Ocarina codes and cIOS have nothing to do with each other. You can run Ocarina just fine with no IOS modifications at all.
To enlighten people about what is roughly going on in the team about piracy policy, there are anti-pirates, pro-pirates, and a lot of shades of grey on the team. We are all divided in our beliefs about piracy, but we are united in our desire to finish the hacks. We have agreed that Riivolution is both the easiest and best way to publish this patch, because of the cool features Riivolution has that can’t be easily done with ISOs. However, some people are pushing for anti-piracy methods that would be nearly unbreakable (such as a Riivolution that supports encryption, etc), some are pushing for methods which protect their files content (so that cheaters can’t look at the levels to see how to play or steal them and put them in their own ISO without credit (I’m looking at you NSMB Next Levels)), and others are pushing for everything to be open but just on Riivolution (the game could be turned into an ISO, but would lack several cool things which only really work with Riivolution, or would require major changes).
Now, every time the pirates act dumb, the team goes 'Maybe we should put in more anti-piracy'. And every time they act intelligent and respectful, the team goes 'Well, maybe we don’t need to put in the extra work if they’re going to be respectful and intelligent about it'. As you can see, being respectful and intelligent, asking solid questions, and understanding that our decisions were originally based on the ease of development that Riivolution offers is the best way for everyone to get along.
What does Riivolution offer that ISO hacking does not?:
- Incredibly easy testing for our development team
- Incredibly easy addition of new or larger files (which we have many of)
- Incredibly easy integration of ASM hacks, which can be compiled from C++ and actually dropped into the game though a script Treeki has created
- Incredibly easy save file redirection, so that Newer can be played without destroying your old NSMB Wii save file
- The potential to be able to provide extra content on demand via network without requiring any further patch distributions
- The best possible compression and file size for distributing the final patch (levels are highly compressable, encrypted ISO patches not much at all)
- The ability to run through bannerbomb, from just an SD card, so that you can play Newer even at your friend with the unmodded Wii’s place
- The ability to allow the user to apply, exchange, or remove specific patches through Riivolution’s option system
That’s a lot of advantages, and that’s why everyone agreed on it.
[edit for 2 minor typos]