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30c3: Console Hacking 2013 Wii U
- Thread starter la_briola
- Start date
Ricerocket
Member
So Wii U is not interesting enough to do homebrew.
The Abominable Snowman
Member
Basically, lack of interest from everyone.
Kazuma Kiryu
Member
Not even hackers are interested in the WiiU.
Interceptor
Banned
So if i get this right...
- Piracy is easier than homebrew nowadays
- Homebrew would need more people. The Wii U is not popular enough to gather them
- Piracy would be easier to pull off but it´s not there yet
?
As far as i understand it´s means its easier to change the source for a code (DVD to USB etc) than writing your own code for the hardware
- Piracy is easier than homebrew nowadays
- Homebrew would need more people. The Wii U is not popular enough to gather them
- Piracy would be easier to pull off but it´s not there yet
?
As far as i understand it´s means its easier to change the source for a code (DVD to USB etc) than writing your own code for the hardware
Uiki
Member
Homebrew means piracy and they are not really ok with it. Basically, they are not ok in doing all this work only to see 1 day later *insergeohothere* release an exploit that lets you run games.
They are trying to make an homebrew launcher-thing that prevents this.
The console is completely pwned, but they have no interest to work on an SDK for homebrew. Thats what I got from it. They hope someone will step up. Thats the point of the talk, I think.
ya - the world just uses raspberry pies and smart tvs and since they dont want to enable piracy by their work, they wont release anything.
pureIsometric
Banned
It's hackable but not worth it because it would only lead to game piracy for a fact. Seems too be few flaws with the whole system.
Yea, that's not it...
You gonna see that same approach for the other next gen systems from them.
With so many cheap and easy alternatives for homebrew, it's pointles to hack these systems for them,
especialy since the risk is very big this will be exploited for warez too.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Well, they did the groundwork (got the decryption keys for boot0, and boot2, IIRC), and poked a lot at the webkit binaries (the only way to execute custom code in WiiU mode as of now), if enough interest is raised that could open the gates.
Moral Panic
Member
Not really giving up. More like they can't be arsed. They aren't interested in piracy. They've broken most of the security, but the work to building a proper SDK that home-brew devs can use would go to waste since there is clearly no real interest.
http://fail0verflow.com/blog/2013/espresso.html
baphomet
Member
Interesting video. I remember when they backed away from going any further because lack of interest. Cant say i blame them. At this point the cons of actually killing the system outweigh being able to run unsigned code. I think they hit it on the head about homebrew not being interesting on closed system anymore.
ColtraineGF
Member
The blog post he mentioned was many months ago.
And what he mentioned about writing an SDK, etc. vs. straight up piracy holds for any console going forward, not just the Wii U. It remains to be seen whether there will be any progress on the PS4/XB1 front, but I'm not holding my breath.
And what he mentioned about writing an SDK, etc. vs. straight up piracy holds for any console going forward, not just the Wii U. It remains to be seen whether there will be any progress on the PS4/XB1 front, but I'm not holding my breath.
Kazuma Kiryu
Member
It was a joke. I understood why they're not pursuing it.
They actually said home consoles aren't interesting enough anymore. Since the work to get piracy going is much easier than writing an entire SDK to do homebrew correctly.
It's like having to build an entire highway and the roads that lead off of it for homebrew, and all pirates have to do is repaint a couple of signs so some cars go down the wrong offramp.
So it's less of a waste of time to just build a Steambox that's more powerful than any of the shipped consoles and do homebrew on that.
Cbajd5
Member
So ultimately there's nothing that new it seems?
The process itself was interesting, but the keys stuff have been on their blog forever now. And that thread they showed is just about the Wii homebrew using what they had access to, which has been known about since May.
I'm just wondering if they've done anything since then, since there's been small things Nintendo's done like the streaming the Wii video to the Gamepad.
The process itself was interesting, but the keys stuff have been on their blog forever now. And that thread they showed is just about the Wii homebrew using what they had access to, which has been known about since May.
I'm just wondering if they've done anything since then, since there's been small things Nintendo's done like the streaming the Wii video to the Gamepad.
Nothing.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Ah, that one's self explanatory - you blink the LEDs control lines into a serial line ; )
Nothing. Thats the point of the talk.
Moral Panic
Member
You can turn the sensor bar on and off (1 and 0), using that port and that functionality they turned it into a rudimentary serial port to connect to the PC, instead of the memory card slots they had on the Wii. In the end they just opened the console up and directly connected to the mobo, but it showed how inventive they are.
The Abominable Snowman
Member
Loader method
Uiki
Member
Yeah.. so much for the "we are worried about enabling piracy on the system"...
Seems I got that wrong.
Moral Panic
Member
They didn't show the keys. They already showed the method to get multicore support in Wii mode back in May.
phosphor112
Banned
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
The moral of the story, for me, is that nintendo could really 'open up' the system for HB as their hw sandbox is robust enough (in contrast to OtherOS hypervisor) to allow for proper isolation, but of course that will never happen for apparent reasons (nintendo having zero interest in such a move).
If someone was to steal your game, they wouldn't have paid for it in the first place so it's literally not worth any of your brain to think about it.
https://twitter.com/delroth_/status/411794040711958528
this should be the wiiu gamepad hacking talk btw. should be more interesting in a comms/hardware hacking perspective.
this should be the wiiu gamepad hacking talk btw. should be more interesting in a comms/hardware hacking perspective.
Moral Panic
Member
The moral of the story for me is that million dollar corporations still make rudimentary security mistakes, so I shouldn't feel bad.
It makes sense what they said. Systems get harder to do the non piracy stuff but in many ways the piracy stuff is still very easy.
They will not work on something that makes piracy really easy so they are more or less done. Sure a group can come along and open it up for piracy but that's up to that group and their intentions will be very clear.
They will not work on something that makes piracy really easy so they are more or less done. Sure a group can come along and open it up for piracy but that's up to that group and their intentions will be very clear.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Erm, do you know what 'incoherent cache' is?
Cache isn't coherent for the purposes of running boot0, because boot0 is decrypted in-place, and they use cache locking and DMA throughout the process, so the decrypted boot0 never gets to main ram.
I hope they just hack it to make it region free like Homebrew Channel and Gecko app on the Wii. It allowed me to play great stuff like Taiko Wii, Captain Rainbow, Disaster, Another Code R, Fatal Frame 4 all imported from Japan/Europe 
However it seems there isn't much for Wii U to import other than the latest Taiko game
However it seems there isn't much for Wii U to import other than the latest Taiko game
Espresso uses MERSI - it is cache coherent.He outright said cache isn't coherent...
Anyway. Here are only a few snaps that I got from the presentation.
ambientmystic
Member
He outright said cache isn't coherent...
Anyway. Here are only a few snaps that I got from the presentation.
Woah, hold on a sec, I missed that part of the presentation. The AMD gfx chipset is a confirmed RV 770 unit?
Wouldn't that mean 800 shader units instead of the bandied around 160 shader units as bgassassin said the other day? Does that mean the WiiU is much more powerful graphically speaking?
For reference, the RV770 = 4870/4850 (800 shaders) , RV730 = 4670 (320 shaders)
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Don't read too much into that. It's just a generation figure. At least marcan does not think it's a R600 anymore ;p
JordanN
Banned
RV770 is the code name for HD 4000 series (Trojan). It's been known since 2011 it was always related to that family.
Also, no way Wii U has 800 shaders or comes close to HD 4850 level. That's roughly Xbox One level which Wii U is clearly not.
phosphor112
Banned
Well, of course they don't want the decrypted boot to hit main ram. That's why they said the wonky work around Nintendo did was to put random code into the L1 to bump it out to L2 for it to be able things to copy around from Real to Translated run time.
I suppose that the coherency can be limited to strictly during the boot to avoid any potential dump to main.
Ah! Yes, I forgot that's a protocol in all gen 4 PPC's. Thanks for the reminder.
Fantastic talk once again by the overfl0w guys.
But the result was just like I expected. marcans post for a theoretical hack dates back to may and not a single thing was achieved since then by anyone (there's trinux, but they are just fiddling around with some stuff, not really making any progress).
Truth is there are like 5-10 talented guys which achieved full-blown homebrew on gc/ps3/wii and the code wizards like segher (still remember how that guy figured out like all of the software quirks just by looking at blobs) are not interested at it anymore. Mainly due to the piracy blowout their work had caused.
Also the numbers about the installations of the HBC marcan mentioned in the talk (>5m for wii, 20k for wii u) clearly speak for themself that there's no interest for homebrew anymore. And to be honest I also think that 80-90% of the vWii HBC user just use it for gc/wii backup loaders...
But the result was just like I expected. marcans post for a theoretical hack dates back to may and not a single thing was achieved since then by anyone (there's trinux, but they are just fiddling around with some stuff, not really making any progress).
Truth is there are like 5-10 talented guys which achieved full-blown homebrew on gc/ps3/wii and the code wizards like segher (still remember how that guy figured out like all of the software quirks just by looking at blobs) are not interested at it anymore. Mainly due to the piracy blowout their work had caused.
Also the numbers about the installations of the HBC marcan mentioned in the talk (>5m for wii, 20k for wii u) clearly speak for themself that there's no interest for homebrew anymore. And to be honest I also think that 80-90% of the vWii HBC user just use it for gc/wii backup loaders...
Sometimes, you don't want to give away years and thousands of dollars of personal investments for free like it was fucking nothing.
ambientmystic
Member
Understood. It was a rather specific reference to the 4870/4850 though, since lower members of the family have different codenames. The RV770 specifically refers to the 800 shader unit cards. There's also the RV740, RV730 and RV710 for the lower end family members.
I'll have to watch this when I have some time.
But some of these slides make sense. Homebrew just isn't important anymore, there are so many cheap devices in various form factors that going through a very specific purpose machine doesn't really make sense. Plus, even these machines are much more open, you can build for them via web or if you want to do something fullblown then you can get ahold of a dev kit and official SDK. So we're just left with piracy which if you have a semblance of a conscious you don't want to associate yourself with it.
But some of these slides make sense. Homebrew just isn't important anymore, there are so many cheap devices in various form factors that going through a very specific purpose machine doesn't really make sense. Plus, even these machines are much more open, you can build for them via web or if you want to do something fullblown then you can get ahold of a dev kit and official SDK. So we're just left with piracy which if you have a semblance of a conscious you don't want to associate yourself with it.
It's about as powerful as the 360 was overall, which is incredibly disappointing for a 2012 system. Smaller though.
And reading through the article fail wrote on the subject of hacking the wiiu, yeah I can see why they wouldn't bother.
1. hardly anyone has a wiiu for various reasons
2. majority of the time homebrew is interesting, like a small child making a sandcastle is interesting but ultimately the sandcastle is garbage and you just smile politely and lie to the kid. Who actually wants homebrew? like seriously what has homebrew done that allows me anything special with my console? No i don't want to play your doom port or your really shitty programmer game with mspaint art because it was made by 2 guys with a budget of $0.
3. people don't care about homebrew, people care about increasing usability for their console.
For example: with the ps2 and a modded memory card, i can now backup my saves to my computer to PCSX2 and back. I can use it to regionfree my games. I can use it to back up my games (fair use) and stream them over the network, saving my drive.
With the DS, I could use them to backup my games/saves, watch some basic videos, use it as an mp3 player, etc.
The point here is:
If the devices had this functionality in the first place, less people would care or want to hack them (which is basically what the article says anyways).
Part of the issue is that it seems hw developers aren't keeping up with what people want to do with their devices or think it's better to lock them down and disallow anything except what they want you to do.
If I have a thing I'm playing a game on, i want to take screenshots. Like, as a png or a not really compressed jpg. Maybe I want to record some video instead of using my smartphone. Maybe this thing can play videos via netflix? Well while we're at it, let me stream video over my network from my computer to the tv in the living room. Maybe I don't want to keep swapping out disks and I don't really give a shit about trading them back after i powergame them on a weekend when I'm probably going to work 12 hours anyways, so instead i just want to download them to a harddrive. Maybe I want to backup my saves for security, and hell maybe I'm sick and tired of failing on the second boss and I just want to give myself 999999 gold and xp so i can just plow through it and experience the story which is more important to me than breaking the game or playing it "right".
Most of those issues have been fixed with the xbone/ps4/vita/3ds though they are still not quite right yet. It makes sense then that unless it's piracy, what does homebrew actually bring to the table?
People are going to do whatever the fuck they want and in their mind nothing you did mattered except what they got by pirating. It's a kick in the balls but it feels better when you literally spend no thoughts on them because they do not matter.
And reading through the article fail wrote on the subject of hacking the wiiu, yeah I can see why they wouldn't bother.
1. hardly anyone has a wiiu for various reasons
2. majority of the time homebrew is interesting, like a small child making a sandcastle is interesting but ultimately the sandcastle is garbage and you just smile politely and lie to the kid. Who actually wants homebrew? like seriously what has homebrew done that allows me anything special with my console? No i don't want to play your doom port or your really shitty programmer game with mspaint art because it was made by 2 guys with a budget of $0.
3. people don't care about homebrew, people care about increasing usability for their console.
For example: with the ps2 and a modded memory card, i can now backup my saves to my computer to PCSX2 and back. I can use it to regionfree my games. I can use it to back up my games (fair use) and stream them over the network, saving my drive.
With the DS, I could use them to backup my games/saves, watch some basic videos, use it as an mp3 player, etc.
The point here is:
If the devices had this functionality in the first place, less people would care or want to hack them (which is basically what the article says anyways).
Part of the issue is that it seems hw developers aren't keeping up with what people want to do with their devices or think it's better to lock them down and disallow anything except what they want you to do.
If I have a thing I'm playing a game on, i want to take screenshots. Like, as a png or a not really compressed jpg. Maybe I want to record some video instead of using my smartphone. Maybe this thing can play videos via netflix? Well while we're at it, let me stream video over my network from my computer to the tv in the living room. Maybe I don't want to keep swapping out disks and I don't really give a shit about trading them back after i powergame them on a weekend when I'm probably going to work 12 hours anyways, so instead i just want to download them to a harddrive. Maybe I want to backup my saves for security, and hell maybe I'm sick and tired of failing on the second boss and I just want to give myself 999999 gold and xp so i can just plow through it and experience the story which is more important to me than breaking the game or playing it "right".
Most of those issues have been fixed with the xbone/ps4/vita/3ds though they are still not quite right yet. It makes sense then that unless it's piracy, what does homebrew actually bring to the table?
People are going to do whatever the fuck they want and in their mind nothing you did mattered except what they got by pirating. It's a kick in the balls but it feels better when you literally spend no thoughts on them because they do not matter.
It's a good thing devs on the PC do not share your extreme opinion, otherwise no one would ever get their games on the platform!
After all someone may at some point and time pirate their game.