ROM:0008F6D7 mov (8,SP), D0
ROM:0008F6D9 or 0x18, D0
ROM:0008F6DC mov D0, (8,SP)

And later:

ROM:0008F7BA mov (8,SP), D0
ROM:0008F7BC mov D0, (0x8576)

This (and only this) sets the lower byte of 0x8576, when we fail the 0xFF check. Keep this in the back of your mind please.

(More checks are done on 0x40880C, part of the reason why you cannot use DVD+R's without bitsetting, but that's for
another time).

The disclogin continues, and ends up in state 0xF2. So, the disc is now logged in. However, as some of you might have noticed
(maybe, possibly), we can only access the DVD at 3x speed. Far slower then the 6x speed I can access a normal Wii disc at.
But aha! Nintendo seems to have foreseen this little problem, and added a nifty function for us to use:
DVDLowSetMaximumRotation, a.k.a SetSpeed.

-- Erant, bushing boy.

Please don't flame me for this question... it's legit, and not out of the realm of possibility...

Is it possible to modify a Wii ISO to FORCE the disclogin to think it's a legit disc? I'm not sure exactly what the drive needs to read to determine the disc's content/format/size, but would it be possible to modify that region of the disc? Or is it in the inner ring that the drive can't write to... and if it can't write to it, how can it read it?

I know that there are encrypted/bad sectors that cant be re-written due to burner limitations, but is it possible to trick the drive into believing the disc is legit, or is that in the realm of modifying the drive's firmware?

 

[Lord Kanti]

As far as the load times I find no issue with the speed, so far the games I have tested work flawlessly except for lego batman.

who if anyone is currently working on the loader to clean up the code used to run back up copies? this would be a huge achievment, and Im tired of all the high and mighty drama from 'certain' members, this is the homebrew equivilant to brown people and black people gang bangin on each other when the real enemy at hand is The Man(who at the moment is neither brown nor black...).

I have already posted a bug i found with the loader, no one seems to have had thiss issue yet but I felt it was my duty to post it so that coders and such might want to know about it and look into a possible homebrew incompatibility as there are multiple apps being fused by the backup loader.

in conclusion who is working on cleaning up the loader code
what parts are supposedly a shitstorm, according to marcan wanin's job was a mere copy and paste (wanin you're awesome) so with that in mind i am lead to beleive there was shit flying about in the codes he copied and pasted....

also, how is the work going on usb2? Id love to have usb 2 so i can watch movies from usb as i currenly do, but with no slow down. also, exactly how far away is a usb2.0 nintendo driver for backups ..... any new nintendo apps on the horizon or any modders on the scene activly tackling the problem?


I just want to say thank you for allowing backups, anyone who has a kid, dog, bad neighborhood, etc. will agree with me. thanks again for geexbox etc. even though that shit is wiggier than mofo at times.

 

[datahoarder]

this is the homebrew equivilant to brown people and black people gang bangin on each other when the real enemy at hand is The Man(who at the moment is neither brown nor black...).

anyone who has a kid, dog, bad neighborhood, etc. will agree with me.
QUOTE(Lord Kanti @ Oct 6 2008, 07:28 PM)

"wiggier than mofo at times.

Just wondering how owning a Wii and running a backup loader has anything to do with the above statements.
Don't get me wrong, you sure did give me a good laugh, possibly for all of the wrong reasons, haha.
(not meant as a flame, no hard feelings..)

Anyways, so, besides being able to run DVDs @ 6x speed, and 'backups' at full speed, what other benefits can this be pulled for?
Someone had prior mentioned commercial quality homebrew games, and I would love to see the groundbreaking one which does.

 

[Lord Kanti]

Exactly. when the funk are we gonna see Scogger Wii on dvd. 4GB of non-stop heart pounding, frog-hopping action!

although that would seriously rock amphibian ass, would it be possible for the various homebrew game developers to come together and release one bad ass, ORIGINAL title; or would ittakethe equivilant of a cyber Martin Luther King to unite the wii modders of the world...?

 

[Lumstar]

Hm, interesting posts guys. One simple question I have yet to see an answer for is why Nintendo (if this was on their part) would configure a firmware for the disc drive to have multiple modes, when clearly it should be expected to only play games. Did they eventually have plans for DVD playback? Did they know it could be utilized for ISOs?

The world may never know...

It appears that at some point Nintendo had considered including DVD playback, then decided against the idea. Yet didn't get around to removing all the needed code. So enough remains for hackers to use.

Retail Wii games aren't proper DVDs, they have minor differences. Mainly in the file system.

 

[skedone]

as for patching the iso to believe its really not gonna happen lol we still cant do that with copied pc games, lol the dreamcast was due to the fact there was no hardware level cd check just a bad byte check. also i think this loader could be better just if the clean the code because as it has been stated it does effect a few other homebrew Apps.

anyone what to tell me where to get the drive firmware image from

 

[linkinworm]

what happens if you just
1) open the ISO
2) extract all files

 

[atomikramp]

but since someone using wiikey said that he had no problems by forcing the read speed to 3x from the modchip, i don't think it's a drive speed problem anymore.

i think it's more likely a filesystem issue or data fragmentation after the iso has been decrypted.

that's why i suggested to make some tests putting the game content on a standard UDF DVD Image and try it out.

and btw, what did u mean by "save files are placed in the homebrew channel instead of system memory" ?

the channel gets overwritten?

 

[marcan]

i think it's more likely a filesystem issue or data fragmentation after the iso has been decrypted.

I already explained that it's a "Waninkoko's code is inefficient" issue.

 

[Jacobeian]

marcan, have you tried to code your own "backup" loader, just for fun (and just for you obviously), using a more efficient implementation ?

 

[marcan]

marcan, have you tried to code your own "backup" loader, just for fun (and just for you obviously), using a more efficient implementation ?

I've considered it. We did some experiments back in the day, decided it wasn't worth wasting time on, and just moved on to more interesting things. We could have probably written a "proper" loader (no ISO patching, much better speed, better compatibility, even working with the system menu disc channel) in a week or two.

 

[Motoko]

such a tease

 

[blueeyes]

wow now that would be something

 

[KirovAir]

marcan, have you tried to code your own "backup" loader, just for fun (and just for you obviously), using a more efficient implementation ?

I've considered it. We did some experiments back in the day, decided it wasn't worth wasting time on, and just moved on to more interesting things. We could have probably written a "proper" loader (no ISO patching, much better speed, better compatibility, even working with the system menu disc channel) in a week or two.

Aw man, it would be awesome if that would be achieved.

 

[PizzaPino]

new material to talk about D; what are the more interesting things?

 

[magic12]

new material to talk about D; what are the more interesting things?

SaveMii?

 

[Slowking]

new material to talk about D; what are the more interesting things?

Last I heard they were working on BootMii. I hope they still are, as it sounds really awesome...

 

[Saladman]

QUOTE(Jacobeian @ Oct 7 2008, 11:26 AM)
marcan, have you tried to code your own "backup" loader, just for fun (and just for you obviously), using a more efficient implementation ?

I've considered it. We did some experiments back in the day, decided it wasn't worth wasting time on, and just moved on to more interesting things. We could have probably written a "proper" loader (no ISO patching, much better speed, better compatibility, even working with the system menu disc channel) in a week or two.


People round here a bit slow-eh?

 

[Slowking]

eeeeeeeh? I think everybody here understod that marcan and co. were thinking about coding a backup loader, but never did it. So why would you call anyone slow? o.O