NES Hacks

If you look back a few days to the BootMii video we posted, you might have had some questions on to what the device actually does. As if on cue, marcan has come out and released a full statement on his new device. First off, we learn something that may be relieving to some:

Oh, and by the way, before I bore you and you stop reading this, at least note that BootMii is entirely software-based. The hardware in the video is merely for debugging.

That’s good for us consumers, but what is it?

The first thing that you need to realize is that BootMii isn’t a single application or hack – it’s a platform for hacks. Up until now, we’ve had little control over what software our Wiis truly run. Sure, we can run our own stuff, but ultimately we’re users of the system – everything we do has to go through Nintendo’s software. We can avoid updates and try to understand the existing system, but we’re still dependent on it. Every piece of Wii Homebrew currently depends on Nintendo’s IOS. This isn’t a bad thing (it provides many bits of code that we don’t have to write), but it also means we have to follow its rules.

Now, there have been some hacks around the system, of course. PatchMii was developed to get rid of some of the restrictions of IOS – but it’s not particularly practical, and only really works for one IOS at a time. Starfall gets rid of some annoyances of the system menu, but it’s an ugly low-level filesystem hack that will get erased with any Nintendo update. And at any time Nintendo can come and update the entire system to patch all the holes. Of course, we don’t expect the latter to happen (we have / will find more holes), but nonetheless it’s still unnerving to a degree.

BootMii – let’s call it the BootMii platform – is about changing that. Instead of being users of the system, doomed to hacking our ways from the inside, we’re going to turn the tables around. Now we’ll have control and Nintendo’s software will have to go through us to do anything.

That’s all well and good, but it still permits the burning question: What do we use it for?

So what can you do with BootMii-Core anyway? Well, the sky’s the limit – you’re running Starlet code on boot, really, there are no limits. However, a simple example was seen in the video: by using a very simple iosboot.bin that just loads the original boot2 and patches it to change the boot title, we can run The Homebrew Channel on boot instead of the system menu. This by itself will already let you fix banner / system menu bricks and the like, as long as you have HBC and BootMii-Core installed. As a more elaborate example, you could load a NAND backup/restore utility from SD, using custom code instead of IOS and without depending on the filesystem. This would let you fix pretty much any brick that didn’t mess up BootMii-Core. And of course, other parts of the BootMii platform will also take advantage of this run-on-boot system to let you do more fun things. We’ll talk about those when the time comes

In the meantime, you can read the entire article including the more technical aspects of the spftware in the Source link.

Source

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 4:56 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.