Hacking Mario Maker Lost Levels, How to backup for posterity?

[nintendarium]

gbatemp lost member because community is childish

 

[Captain_N]

Its going to be up to the individual to save their work. Im not sure how mario maker works but cant the levels be stored locally?

 

[nintendarium]

gbatemp lost member because community is childish

 

[Deleted member 370671]

Yes but when NX will be out and they decide to shut wiiu server down millions of levels will be lost from public download , i doubt all of those creators will help sharing their levels to others , finding a way to "talk"with server now creating a homebrew client or patching game to act like that would be only secure way to preserve them all...

I don't think it's going to be the case...
Take the Nintendo CWF. It was still up for 3 years after the 3DS Launch, and it was not run by Nintendo, but by a 3rd party company. And, moreover, the Nintendo CWF was "just" useful for games ; it had nothing to do with the Nintendo DSi / Wii shop.
Now, look at the current Nintendo online system. It's hosted on Nintendo's own servers, linked with the Nintendo Network ID, and used to purchase in game DLCs / others. Nintendo even made a little "experiment" on the European Club Nintendo with the NNID account. Everything seems to say that the NX will use the NNID, and probably the E-Shop, which means the servers will probably still be up for a long time, even on the Wii U side.
However, I completely agree with you, we should start on RE the online systems now, because since it's encrypted it probably won't be as "easy" as with the NCWF

 

[hippy dave]

I was going to say pencil and graph paper, but for more reliable future-proofing you might be better off chiselling them into stone megaliths.

 

[nintendarium]

gbatemp lost member because community is childish

 

[mightymuffy]

Yes but when NX will be out and they decide to shut wiiu server down millions of levels will be lost from public download , i doubt all of those creators will help sharing their levels to others , finding a way to "talk"with server now creating a homebrew client or patching game to act like that would be only secure way to preserve them all...

EDIT
I should rename topic in "Mario maker lost levels"

Hah, liked the lost levels bit!
But don't panic anyway! Like has been said there's no servers shutting down, especially not straight after the NX release... Clearly this is a popular franchise, with the title already sailed past the million mark on a pretty much dead console.. expect those servers to be ported over to what looks like an inevitable NX version, a probable 3DS version, and a quite possible Android/iOS version (in my opinion).
Make no mistake Mario Maker is here to stay, and like Little Big Planet I reckon future games will all be compatible with older saves.

 

[nintendarium]

gbatemp lost member because community is childish

 

[Kylecito]

Where are your sources about them shutting down WiiU servers when NX arrives? Or is this just tinfoil hat panic mongering?

 

[Pacheko17]

"Or is this just tinfoil hat panic mongering?"

It's that

 

[Cyan]

Where are your sources about them shutting down WiiU servers when NX arrives? Or is this just tinfoil hat panic mongering?

Servers are not eternal.
Wii servers shut down already, because it's NOT Nintendo hosting them, and when the host decided to close its services then all online went away with it.
Eventually, one day, the servers and the game will stop working online. could be in 5 years, could be in 10 years, you don't know.
it's the same with MMORPG, and now museum are allowed to create an emulated server to continue using the games for preservation purpose. to do that, they need the resources to backup and preserve the data.

don't see it at short term, but long term backup. in 20-30 years, all current online dependent games will probably can't be used anymore.
so, you don't care about it because when NX will release you will still have access to that server, but it's not his concern here.

 

[gamesquest1]

Servers are not eternal.
Wii servers shut down already, because it's NOT Nintendo hosting them, and when the host decided to close its services then all online went away with it.
Eventually, one day, the servers and the game will stop working online. could be in 5 years, could be in 10 years, you don't know.
it's the same with MMORPG, and now museum are allowed to create an emulated server to continue using the games for preservation purpose. to do that, they need the resources to backup and preserve the data.

don't see it at short term, but long term backup. in 20-30 years, all current online dependent games will probably can't be used anymore.
so, you don't care about it because when NX will release you will still have access to that server, but it's not his concern here.

yeah the unfortunate thing is that most of these "lets preserve everythink" projects start off all well and good, "oh yeah backing stuff up, this will be so handy in the future"....a few months/years down the line and "right i will just format my computer or lash this old one in the loft/basement".......a few years later...."wow why is this crap still here *throws super rare archival MM level DB in the bin*....a many years later "oh wow its been 25 years since mario maker came out, ohh wow i recognize that guy who is now VP of nintendo he is that dude who used to make MM level, im going to check out that project i started about backing up the ENTIRE internet.............oh......i binned it years back"

 

[nintendarium]

gbatemp lost member because community is childish

 

[Elliander]

Servers are not eternal.
Wii servers shut down already, because it's NOT Nintendo hosting them, and when the host decided to close its services then all online went away with it.
Eventually, one day, the servers and the game will stop working online. could be in 5 years, could be in 10 years, you don't know.
it's the same with MMORPG, and now museum are allowed to create an emulated server to continue using the games for preservation purpose. to do that, they need the resources to backup and preserve the data.

I completely agree. It seems like working on a way to download and mirror this data would be important. Wouldn't it be possible to connect to Nintendo servers to download them in bulk from a PC?

don't see it at short term, but long term backup. in 20-30 years, all current online dependent games will probably can't be used anymore.
so, you don't care about it because when NX will release you will still have access to that server, but it's not his concern here.

I disagree here. Nintendo has stated that content will be removed if it is not popular - which could just mean other content was more popular. This means that content is already being removed.

 

[Vappy]

Even thinking short term, having a homebrew manager for levels would be handy for anyone playing without the ability to go online. A thought entirely unrelated to the recent update to Loadiine that got Mario Maker working /s

 

[Cyan]

This means that content is already being removed.

I didn't know.
they probably will re-used the free levelID for someone else then. it will mess a lot the available data. one ID could have multiple different levels attached to it.

A way to save the levels is extracting the savegame from a user (saviine, loadiine, etc.), that's not practical as it's only very small user base. (wii had only 1% hacked consoles, should be even lower on wiiu)

 

[Elliander]

If I understand the current situation correctly, you can export levels to USB indirectly: They are downloaded, and stored with the save data, rather than as independent files. Each level is identified by a 16 digit string which is used to share with friends, so this string is likely an identifier within the level itself.

If the above is correct, the first step would be to find a way to extract the levels from a given save file - perhaps a program which would name them according to their string. Once we have that we can either manually inject them into the save or we could find a way to trick the game into looking through a private server for those levels.

I know the PC emulators are new and limited, but would it be possible to use a variation of a PC emulator to connect to Nintendo servers with spoofed information and have it set with a bot which does nothing other than download levels? It could download, save, extract, and repeat. I'm sure many people would volunteer to run such a program and since the levels have a unique identifier a simpler program could be written which would upload via FTP a given level file if not already present so to prevent repeats and the entire archive could be downloadable all together... although it might just be simpler to have people submit the levels manually after having extracted them from the save files themselves.

I didn't know.
they probably will re-used the free levelID for someone else then. it will mess a lot the available data. one ID could have multiple different levels attached to it.

Oh, I didn't consider re-used levelID information. We would need a safe guard. Some kind of CRC check maybe to see if the files are really the same and then append the end of it with some additional identifier if so.

 

[nintendarium]

gbatemp lost member because community is childish
ch ...)

 

[nintendarium]

gbatemp lost member because community is childish

 

[nintendarium]

gbatemp lost member because community is childish