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Admin
It's the manufacturer's divine right to try to lock the thing down, and it's my divine right to be (legally) able to break it open again.
I think if you actually look at the real statistics, you'll find that at least 95% of Wii piracy right now is done via modchips, not homebrew. You keep associating homebrew with "modding" and piracy. I think you just don't understand how distant those two fields are, and how they only cross unintentionally (on our side anyway). Usually because the pirates take advantage of our work. Homebrew has nothing to do with modchips, and you don't need a modchip to use it. Currently loading pirate games is much easier, faster, and reliable using a modchip. VC/WiiWare is pretty much a lost cause by now, but Nintendo really screwed up on that one by storing everything in plaintext.
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Oh, and for anecdotal support, I'm on my 3rd backup of Super Puzzle Fighter. I'm glad I stopped playing with the original disk, or I would've stopped playing it years ago.
Admin
You almost had me except for this paragraph. While I will definitely agree that homebrew is not a "divine right" (which I would interpret to mean as a God given right... not sure about the use here), I would say that anyone not allowing homebrew is doing themselves a disservice.
How is modding NOT innocent if you aren't pirating? What harm does it do to the manufacture if you aren't using it to pirate games? What harm does homebrew do to you? If I buy a Wii, mod it, put homebrew games on it, and still buy your game to play, did modding really hurt you at all?
I didn't really buy the argument someone else gave that said that you are afraid of homebrew competition but after this post, it sure seems like you are.
Admin
Every piece of software is crackable, so what's the point here.
The real WTF is someone complaining about one of the most popular consoles ever not being coded with perfection. Neither are the PS3 and the XBOX. The SNES might have been more stable but really, complexity has changed a bit.
Comparing the game scene today with the time of the SNES is ridiculous. It's like saying it's awful that man no longer goes hunting in the woods for food.
Worst post ever.
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There are chaotic evil bastards out there, sure, but I'm not convinced there is a 1-1 ration of evil bastards to good modders. As numerous people have said (many in reply to your post - interestingly uyou pick and choose which responses to reply to) allowing people to make their own Software would probably not affect Nintendo's bottom line - if anyhting, we geeks would be MORE attracted to a console we can do our own thing with.
Clearly their current attempts against piracy do not work - for great effort. For less effort (and therefore cost) they could be in the exact same position they're in now - with a console that's more attractive to the (good) hacker (something which must increase their bottom line).
Not to condone Piracy, but clothing manufacturer's have for years not cared if (some) people steal their product (especially young teens), because the image of these types wearing it is cheap advertising. Similarly, if I went to a friends house and played a game he had pirated and enjoyed it, I would be more likely to buy it than had I not been exposed to it. Some might be more likely to pirate it, but a remarkably high proportion would actually buy it (if for no other reason than they don't want to void their warranty by chipping their console).
There is no question that Piracy is wrong, however any company must accept that: a) it exists b) sometimes fighting it costs mroe than what you lose from it c) sometimes what you lose from it is outweighed by what you gain from it.
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It took me 4 hours to understand the title: Anatomy + Wii = anatomii Brillant!
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The only reason I 'hacked' my wii is so that my wife could play some Region 4 games on her US console which we purchased since moving here a few months ago.
Region locking is one of the biggest things that affects innocent law abiding citizens by treating them like criminals. I brought my entire collection of region 4 DVDs over with me (at least a couple hundred) only to find that I have to play them with my laptop because the new blue ray player we bought will not play them back.
This affects a lot of people every day and it hurts them a lot more than the dodgy supplier that's trying to sell a dvd imported from Hong Kong for half the retail price. It's about time that the big film studios and game developers realise that they're hurting their customers more than anyone else.</rant>
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Speaking of Earthbound, the Mother 3 translation comes out at the end of the week. This is one where the people involved have written petitions, bought Japanese versions of the game they can't even read or play, and sent a giant gift basket to Itoi (the guy who made M3).
So it's not all about the piracy. They did everything they could to buy the game legitimately, and a great many will be playing the translation on an emulator while the Japanese cartridge with a game they don't understand sits on their desk.
/We know how to use slashies, too. //The translation is at http://mother3.fobby.net/
Admin
I have to admit that I'm not a console hacker and never will be, but it seems to me that the community around this sort of activity is more like a gaming modders' community.
Most modders have no interest in piracy and some even go so far as to build in their own anti-piracy checks into their mods so you can only mod a valid copy of the game. A lot of them seem to know a lot more about game security than the HPCs who build the game security in for the publisher in the first place.
Hell, some of them probably ARE the HPCs who build in the game security in for the publisher in the first place. It can be a tightly knit community, modding, but I digress.
My point is this. Most games being released on the PC platform these days have some sort of allowance for modders. They HAVE to. You see, if a game can't be modded, it doesn't build up the community of players that will extend the longevity of the game. Most modders are just highly creative and adept fanatics who love the game they're modding.
They spend an awful lot of time on the game, on the forums, building their mods, etc. They act as a de facto support line, they release their mods to the community free of charge, they collaborate with each other to build even bigger mods...
I think you get the idea.
To date, I've been seriously involved in two gaming communities. The Egosoft community, the name behind XbtF and X2 onwards, and the Freelancer community.
The X community was the tightest group of gaming fanatics I've ever met in my life. And with good reason, they were playing a very good game. IMHO X-tension is still by far the best game in the X series, but it had one fatal flaw - virtually NO modding capability at all. There were some basic tools et al to help make minor changes, but the game couldn't really be modded. Egosoft realised their mistake when they looked at the gaming boards and the next games in the series all had modding capabilities built in.
Freelancer on the other hand seems almost built from the ground up with modding in mind. M$ turned off the global servers last year, but Freelancer is still alive and well because the community built their OWN global server system. These are incredibly dedicated and talented people who've extended the life of the game (and therefore M$ revenue) on their own time. The only difference here is that despite creating such a moddable game, M$ hasn't really seemed interested in the community they've built. If they were, a FL2 would be in the works by now. It's a huge community out there loving the game even still.
So here's my point - Console designers in the long term are more likely to GAIN revenue from hackers than LOSE it through piracy. Even though more of the end users out there are going to want to use this technology to pinch games, the console market is missing in key ingredient to keep the market share they gain - modding. If you can play a game once, beat it then not play it any differently next time, people play your games (and your platform) until they're bored with it. If they (on the other hand) can mod the games, do new things with the hardware making it more useful to them, then everything's new again and they play longer. No need to design a $1k replacement model next year if everyone's happy with what they have.
That means bigger ROI on your original designs, and if you're the first to allow it, modders will flock to YOUR platforms in droves.
Will some of them do it for cheap (if not free) games? Yeah, only an idiot would not admit that. BUT, my point is that MOST of the people on the platform will switch to it for the possibilities that modding presents. Once you have the core gamers, the broader community will follow.
So, to me, the real WTF of this article is why are the console companies fighting this AT ALL? They should be happy about this, it's going to draw more people and more revenue to their platform. I'd be advertising the fact.
I think the companies have it right to try and stop piracy. That is right and fair, even if they DO charge too much for games. But, confusing hacking with piracy seems to be the typical myopic corporate view that looks great to the shareholders but is ultimately self defeating to the company over the long term.
Games (and gaming platforms) are made by the communities that support them, not the factories or developers that create them in the first place. Forget that, and the gaming community will forget your game or platform soon enough.
Acid.
Admin
concerning elliptic curve crypography....
http://www.schneier.com/essay-198.html
Admin
Just to be pedantic: Super Mario Brothers was released in 1993, not in the 1980s.
I happened to see it a couple of weeks ago and got a real kick out of Fisher Stevens playing Iggy. You may remember him as The Plague in Hackers.
Admin
The bigger WTF is that they're attacking the homebrew community in the first place.
That's a very good point. The DMCA provides for exactly that.
Naq V guvax vg'f shpxvat ergneqrq. Ol gur jnl, lbh'er ivbyngvat gur QZPN evtug abj, ol penpxvat guvf. Ubj'f vg srry gb or n pevzvany? Bu, naq vg'f sbe NAL checbfr, nf V haqrefgnaq vg -- juvpu vf jul, sbe fb ybat, vg jnf npghnyyl vyyrtny gb cynl n QIQ (gung lbh bja!) ba Yvahk.
For what it's worth, I don't agree that this is why you use a cheap tumbler lock. You use a cheap tumbler lock because you're very unlikely to have even one person attempt to break in. If that's not the case -- if you live in a city, say -- you use a deadbolt or five, a peephole, and a chain.
I suppose what makes it that much more of a WTF is that crypto algorithms -- especially implementations of common, pre-existing algorithms like RSA and SHA1 -- are not particularly difficult to come by.
Admin
While I'm at it:
And here I was thinking region locking had nothing to do with protecting the consumer, and everything to do with protecting the corporation.
Basically, it lets them fix prices in those respective regions. People in the UK pay more than people in the US, who pay more than people in India. Better to sell a DVD at lower profit margins in China, say, than not at all -- although China may be a lost cause, it's still a billion people.
But if people in the US are willing to pay ten times as much, the region coding lets them gouge us that much.
Oh, there are other reasons -- the fact that there are often completely different corporations with the rights to distribute in each region, for example. But if there was some benefit to doing so, why wouldn't they consolidate to one global corporation responsible for distribution anywhere?
Bs pbhefr, vs lbh'er jvyyvat gb ivbyngr gur QZPN (yvxr lbh unir gb, va beqre gb ernq guvf zrffntr), vg'f abg qvssvphyg gb pbzr ol ertvba-serr fbsgjner cynlref. QIQ PFF vf rnfl gb penpx.
Admin
If you don't use it to run games for free, then yes, you are not hurting anyone, except maybe the feelings of the security expert that designed the thing. The problem is that although in the "die-hard" modding communities, a very large portion of people play nice (99%? :D), next to these relatively small modding communities, there is a huge main-stream audience that simply uses teh hax0rs for free games.
I went to the birthday of my little cousin last week. When I got there, she and her friends were playing on their DS-es. (kids nowadays....)
As soon as I sat down, one of their parents suddenly started smiling ear-to-ear: "Jim, you are into that whole video-game business, right? Weeheheheellll, look what I got. HEY BRANDINE! SHOW THAT CARD-THING I BOUGHT YA!".
Turns out, she was playing from a G4 card. In fact, all of them had G4 cards, and none of them, nor their parents are tech-savvy in any way. Just swapping games and using google and banner-ridden download sites to get more. The parents were very happy with themselves, being so smart to buy the little kits, saving them a lot of money on games. Just shows how quickly things go when they hit the casual market.
(Yes, my family is a hive of scum and villany.)
Admin
I didn't reply to all of them because there are so much and most of them were about the 99%-thing, or the exact troll/tard ratio. (I think I'll call it the Jimmy-ratio)
Security only delays the inevitable, which is still enough reason to put lots of money into it. Apperantly it still "works" for most publishers. If a console caters to the modding community, the lives of most modders would become much easier (and less illegal), and I'm all for it! The problem is that there will always be a group of people who will (try to) use it/twist it/bend it to play games for free. They always do. And they usually succeed. :D
Admin
Dunno about uniary but in base RSA-2048 it's:
Admin
On a related yet un-related note.
I take backups of my DVDs. This is because I have kids. Anyone who has kids knows that this statement needs no further elaboration.
I am currently on burn 15 of "The Knights of Can-a-lot", burn 7 of "Numberjacks 'Calling all agents'".
I also take backups of DVD films that I own. Not JUST for the sake of a backup, but so that I don't have to sit through:
a) Copyright notices that you can't get rid of b) Trailers for films I don't want to watch, or have already watched and own the DVD for c) and warnings about why DVD piracy is a crime.
If they didn't include the warnings and copyright notices and the adverts I'd be less tempted to cut my own version of the disk.
Irony much?
Admin
So you're suggesting security through obscurity?
...
Could work well enough against piraters, as those don't seem to be particularly good hackers.
Admin
Wrong.
Nintendo makes profit on the Wii Console. They were the only one making direct profit from the Console itself.
Admin
Homebrew and piracy are "distant" on the Wii, that is true. But in general they go hand in hand; executing foreign,unsigned or unsafe code. Again, I applaud modders who discourage piracy.
It doesn't really matter to me how people break into the system, with a chip, a modded battery pack or their toothbrush. It's the people who play and defend pirated games whilst shouting that they "just want to run homebrew". And the "hackers" that ignore the impact of their efforts (can) have on the industry.
It's just like release-groups that release 0day cracks of games with the disclaimer "if you like this game, buy it!". Knowing that teenagers (and their parents) aren't gonna do that, and they are seriously hurting the developers of the game with their efforts.
"Not our problem". yeah...thanks.
Admin
The region locks are not that specific - it's basically PAL (Europe and Australia), NTSC-U (USA/Canada, etc.), NTSC-J (Japan) (and China, but that's another story). While you can cover the ratings this way (PEGI/ESRB/CERO), that's about it.
Pretty much all games that rely on this (a practice that stopped ages ago) were originally coded for NTSC. The PAL conversion was often just slowed down in comparison with the original NTSC version, and they'd play as such if you tried to play the NTSC version on a PAL console. Additionally, the NTSC versions were almost always released before PAL versions, so the "PAL game running on NTSC" is virtually no issue.
Most PAL TVs sold within the last 10 years or so support PAL60, and PAL games tend to support both (I think any non-VC PAL Wii game must support it, but I'm not sure). This (at least theoretically) allows them to be run on an NTSC console without technical issues.
There was also a region lockout chip (as there have been in all their consoles), but it was identical for both NTSC regions - for PAL, you'll usually want to install a switch to toggle the lockout chip between the two regions, or use a cartridge designed to use the lockout chip from a different cartridge (but due to some of the later games, you'll need a 50/60Hz switch anyhow).
To make matters worse, I seem to recall there were actually two different PAL chips for the SNES - games from the UK won't run on a Danish SNES. The NES had a similar problem: There was a Mattel version and a Nintendo version, and the games were incompatible with the other one (that may have been the basic SNES issue as well, can't remember).
It made sense to do the USA/Japan divide like that at the time, though: importing from Japan was much more uncommon than it is today, so it wasn't something you'd expect many people to do.
Admin
I'd say you have the same grasp of numbers as the average banker.
Admin
I was talking about the percentage of people that DO hack/mod their Wii, and how many of those people use this to play free games.
Admin
In the final pseudo-code snippet, the line...
fileLength = (fileLength + 31) & (~31);
should surely end (-32) (producing the mask FFFFFFE0) whereas -31 is FFFFFFE1.
Admin
Leaning a bit closer to my monitor, I now see that it's a tilda and not a minus sign. Time for a new pair of specs I think.
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Admin
Come on you can do better than that Level 2.
Conservatively saying that just 100 people in the whole wide world mod their Wii, that would mean just 99.99667% :-)
Hoping I got my maths right
Admin
Because if you buy them in another country, you'd be able to pay the fair market price for a new game, rather than whatever arbitrary number has been plucked out of the air by someone who wants to sell you the game. Joke's on him, of course, the market will adjust when you don't buy the game at its ridiculous markup.
Oh, you say you're complaining because you bought the game at the inflated price anyway? (facepalm)
Admin
While I needed to use my U.S.-bought Playstation 2 for many DVDs when my only other option was a U.K.-bought Playstation 2, I've been surprised by how many of my DVDs seem to work just fine on my XBox 360. Which is surprising, considering that it won't even let me sign up for XBox Live due to an error in similar "region lock" protection for games.
Here's hoping that it's not silently switching the console's region up to a maximum of N times every time I put a dvd from another country in. But perhaps, just perhaps, they realized that DVD regions were stupid and aren't bothering to check on the 360?
Admin
Because teenagers with no money and their parents who refuse to buy games, that's a real key demo that's being blocked-out by the ease of piracy.
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Actually Nintendo, unlike Sony and Microsoft, make a profit on every console they sell.
Admin
Did you guys know that Nintendo actually makes a profit on its console, unlike everyone else?
I bet you didn't know that, because certainly no one has said it in this very thread.
Admin
You're mistaking everyone who breaks into a system for a pirate. They are doing different things, for different purposes.
Personally I modify video games to patch obvious flaws in the gameplay mechanics or add new features. I write patches for games when the developers are too lazy to do so.
The fact that I have to get past anti-piracy protection is no ethical dilemma since I know that protection was never intended to stop me, only pirates.
The pirate themselves do it to see if they can... but sure they have an ethical dilemma. However when the only people you're hurting is a company which punishes you for using their applications in the form of ever more restrictive DRM then it's pretty easy for them to justify: an eye for an eye.
BTW. The WTF is the really shoddy code Nintendo are trying to use to stop those who they know are highly skilled software engineers from modifying their environment.
\Game Developer \Software Security Analyst
Admin
It's awesome to play your old Lucas Arts games on the Wii (ScummVM) and watch XviD movies in the living room (MPlayerWii; my crappy DVD player does not support XviD). It would be great if the Wii would support DVD playback including menus. Navigating DVD menus with the WiiMote would be a treat.
Admin
Lighten up Francis ehm...Steve.
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I know the difference, and I'm not accusing homebrewers of piracy. Just saying that people who think the piracy issues that come with modding/hacking aren't a big deal are a bit naive.
And I don't agree with the eye for an eye deal. Yes the security measures are annoying, yes it sucks, but it is absolutely no reason to just start stealing/downloading everything.
But that is a different discussion, with more yelling and screaming, seeing how this one is going. :D
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Wonder if anyone's jumped on this, but I couldn't let it sit. Nintendo, unlike all the rest of the Console Manufacturers, actually makes money on every console they sell. They have never sold any current console at a loss.
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What I don't understand, is why video game makers don't take advantage of this sort of thing. A lot of game designers go to some great lengths to design a game that has a lot of tight limitations, or rules to conform to and play by. Which is fine, initially. But, once most people have played the game they're tired of it. Why design games with unlockable features that "free it" or open it up for "hacking" by the user. I use the term "hacking" loosely, but what I mean is allow the user to play around with the game without the limitations of normal game play.
Console designers could do the same. Open the system by offering/selling a modified firmware, albeit unsupported that the people who want can have to play with to their heart's desire. Then offer a forum in which they can access, for a fee of course, to sell and/or trade mods. Users who weren't as tech-savy, could subscribe as well, and download the mods.
Admin
This is so true, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory still has a massive community today, a) because it free, b)cos a lot of user development has gone into the mods(etpro + etpub being the most succesful ones). There were complete full games written around the code(True Combat Elite). Not to mention user scripted menu, sounds, graphics. Theres even anti-cheat technology being developed for a new competition mod.
Its the same with other games. if there modable they last longer!
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Just so you know, the playstation 3 runs Linux natively, without the kit. It doesn't let you access the full hardware though, and runs in an hypervisor.
Admin
Unfortunately, that unauthorized code runs in a VM.
Yes, Linux runs on the PS3, but it's running on top of a hypervisor that's virtualized all the hardware away. One of these things is the RSX, so you're limited to framebuffer graphics. Which wouldn't be too bad if the framebuffer was in the RSX itself, but it isn't. Instead, you update you local memory, then trap the VM which causes it to copy your framebuffer into the RSX, all at very high CPU overhead (You have two PPUs - and running X, keeps the load at >1 all the time).
Oh, the PS3 also has 512MB of RAM. But that's split 50-50. 50% of it is GPU memory (the RSX), while the other 50% is system memory. So you really have a Linux system with 256MB of RAM to play with (make sure you enable the swap - you'll need it!).
Other than audio, playing anything on 1080p is very... very... slow. Any video will have dropped frames due to the sluggishness of the framebuffer system implemented (framebuffer isn't inherently slow, but copying a fully 1080p framebuffer 60 times a seconds exacts a huge performance penalty).
Oh yeah, access to all the hardware is through the VM too. Blu-Ray drive? Yes, you can read it. But you can't issue any security commands to the drive (VM blocked), so ripping your movies and games that way won't work. Hard drive? VM'd too. It acts like a SCSI drive (even though it's SATA, and it's not the kernel's IDE-SATA emulation). Found this out when my hard drive went bad, and I kept getting wierd "Read-only filesystem" errors, but no I/O errors. Only clued in when I rebooted, then the filesystem ended up unable to cope with the strange data being returned from the hard drive which immediately turned it read-only. (Taking the drive out and sticking it on a USB adapter and running disk tests confirmed the diagnoses).
Really, the PS3 is a reasearch and development platform the for the Cell architecture (no doubt done to avoid EU duties on consoles, so the PS3 can be classified as "computing equipment" with lower duties).
As for people wanting to develop, try OpenPandora. It's got a 900MHz ARM CPU, a TI DSP, a high-res screen (for a portable - 800x480) and tons of other hardware in a portable formfactor. It also runs Linux and is completely open, and designed to be that way so people could do homebrew on a portable device with halfway decent battery life. Or get one of those GamePark devices - I hear they have a "Wiz" coming out, also pretty open. They seem relatively successful homebrew devices...
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To all of the people claiming a need to "backup" their discs because of damaged discs, all I can say is take better care of your discs. I still have original PlayStation games that work flawlessly.
Admin
For those of us with a DS that can play unofficial code, I wholly recommend my Nintendo DS Port of Lemmings, which includes all the original Lemmings levels, Oh No More Lemmings! levels and the holiday expansions.
From The People Who Brought You Magenta Kong™
Admin
Dammit, teach the kid some responsiblility.
My 4 year old already habitually handles optical discs by the edges only, because that's the way daddy showed her. She puts the discs back in the box carefully. And she knows for a fact that if she scratches one, she isn't getting a new one.
And it's the same for anything. Yes, you want to protect your children. And the best way to do it is to teach them to make their way in the world by themselves. You may end up with a few tears, and a busted copy of Toy Story, but it won't happen twice, and your child will learn a valuable lesson about taking care of their property, instead of learning that it doesn't matter if you are careless, because Mommy will fix it. This attitude probably turns into vandalism later on in life.