Hacking Decompiling waninkoko's softmod

[zapu]

Diff between original and patched will be huge, cause patcher decrypts the iso.

 

[atomikramp]

mhh
ok
so

what we get after the backup creator has been run on an iso, is the same content of the original iso but decrypted..

still my knowledge is really weak about how wii loads games from disks, but if you have an iso from wich you can read the content using an homebrew (read files etc)
and you have a library to access the DVD to read this contant.

the missing part is just an homebrew wich can run the content.

maybe i'm wrong (well nearly for sure) but aren't games on disk run by lounching a wad on the disk?
if that's the point a wad loader would to the work...

else.. all i wrote is pure bullshit, and i hope nobody is gonna flame me for this

 

[zapu]

You can check geckoos source for basic idea about loading application.

If you really want to check the differences in isos, do the following:

obtain game.iso
decrypt game.iso, save as decrypted.iso
patch game.iso using wanin's patcher (you will get partition.iso)

compare decrypted.iso to partition.iso.

You can try to remove update partition from decrypted.iso too, since we know that this is done by the backup-creator.

And don't ask me to do that, I don't have any idea how to decrypt wii discs.

 

[atomikramp]

il will check difs for sure before doing anything.

i'm a total crap in coding and such, but even if in a minimal way, i want to contribute proposing ideas and testing minor things out.

 

[CambridgeGuy]

I have far too much going on for me to contribute much time to this but are you using a Wii oriented plugin for IDA or just the GC one?

If it is the wii and you are able to share it?. It would be appreciated as I could not find it the other day when I was looking (just references and Wii stuff that used IDA).

I hate to disappoint, but when it comes to IDA, I'm a total n00b. I didn't even know there was a Wii or Gamecube plugin for it. All I did was open the backup-creator.exe in IDA pro, then go to File > Produce a File > Create C file. That's it.

Yes, I know it's not that much use, but what I was hoping to do was inspire someone who might know what they're doing to look into this produce something useful.

We probably don't need to anymore though. I mean, we now know exactly what the backup creator does, and we should in theory be able to write our own version of that pretty easily. Also, the backup loader .dol file it supposed to be pretty simple. What we really need to do is understand how the custom IOS works.... I think

 

[atomikramp]

we need to know why a custom ios is needed...

the apploader itself looks pretty simple...

and it loads apps afeter all, all problems related to video, audio and such, i think that many fixes for this are already present in GeckoOS, so, nothing new to deal with.

 

[FAST6191]

No worries, in that case one GC plugin set for IDA (not as nice as a full blown GC but better than stock):
http://hitmen.c02.at/html/gc_tools.html

 

[zapu]

we need to know why a custom ios is needed...

the apploader itself looks pretty simple...

and it loads apps afeter all, all problems related to video, audio and such, i think that many fixes for this are already present in GeckoOS, so, nothing new to deal with.

Custom IOS contains all stuff related to reading the disc. Games probably use these IOS calls.

 

[atomikramp]

we need to know why a custom ios is needed...

the apploader itself looks pretty simple...

and it loads apps afeter all, all problems related to video, audio and such, i think that many fixes for this are already present in GeckoOS, so, nothing new to deal with.

Custom IOS contains all stuff related to reading the disc. Games probably use these IOS calls.

the standard IOS itself has all the features needed to load a disk, a standard disk i mean.
and not only from the disk channel, since GeckoOS is an application and it can load disks without any problem and without the need of a custom IOS.

i can't find any documentation about how disks are booted in the wii system...
even by reading the source code from geckoOS i can't get it.

any tutorial?

 

[Jacobeian]

http://hackmii.com/2008/08/open-source-app...r-iso-template/

the apploader read the DVD, initialize some values at the start of the RAM then load the main dol and jump execution to it

after that, all that is running is the game program (main dol)
Like any other PPC program, it access to DVD using the IPC functions (open,close,ioctrl...) to communicate with the IOS running on Starlet (ARM9 cpu),

the IOS is indeed in charge of the communication with all the I/O system, including DVD drive.

To modify the original DI functions and use the same functions as libDI (access without modchip), you need a custom IOS and a custom DVD module that send those new command : this is what the simple parser from waninkoko is for

that's how I understood it, please correct me if i'm wrong

There are some other stuff regarding Wii Disc security (encryption/signature/tickets/tmd/partitions) but I'm not very confortable with this

 

[atomikramp]

do you think that it's possible to modify the geckoOS disk loading features, to use the customIOS calls, instead of the normal ones?
in this way maybe we can load backup disks... and most of the features related to glitching, movie problems, regions etc, would be already implemented...

not sure tho.

 

[Jacobeian]

the author will certainly not allow that kind of feature to be implemented

and btw, as far as I know, using geckoOS will not fix the glitches or movie problems, these are related to the DVD access IN GAME, geckoOS is only concerned by booting games properly (original games don't have such problems lol)

 

[zapu]

Does GPL licence somehow limit us in implementing such things?

 

[Arm the Homeless]

do you think that it's possible to modify the geckoOS disk loading features, to use the customIOS calls, instead of the normal ones?
in this way maybe we can load backup disks... and most of the features related to glitching, movie problems, regions etc, would be already implemented...

not sure tho.

Yeah. It's possible.

But it's not like you're just going to change a couple IOS calls and it will read the disks.

 

[atomikramp]

yup, i know...
and i'm not the right guy for implementing such things... i'm just putting on the table all the possibilities that comes to my mind.

 

[CambridgeGuy]

the author will certainly not allow that kind of feature to be implemented

and btw, as far as I know, using geckoOS will not fix the glitches or movie problems, these are related to the DVD access IN GAME, geckoOS is only concerned by booting games properly (original games don't have such problems lol)

GeckoOS is free and open source software. You can do what you like with it. I think modifying it to make it play backups too is a great idea, and the best way forward for this project.

...unless of course this hasn't really been abandoned by Waninkoko. But who knows. I dunno what to believe, really.

 

[slimpyman]

waninkoko should have had PERSONal friends test for him... now he says he is abandoning the project because he got got. they got him good. now if only he would realize it was gonna happen, and further develop that project, not quit because he got got

 

[FGOD]

it would be great to have this feature into gecko os but how would you do this if we don't even have the source on the whole project...

 

[atomikramp]

cIOS Library is available on waninkoko's website.
it says it's there to allow ppl to develop applications to use the cIOS functions.

if i was a dev i would start from there.

 

[Midnightzak]

he already said he will release the source, just give it time.