Wii #0425 - Puzzle Quest Challenge of the Warlords (USA)

[jhoff80]

Wow, the fonts are tiny in this.

 

[stev418]

Just tested on PAL wii with wiikey 1.9g and NOT WORKING. Locks on black screen at boot (tried 50hz and 60hz)

 

[Alastair]

it compressed well coz its multiple copies of the same piece of garbage..surprise surprise.. this could be interesting though

if you search for 6F 32 BF 5C E8 D0 9A 17 you'll see the pattern...

Thanks for the report! I reeeaaally hope that that was done by the group and not the developers.

 

[Deleted User]

it compressed well coz its multiple copies of the same piece of garbage..surprise surprise.. this could be interesting though

if you search for 6F 32 BF 5C E8 D0 9A 17 you'll see the pattern...

Thanks for the report! I reeeaaally hope that that was done by the group and not the developers.

Wow it's a major breaktrough ! Major Breaktrough !! (sorry how I met your mother...)
I think you know about it, but apart from bruteforcing, the only possible way to get past the encryption is plain-text attack, and here we are not so far from it. By the length of the repeat we have a rough estimate of the size of the key or at least of the encryption block. If another game goes out with the same thing it will be perhaps enough to reduce the bruteforcing to something feasible.

 

[Renegade_R]

Why don't you just download it for PC and save yourself a DVD?

 

[kreatosoupa]

Yup. PC and 360 versions are identical (even their size at roughly 80MB) and you can crank up the resolution real high. I really can't go back to the DS version anymore...

Great game, but the AI cheats!

 

[Railgun]

Just tested on PAL wii with wiikey 1.9g and NOT WORKING. Locks on black screen at boot (tried 50hz and 60hz)

agree, not working

 

[joedodgy]

well i dug a bit more..chunk is 32kb (no doubt sector size), repeats for 3974mb.. there are other groups of chunks which are like this repetitive chunk (1st 512bytes matched, maybe more, but not exactly the same) - they are spaced apart at the end of the iso and there are 67 'groups' of these chunks.. still anyones guess

 

[2cb2ct7]

The compression is fucking awesome. It is ridiculous to have to download "padding" for Wii ISO's. Good job! I hope this helps to launch the Wii homebrew scene too...

 

[Dack]

The other extreme seems to have appeared in the shape of

               ______ _
           _ ____ / _ ________ _ _____ ___
           _____ \\/  / ___ \\_ ___ \\/ \\_
            /  /  / _\\ / / /  /  /
           /  /  / ___\\__/__\\ _/ __/
          _/  /  /  /  \\_ _ ___/
          \\  /  /  /   / / \\__
           \\    /\\      / /   /
           \\______/ \\____   /\\__/   /
                   `-----  \\_____/
          VECTRONIX - We\'re still in your dreams!

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
: [ ????? RTL Winter Sports 2008 ????? ]Â [ ????? PAL ????? ]Â [ ????? Released on 02/12/07 ????? ] :
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
: Supplier ...: Hardball      ?ó????Ñ Rating .....: [??????????????????????????????????????????????????] [08/10] :
: Ripper .....: Hardball      ?ó????Ñ Archive ....: ZIP/ISO        :
: Packager ...: Hardball      ?ó????Ñ Language....: German only      :
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
: Requirements: Wiikey or similar modification on your Nindendo Wii System :
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

                  Â

Which is listed as 8.28 Gig!

The compression thing is interesting in that it should lead to a way of fully decoding the games discs.

 

[Zendrik]

Just to kinda clarify a little bit. This is the not the same game as the handheld versions, but it is the same as the PC and XBLA versions. The non-handheld versions have added in cooldown timers for spells, changed mana costs for some spells, and they re-worked the inventory system(there is no limited to rune items in your inventory). Although it doesn't change enough to get me addicted again(i only beat 1/3 of the PC version) they did try to un-break the game and get rid of the infinite turn combos.

 

[kedest]

It's good to finally see a decently compressed game. Same thing should have been possible for geometry wars for example. That game can't be bigger than a few dozen megabytes, but still the download was the full 4GB.

 

[Bitbyte]

What are you guys talking about lol. This is just basic WinRAR compression. If there's a lot of dummy data in a game, it'll be compressed a lot, the release group obviously didn't hack anything... This has been around for like forever, I remember Vagrant Story for PSX being like 90 MB when compressed.

 

[Youkai]

Yup. PC and 360 versions are identical (even their size at roughly 80MB) and you can crank up the resolution real high. I really can't go back to the DS version anymore...

Great game, but the AI cheats!Â

Yeah the AI cheats very very much and thanks to the max level of 50 its impossible for me to beat the final boss (once barely had him than he just did 200hp damage at once and i was death

V)

 

[Deleted User]

What are you guys talking about lol. This is just basic WinRAR compression. If there's a lot of dummy data in a game, it'll be compressed a lot, the release group obviously didn't hack anything... This has been around for like forever, I remember Vagrant Story for PSX being like 90 MB when compressed.

Then you clearly don't understand the point of encryption and compression.
To compress data you have to find some structure apart linking the data to reduce it to a little structure and the minimum amount of data to regenerate it. With some zip compression (huffman mostly) the minimum data is a dictionnary of most used sequences and the structure is the list of these sequences.
To encrypt data you have to hide the structure of data and make it look like random data.
So compressing rightly encrypted data with lead you to no compression at all or worst extra data will be added by the compression.
The fact that this iso compresses well is a sign that the encryption process is not as efficient as it should be, and one can (it's more sci-fi than a real fact) exploit this to break the compression.

 

[niklasnyfiken]

The fact that this iso compresses well is a sign that the encryption process is not as efficient as it should be,

No it isn't. Most likely they just duplicated their entire game until the disk was full. The game is probably just 250MB big.

and one can (it's more sci-fi than a real fact) exploit this to break the compression.

Good luck with that. Call me in a billion years when you've cracked it.

 

[Deleted User]

The fact that this iso compresses well is a sign that the encryption process is not as efficient as it should be,

No it isn't. Most likely they just duplicated their entire game until the disk was full. The game is probably just 250MB big.


I don't know why it's so difficult to understand, but the encryption used on wii disks "should not" encrypt the same way same data at different locations until they are using a very small block size. Just think of it, take a file called A of length n and create a new file with A then A then n zero bytes, and another file with A then n zero bytes then A. Then computes CRC (which are a very lossy encryption...) they are not the same ! It's really a rough analogy but real encryption will not encrypt ten blocks of A with ten blocks of encrypted A !

and one can (it's more sci-fi than a real fact) exploit this to break the compression.

Good luck with that. Call me in a billion years when you've cracked it.

I don't plan on do it and never said I will, I'm just commenting on the fact that it's strange because it looks as a possible flaw.

 

[Dack]

I take it no-one had looked at the Spyro (USA) disk yet to see if it had the same sort of structure (that also compressed down IIRC to about 2 Gig)

 

[Alastair]

The fact that this iso compresses well is a sign that the encryption process is not as efficient as it should be, and one can (it's more sci-fi than a real fact) exploit this to break the compression.

Or perhaps it's already been done?

 

[Jhongerkong]

I suddenly got the urge to play Ikaruga on the dreamcast,

talk about coincidences!