Hacking Coding vWii 3-core support - everything you need to know.

[JoostinOnline]

Just as many experienced Wii homebrew developers would've been able to get the race condition exploit running in an evening.

I think maybe you are overestimating "experienced Wii homebrew developers". And before you make any assumptions, I'm not claiming to be in that category. I'm a mediocre programmer. The only thing I excel at is optimization, and everything I know about C is self-taught. That's not much though.

Anyway, like 95% of Wii homebrew is pretty basic stuff. It doesn't involve anything like a race attack.

 

[the_randomizer]

*Redacted statement*

 

[mcchase]

Linux in Wii U mode.
Linux in vWii mode was meant to be a teaser to get people interested (and the tri-core stuff is directly portable to Wii U mode), not the way forward. Otherwise there would be no need for a Wii U exploit.


Many competent kernel developers are perfectly capable of bringing up SMP support on a new machine type for an existing architecture with existing SMP support (PowerPC) in a very short time. Said kernel developers may not be interested in Wii U homebrew.

Just as many experienced Wii homebrew developers would've been able to get the race condition exploit running in an evening. Heck, we discovered it and got it working less than a week after the Wii U launched (I can't remember the exact time, but the "8 days" fail0verflow post referred to a more interesting exploit that we got working after that, so it was sometime within those first 8 days).

We're not asking for miracles, we're looking to see whether experienced developers capable of running the show are interested. They aren't.

Update: actually, I just checked our internal repo and we had that much working before the Wii U launched in Europe. Must've been one of the early remote tests we were doing on one of the US folks' Wii U before we even got ours (I got mine the next day). So yeah, that much was utterly trivial to implement.

In your previous post you have urged everyone to continue on this project, stating it would be a good learning experience. I have since picked up my first tutorials on coding (thanks to a few useful links from people posting here); but how can you honestly expect any motivation from anyone involved, or attempting to be involved in this project if you quite clearly imply that the exploit will never come to fruition without the involvement of a team of extremely talented individuals? What incentive is there for people like myself to start learning for this project? Or even for relatively skilled individuals to get involved knowing that they will be subject to tight time schedules to see any progression in the exploit.

 

[the_randomizer]

*Redacted statement*

 

[Deletedmember331810]

You guys are blowing this way out of proportion. A new thread should be made for discussion and this one needs to stay development. Can we please at least agree on this and take this discussion elsewhere or not have it at all?

The last thing any of us need is to have to sort through pages of conflict and arguing just to find something related to the actual project!

 

[the_randomizer]

You guys are blowing this way out of proportion. A new thread should be made for discussion and this one needs to stay development. Can we please at least agree on this and take this discussion elsewhere or not have it at all?

The last thing any of us need is to have to sort through pages of conflict and arguing just to find something related to the actual project!

Fair enough

 

[marcan_troll]

In your previous post you have urged everyone to continue on this project, stating it would be a good learning experience. I have since picked up my first tutorials on coding (thanks to a few useful links from people posting here); but how can you honestly expect any motivation from anyone involved, or attempting to be involved in this project if you quite clearly imply that the exploit will never come to fruition without the involvement of a team of extremely talented individuals? What incentive is there for people like myself to start learning for this project? Or even for relatively skilled individuals to get involved knowing that they will be subject to tight time schedules to see any progression in the exploit.

If your only motivation is the release of a Wii U exploit, you're doing it wrong. Your motivation should be to learn and improve your skills. Half of what will be presented at 30c3 has no practical purpose (i.e. it doesn't allow us to achieve anything we couldn't achieve before) but it was still fun, interesting, and challenging, and we learned from it.

Also, you guys need to stop taking examples literally and pessimistically. I said if someone got this done in two weeks we'd almost certainly release the exploit. I said if it took 6 months we probably wouldn't. I didn't say we wouldn't if it took 15 days. Again, what we're looking for is a team coming together that can demonstrate that they could successfully bootstrap a homebrew ecosystem. There are no hard numbers or deadlines. This isn't a TV contest show.

 

[mcchase]

If your only motivation is the release of a Wii U exploit, you're doing it wrong. Your motivation should be to learn and improve your skills. Half of what will be presented at 30c3 has no practical purpose (i.e. it doesn't allow us to achieve anything we couldn't achieve before) but it was still fun, interesting, and challenging, and we learned from it.

Also, you guys need to stop taking examples literally and pessimistically. I said if someone got this done in two weeks we'd almost certainly release the exploit. I said if it took 6 months we probably wouldn't. I didn't say we wouldn't if it took 15 days. Again, what we're looking for is a team coming together that can demonstrate that they could successfully bootstrap a homebrew ecosystem. There are no hard numbers or deadlines. This isn't a TV contest show.

The incentive for me is Linux on a new PPC platform, I don't really have any interest in any open ARM/86 system. That being said I can understand how releasing the exploit could potentially cause legal issues and I can't blame you for not releasing it 'just because' - I doubt I would if i was in the same position either. It's just a shame it's unlikely to see the light of day is all.

 

[obcd]

If it currently would take 3 years to build a homebrew ecosystem, how could we possibly have piracy after 6 months?
If I look in the past, people used the homebrew ecosystem to create the usb loaders that could be used for piracy..
xbox 360 had a way to alter the drive firmware that could be used for piracy, but early wii's had that option as well.
There is a difference between digging and not finding the Holy Grail
and digging on a place of which you know in advance that the Holy Grail isn't there.
For me, the situation changed from the first 2 the second. Learning to improve my skills on something I know has no
practical use feels like a waste of time. The 3 core SMP could be reused in wiiu mode, but the skilled people claim they can do
it in 2 weeks. So it again feels a bit like a waste of time to learn a highly specialised thing like SMP on PPC architecture.

I wouldn't buy any stock options anymore on PPC architecture.

I'll become 50 next month. It's an age at which your motto starts to become "no time to waste"

So why not create an smp wiiu linux framework and allow others to start finishing it.
The linux knowledge you will learn examining such a system is something usefull and reusable,
it's not a waste of time. You can even hide and obfuscate the exploit like was done in the wii hbc.

I am sure once the fundaments for such are in place, community interest would rapidly grow.
Linux would be a different ecosystem than cafe os. I don't think it would lead to early piracy.

It's like you have the key to open the door for us, but you have "no interest" in doing it. You are
just telling us to figure out another way to get in.

I know it's "non technical" off topic again, but a moderator could just "copy past" this stuff and move it to another topic.
It's not like there is technical stuff in between you would miss if you aren't interested in this.

 

[marcan_troll]

If it currently would take 3 years to build a homebrew ecosystem, how could we possibly have piracy after 6 months?

Because all it takes for piracy is a few small kernel patches to send disc requests to a USB drive.

If I look in the past, people used the homebrew ecosystem to create the usb loaders that could be used for piracy..

You're looking too far back. With the PS3 piracy came before useful homebrew (heck, we never really got a real homebrew ecosystem), because it was trivial (PSJailbreak was a tiny patch to the OS), ignoring Other OS which of course was sandboxed and supported officially. I had to do a lot more work to get AsbestOS to run an already-ported OS (Linux) than it took for whoever made PSJailbreak to play warezed games. The Wii U would be in a similar situation, except we actually have to port Linux from scratch for that one.

The Wii took longer because 1) people already had modchips, so there was no big incentive to come up with a softmod, 2) the Wii's software framework is so appallingly poor that it actually took real work to access USB drives in a way usable for disc-game piracy. VC piracy, which was a lot easier, came almost immediately after hombrew got started (specifically, after I made the mistake of teaching waninkoko a few things thinking he would become a productive homebrewer, instead of the hopeless attention-whoring pro-piracy incompetent sponsored leecher he became).

 

[the_randomizer]

Ah so in summary, it's better that we don't do anything at all to even bother learning to code/contribute or make a viable ecosystem for homebrew (since piracy is inevitable) and as a result of that, we might as well just give up while we're ahead, right?

 

[OncleJulien]

stop looking to others to provide your motivation - look to yourself.

 

[the_randomizer]

stop looking to others to provide your motivation - look to yourself.

Because that's really going to get the ball rolling or help develop an ecosystem for the Wii U. Like I said before, if we decide to learn on our own and do our best to contribute, it will be for naught because it sure as looks like they want us to just give up altogether. Let's face it, many of us coding noobs learning to code now won't make a damn difference when it comes to getting this started, nor will it prove to Team f0f how serious we are. Not being negative, trying to be realistic.

 

[OncleJulien]

your consistently thinking about this all wrong, focusing on the 30ish people who have the key to the front door of the wiiu. and while in one sense it seems like he's dangling his key in front of your eyes, just out of your reach, what he's really doing is saying, "we found a door and made a key using our skills and experience, mayhap you can too!" - side doors, back doors, skylights...all have keys, don't ask for someone else's, forge your own, no one can stop you.

 

[the_randomizer]

your consistently thinking about this all wrong, focusing on the 30ish people who have the key to the front door of the wiiu. and while in one sense it seems like he's dangling his key in front of your eyes, just out of your reach, what he's really doing is saying, "we found a door and made a key using our skills and experience, mayhap you can too!" - side doors, back doors, skylights...all have keys, don't ask for someone else's, forge your own, no one can stop you.

Then what's all that BS about "proving to them that there is interest"? Again, by the time many of us start to actually learn to program decently, the eighth gen will already be over. Never mind Team f0f not giving us the exploit, but ugh. I just don't know anymore.

 

[obcd]

I am afraid you are right.
Understanding how 3 core smp works on a ppc architecture, knowing that the exact cpu details aren't known, only looks like an interesting challenge to software developers that designed osx for the last ppc generation of mac computers.
At the moment, we don't have such a guy that shows interest in figuring out how the wiiu cpu differs from the last generation ppc cpu's in mac pc's (or other game consoles)
So, we'll have to admit there is no interest.
Maybe Team f0f isn't having members with that knowledge either, explaining their lack of interest as well?

 

[the_randomizer]

I am afraid you are right.
Understanding how 3 core smp works on a ppc architecture, knowing that the exact cpu details aren't known, only looks like an interesting challenge to software developers that designed osx for the last ppc generation of mac computers.
At the moment, we don't have such a guy that shows interest in figuring out how the wiiu cpu differs from the last generation ppc cpu's in mac pc's (or other game consoles)
So, we'll have to admit there is no interest.
Maybe Team f0f isn't having members with that knowledge either, explaining their lack of interest as well?

To quote Homer Simpson: "If something's too hard then it's not worth doing". F**k the project. I'm not even going to try to learn coding. No one is interested, no one ever will be and Team f0f has no interest whatsoever in giving us hints or advice on where to go from here. It would have been better if marcan_troll or delroth had not said anything in the first place. No wonder hacking scenes go down the crapper. I hate to say this in fact, I never thought I would, but part of me hopes the Wii U vulnerabilities (whatever ones may or may not be left) get patched and the console remains unhacked. I know, it's terrible for me to say that, but at this rate with the reality of the situation it's in.....*sigh*.

The whole mentality is pure BS on their part. Unless someone can prove to me to the contrary and people with experience come forward, then that'd be great. But until such a time, I'm not even going to bother learning.

 

[JoostinOnline]

Then what's all that BS about "proving to them that there is interest"? Again, by the time many of us start to actually learn to program decently, the eighth gen will already be over. Never mind Team f0f not giving us the exploit, but ugh. I just don't know anymore.

It's not just about that. They don't want to carry the weight on their shoulders, and you can't blame them for that. An exploit alone wouldn't do that much. Risking legal action and wasting an exploit isn't exactly productive.

Personally I think that f0f is expecting a little too much. Almost all homebrew devs take a look at what is being asked and think "This is beyond me, so I'll just have to wait till it's done to start working on homebrew again." I know because I've reached out to many of them. I don't think the result would be any different if they had done the same thing with the Wii. Interest hasn't dropped (well maybe it has a little), it's just that they've forgotten what it's like to have the limited amount of knowledge of the average homebrew dev, and expect everything they know from the Wii (that's not a typo) to be known by us.

That's just my opinion though, and I won't pretend that I know exactly what f0f members think. I might be completely wrong.

 

[obcd]

Don't compare delroth to marcan troll. I have faith the 30c3 will give us hints how to use the wiiu gamepad.
Don't flame anybody untill that event happend.

 

[Henke]

Give me the moderator rights! I'll clean this forum from all the trash and idiots that can't be polite and respectfull!!