Hacking Wii (Mini) Boot0 binary via GhettOHCI

[nitr8]

Here comes the Boot0 binary displayer for the Wii and Mini.

R-E-A-D C-A-R-E-F-U-L-L-Y

It's straight forward: Install the attached WAD.
It creates a channel on your Wii (Mini) from which you can then read the Boot0 binary output via 2 USB-FTDI devices combined together this way:

RXD on USB-FTDI 1 (PC side) to TXD on USB-FTDI 2 (Wii (Mini) side)
GND on USB-FTDI 1 (PC side) to GND on USB-FTDI 2 (Wii (Mini) side)
Voltage on BOTH USB-FTDI devices: 3.3V

Open the serial terminal on your PC and open the port with these settings:

BAUD 230400
Data Bits 8
Parity NONE
Stop Bits 1

Run the STATIC Channel.

Btw.: Compared to the Wii Boot0, the Wii Mini's Boot0 is IDENTICAL!

Back story:

As of the current time, USB Gecko's are no more. I tried digging more into the lower level hardware of the Wii - most likely known as the "ARM core". By knowing that it has NO access to the GPU of the Wii and there is NO other possibility than dumping debug messages to an attached SD-Card (which is also GONE on the Wii Mini), i was used to grab @marcan's code over at https://gist.github.com/marcan/4ce7e13321a03d85a73b10840f532892 and modify (add) stuff, to get serial debug-out on the ARM core using the GBADEV romdumper which includes MINI. While there, i fondled with Boot0 - just to find out if the one on the Wii Mini is the same as the one on the Wii.

Have phun.

 

[nitr8]

Converting the Boot0 "One-Liner" from the serial terminal / monitor output to binary format:

1.) Grab Notepad++
2.) Copy the "One-Liner" from the serial terminal / monitor into a new document

Then you do something like this:

3.) From the menu: select "Plugins" -> "Converter" -> "HEX -> ASCII".

This will turn your Boot0 One-Liner hex into binary format. You can simply save the file as "boot0.bin".

 

[Vila_]

Nice