The Wii, officially “hacked”?

wii hacked

Nintendo-Scene.com is reporting of an interesting presentation that took place at the 24th Annual Chaos Communication Congress (24C3) right now; it would appear that a fully hacked Wii capable of running native homebrew with full hardware access has been presented.

From the report:

The guys over at 24C3 just demoed a Wii hack that is set to provide native Wii
homebrew in the near future (not running in GC mode, and with full access to all the Wii hardware!)

They were able to find encryption and decryption keys by doing full memory
dumps at runtime over a custom serial interface. Using these keys, they were
able to create a Wii ‘game’ that ran their own code (their demo happened to show live sensor/Wiimote information, amongst a few other things).

Someone was able to start Homebrew in Wii-Mode. The video [in English] is from a hackers event in Germany. It’s mainly about the xbox 360, but at the end they speak about wii and show own Code injected in Lego Star Wars. More information: wii homebrew.

I’ll keep this post updated as more news/images/video come in.

Update – View the video on YouTube

Update 2 – (From GBATemp forums) There is a “Lightning Talk” with the topic “Console Hacking: State of the Wii” by Ben Byer+others on, Sun, 17:15–19:30, this is central European time (I think) and there is a live stream:
mms://streaming-internet.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/saal3

Update 3 – Interview with hacker who found the Wii exploit

wii store

Post to Reddit

  • LordX

    Very good job ,
    WII Media Center :)
    Games from External USB HDD ;)

  • http://qoal.110mb.com Quiche_on_a_leash

    Hooray!

    Homebrew time! :D

  • http://www.ps2hd.com Mature

    LOL REMEBER that today is DECEMBER 28th………..

  • sanghoku

    so relatively soon we could be having a wii media center, without any hardware changes? would be great!! :D

  • Broken Vii

    Snes9x without a nasty GC controller?

  • http://www.digg.com wii436745

    does this mean i can run the dl’d games off of bittorrents and not have to sodder my wii or does it mean that i will have to run homebreww on a memory card and copy the game to it as well in order to play? yes ima newb.

  • Realizt

    @wii436745
    *sigh*
    I sure hope your joking!!

  • http://www.hannahmontanazone.com Hannah

    Great job :D

  • http://my2008horoscope.blogspot.com Tom

    Awesome!

  • http://shanoboy.com shanoboy

    So, is this a softmod then? I’m not totally getting what the mod involves.

  • http://skilledtradesassociation.com Bob

    Great, now a Wii will be even HARDER to get!!!

  • Corey

    What is homebrew?

  • http://www.wiifitfans.com Wii Fit

    I hope they use this hack to come up with more mini games for the Wii Fit

  • http://www.gunungpring.com Budi S

    How they do that … ??
    I want to learn hack wii too :D

  • Max

    I just wanted to point this out | 55,726 Views! Holy Crap good work hey_suburbia

  • http://kuki.com.es Allison Stokke

    buen hack

  • http://www.wiidata.net fabdn

    Guter Fortschritt :D

  • http://www.khaled.us Khaled

    Nice!

    I sure hope it will help me unbricked my JP wii ;)

  • [][][]

    This post is linked to from Gizmodo, so we are exclusive!

  • Senol

    it doesnt started, when will be the state of the wii?

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  • musha

    Awesome!!!

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  • jon

    good job

  • http://thesocalledme.net Jenny

    Interesting.

  • dontay

    This is very very wondeful news, the nintendo wii is built for emulation for any console. We will have all the homebrew games running without no problem – this will be the only console which will offer 100 percent emualtion. People can create there own apps like the weather channel, which uses a internet connection. We can connect up 1 tera byte drives through usb to store our music, videos, emualted games, saved wii games, action replay, heaps of other apps. I have they create dosbox too, oh its going to be very amazing. Imagine ps1,ps2 games & so much more bonus. I brought a nintendo wii on the 1st day in Australia & I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS DAY – I REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY CANT WAIT PEOPLE HOMEBREW YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

  • anon

    @dontay (#28): You’re getting a bit carried away there.

    1. I doubt there will be PS2 emulators for the Wii. PS2 emulation on the PC already requires a lot of CPU power, and it’s not perfect. We _might_, however, see PS1 emulation as that has been around for a while.
    2. Wii _probably_ (not sure) uses USB 1.1. This means 1TB hard disks will be slow. SD will be faster in this regard, unless it too is connected via USB.
    3. Wii runs on a PowerPC architecture (same as what Macintoshes used until recently). DOS runs on an x86 (i386) architecture. This means emulating DOS will probably be slow… but maybe fast enough for a 486 (for DOS games). This doesn’t mean you’ll be able to run OSX on your Wii, though.

    I do, however, think that once all the bugs are worked out we’ll see things similar to what we did on the first XBox and PS2 – games loading from a hard disk, NES/SNES/MAME etc. emulation (ie: old stuff), a Linux-based desktop OS and probably standard definition video playback. Maybe less HDD oriented stuff as there’s no standard hard drive, but given that you can load games off a USB drive on a PS2 slimline, you should be able to do that kind of thing with the Wii probably as these hacks mature.

    We won’t see a lot different from what we do on the GameCube, only the extra hardware (full DVD drive as standard, USB support, Bluetooth). So don’t get your hopes up, and check out the Gamecube homebrew first to get an idea of what to expect. We’ll probably see something better because not as many people went after the GC – Wii is a lot more popular.

    GameCube homebrew can run on the Wii Right Now, all this hack means is we now have access to that extra Wii hardware, and can boot as a Wii application, not a GC one.

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  • dontay

    anon thanks for the breakdown & its interesting to hear all this. I had the vision that people will create channels example snes channel. All the roms will be stored on the hard disk. I thought the wii is more powerful than the ps2, so it would be able to emulate it. I honestly believe all nintendo are doing at the moment is getting, there VC games & running a program to make it perfect for wii. I have purchased afew wii virtual console games & its the same as the system. Example i brought street fighter 2 & it allows the same cheats from the snes on the wii. To me they must be running a program on the rom which allows it to ran perfect. Hopefuly with this people would be able to do the same, it is such a shame its usb 1.0 not usb 2. I suppose i be happy with mame & other stuff which comes out, i thought people would make there own apps & games, like the weather channel. Lets hope this makes magic for the homebrew but i was hoping for the works on this one even dreamcast games.

  • Lenteo

    Any updates on this issue because i be looking forward to be playing ps2 games on the wii

  • Smartguy

    It is very interesting to see that the Wii is getting decoded. A friend gave me 3 Japanese games from the Wii, but I can’t play it. I just hope in the future there can be a Self-boot cd for the Wii making it ignore the Region lock and be able to play Back up CD’s to preserve my originals….

    Homebrew is cool, but I believe that the hackers should be working on Self-boot CD’s.

    Or at least the same nintendo company should create a firmware making the wii region free that way i can play my 3 japanese games.

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  • jessy

    smartguy, u ever heard of freeloader? its made i think by datel and takes out the region block.

    just thought id let u know, thats been out for a while now…

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  • http://fxmasterz.com fxmaster

    Nice, thanks for sharing!

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  • http://www.pokemoncraft.com Pokemon

    it must be really hard to hack those things. i mean i am a computer engineer and i have no idea how to hack :D

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