Wii Savegame Crypto reverse engineered

Via Nintendo-Scene

Update - backups playable, NAND dumped

Been a long time since I rock and roll'd.

Where are we now? modchips exist similiar to the xbox360 chips that filter DVD drive commands to report a burnt disk as a real disk. So the pirates are happy. http://www.openwii.org

Some people have been dumping the NAND filesystem. A couple of them have been dumped. http://openwii.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=203 seems to be the most accessible place to find some images and some analysis.

The NAND isn't what we need though. It's just filesystem storage. We need the lower-level BIOS.

The other option is to break out of GC compatability mode. Is there any example code that does that? I don't think so.

Time to learn some FPGA :D

Sensor Bar is just an IR LED Array

From HackADay:
The video demonstrates that the Wii 'sensor bar' is just an array of IR leds. The actual sensor is in the remote control - which probably sends data to the Wii via RF. These guys faked the ir signal using a pair of standard remotes.

Personally I've assumed from the start that the way it works is that each WiiMote can detect the position of the sensor bar in 3-space and uses that positioning over time to detect motion. Hopefully some probing of the bluetooth accesibility of the device will provide further details.

Wii Hacking: Day One Summary

A summary of current (reported) progress. I unfortunately don't have a Wii that I can really mess with, yet, so take all of this with a grain of salt, please.

• Most important news: Datel FreeLoader for Gamecube already works on the Wii. Right now people can use this to run imported gamecube games (NOT HOMEBREW, see below..AR does!) and will probably be a popular entry point. For the uninitiated, FreeLoader is a commercial product that allows one to boot unsigned code on the Gamecube. You can buy it from Amazon, but I wouldn't do that until this has been more widely confirmed to be true.
• There are also reports of people using their Action Replay with SDLoad to play GC homebrew on the Wii, such as Snes9x. Snes9x was able to read roms off the SD drive as well.
  
• This is good news, because PSO for the Gamecube apparently does not work on the Wii, so no PSO exploit. The issue is that PSO does not find any sort of ethernet/broadband adapter.
  
• Rumer has it Wii rips are already being released. A quick scan of torrent and public IRC trading sites shows no activity yet, so no way to tell if it's not just a rumour.
  
• While no drivers exist yet and no one is sure if it conforms to many standards, the WiiMote is confirmed to be a bluetooth device.
  
• Wii cannot play CD's or DVD's apparently. Not too big of a deal if whatever linux distribution eventually gets support for the wifi, SD, and USB.
• Speaking of linux distributions, see WiiLi, or Wii-Linux. My money is on WiiLi.