Not directly related to the above post, but easiest place to ask my question:I remember back in the day, there was some outrage about Nintendo pushing an update for boot2 for /every/ single Wii (if I recall correctly it was an attempt to overwrite BootMii, if installed).The outrage was because apparently Nintendo’s boot2 flashing code sucked and would brick heaps of Wiis (and you guys wrote your own boot2 flashing code cos you didn’t trust Nintendo’s)Did the expected mass-bricking ever happen? Because I can’t recall hearing much about it after.Thanks.tech3475 // Sep 22, 2010 at 5:37 am.
![]()
But, if you do decide not to install priiloader to disable disc updates, then if you do update it will not brick your wii, as long as your homebrew channel is 1.8 or higher. If your home-brew channel is 1.8 or higher, everything is handled by a modified cIOS 249, and updating from this cannot brick your wii, and the only thing the final update will do is stub any cIOSes that aren't stock. As you all know, I’ve been working on libdi (or the DVD Access library) for a while now. We had some problems getting it out to release because of the difficulties we encountered while writing the second part of this topic. The DVDX installer instead will install a small, hidden, channel on your Wii that allows you to read DVDs on an.
Did a frequency analysis on the garbage (because that’s my idea of a good time), except for a few regions it’s very evenly distributed in 0-7f. The exception regions are:0x2158000-0x21600000x9F60000-0x9F640000x9FC4000-0x9FC0000-0x10208000-0x1800C0000x1806C000-0x18070000As I have no Wii knowledge I can’t make any sense of what I see here, likely just normal FS stuff that wasn’t in active files (probably the stuff you already discussed), but for anyone wanting to analyze the garbage alone, exclude these regions.Thanks for the article!.G0dLiKe // Sep 22, 2010 at 9:23 am. @BentOne reason could be that because Wii Sports uses it, they decided it was easier to have it on the console.Three possible theories for why there are files on NAND I have are:1. Security- they may have thought that units would be less likely stolen if they were useless without the disc.2.
To make it easier for the people setting up the demo stand.3. The system software was still in development right until the main production started.
This could explain somewhat why they still had stuff on NAND despite needing the disc, the few IOS files were stable but the system software itself was not ready.tech3475 // Sep 22, 2010 at 10:01 am. A quick search in spanish (my main language, also a language spoken by people that messes with tech stuff) reveals this:orthe post date is 2006 and the box sais it includes the WiiStartupDisci think the 3º point of tech3475 would be the best guess. The system wasnt ready, and don’t forget that when it first came out they couldn’t cope with the demand, so it would make some sense to rely the last step of the production to some “trusted” (or not) retailers (maybe without them knowing).Probably by now they don’t reease these wiis intentionally because now they have time to do this step at the factory.veraca // Sep 22, 2010 at 10:40 am. Okay, in order:@Some Person: That’s mostly true — the concern is more that updating the bootloader carries a certain statistical risk of bricking the Wii — even if we assume both installing BootMii and Nintendo updating boot2 creates the same small (say, 1 in 10,000) risk of bricking the console, then 50 million users being updated for no good reason may see 5,000 bricked Wiis and 50,000 users installing BootMii might see 5 bricked Wiis. At least those installing BootMii chose to do so because there was a potential benefit for them (and I don’t actually know of any units bricked by BootMii).If you go search on Google for “4.2 Wii bricked”, you’ll find a number of articles — some merely parrot each other or our warnings, but many link to posts on various forums — including Nintendo’s — with first-hand reports of consoles being bricked.
It got to the point where Nintendo had to put up a note on their forum trying to minimize the problem.@Bent and veraca: With regards to IOS4 — IOS4 is a lot smaller and simpler than IOS9 (about 400K vs 1700K), due to the fact that many drivers are missing, specifically most of the networking drivers (WL, WD, SSL, NCD, KD). I tried to boot IOS4 once, a couple years back, and couldn’t get it to work — but I didn’t put too much effort into it, and it was important enough that Nintendo later stubbed that IOS out. IOS9 would be necessary to run the gamut of burn-in tests that they have — see the list in. It’s possible that they only initially flash boot1, boot2, IOS4, and 1-2 into NAND externally — this would only be about 3 MB of data, and maybe shaving off that extra 1.5 MB saves money and time for them.I ended up figuring out the cause of the semi-random data, I’ll update the post above in a bit with the info.MrTaco // Sep 23, 2010 at 2:08 am. Right when I got to the second paragraph, that Insert Startup Disc thing set off a whole lot of bells ringing in my head. I remembered seeing early pictures of the Wii box, and mentions on the contents list of a “Wii Startup Disc”, and everyone wondering what that was.
Then I went to go double-check my Wii box and sure enough the picture of the disc was there like I remembered. But it was labelled as being Wii Sports ?Good read, I love how there’s long periods of nothing then all of a sudden a new part of the story suddenly unfold out of nowhere.KingLewy // Sep 23, 2010 at 3:19 am. Thanks brilliant break down, things like this always interest me ?Just a thought her but looking at this logically is it possible that as Nintendo were running short of time for the dash and get this onto launch Wiis, and from your article that the units were being made with a very basic BIOS effectively that initially the free bundled game of Wii Sport was to have been a dual purpose disk to flash the NAND fully and also as a game, therefore encouraging it’s use? This is after all the only first time (as far as I’m aware) that a game was given away with from the manufacture with a full game.Just a thought, but I think it has some merit.CheersJinxter.mtu // Sep 23, 2010 at 12:56 pm. This is by far my favorite blog. Thanks Bushing for the time you put in to all of this.The US systems were shipped with the Wii Sports disc but not all countries? Would the data from the non US Wii’s be different or be the same and just load different language files?Even so they wouldn’t want to rely on the disc to update if not all Wii shipped with it.I know that Korean Wii’s have a few extra or different ios on them.
That half-way answers my question but being that long ago when the first Wii were shipped I’m not sure how they rolled them out of the factory to different countries.Sephiroth // Sep 24, 2010 at 2:12 am. @yvonne.maginley: Yes, I’m pretty sure that is at least part of what it is. The program that writes that data out does in fact count the number of bad blocks and compare against a limit (80).@Phredreeke: We did that one-copy update as a way of trying to be brick-proof, but even Nintendo had their own way of trying to prevent bricks — It’s been a while since I last looked at it, but I believe they only write one copy of boot2, and then only write the second copy once the first one is verified. I’ve still never been able to get my hands on a Wii that was bricked by installing the new boot2, so I still don’t know what the exact failure mode was.@nilum: Sorry, I’m pretty bad with email, just ask Paul ? I see your message and will write back soon.Scaevola // Sep 25, 2010 at 5:37 pm. I just read the article. It was very informative.
Considering that you are doing this only in your spare time, I appreciate your efforts and the time spent on not just analyzing the Wii but also sharing it with everyone in such a detailed post.Reading your comments on searching online about this issue and seeing the multilanguage error screens, I wondered if this kind of broken Wiis and startup discs also exist in other countries. I checked eBay UK and Germany, but defective wiis mostly had disc read errors.Then I checked Ninty support sites. In Australia and Japan, there was no FAQ entry on startup disc. In Europe, all language sites contained the same FAQ entry about the startup disc, but I believe that it is just a result of translation without adjusting the content according to local needs.Probably, only US had these units but it may also be possible that these startup discs were available in Latin America and Canada. Somebody better check the local auction and classified sites for similar Wiis or startup discs.
I did my job for Europe. ?I continued Googling various phrases that contained “startup disc” and so, but this post is the most comprehensive information available. The discs were possibly collected back as you mentioned.By the way, while searching, I found a Google cached copy of the auction Paul got the Wii from and a thread in Ninty Support forums about the startup disc error.
?And I have a final question. Why is this disc blocked in future system menu versions? Is it because it had the possibility to brick Wiis or is it because it contained exploitable stuff?.Nickwiiman // Sep 26, 2010 at 1:30 pm. Well hi all i have just had a thought on what some one said before sort of. When the launch of the wii was happening the demand was so high, that my thought was that they had cut their process time on flashing the NAND and put basic file reading firmware on to it and the rest of the coding on the wii sports disc, which needed IOS4 to run mmmmm well after a moment of madness i ripped the copy of wii sports and theres no obvious files on it.Question: (im not fully up to date on this but)How does the wiimote connect to the wii when there is no obvious support on there or is it seperate to the nand?.Nickwiiman // Sep 26, 2010 at 1:56 pm. And just another silly coment really but a pause for thought the pictures above saying please insert wii start up disc, if you look at the picture of the wii in them they havent got sd card slots mmmm just another wierd observation lol. I do remember some time back i read an artical that said the wii originally was not going to have sd support but was a “so to speak” last minute thing after Nintendo was told they had to put some sort of support for developers to work with.
Not sure on the truth of this but i thought i would share my wii bit of knowledge with ya!!!.Sephiroth // Sep 26, 2010 at 4:02 pm. “if you insert a disc, it would transition to the other two discs”Other two screens, perhaps?
![]()
Couple other typos too did you perhaps write this as you were playing with it?:-pIt sounds like even this base image has an encrypted NAND and only boots fake-signed discs, which means there’s still no way for the system to bootstrap from a black NAND? I suppose they program each chip before installing it, but used these stubs because they wanted to ship before they’d finished writing the software.
It’d still be interesting if you ever discovered exactly how they get that first image on there.Pretty neat to know more about what the startup disc does. I wonder if these “broken” units will become valuable now that they’re known to be hard to find? (Or less, if people can get the image and flash it to that state themselves for no good reason?) Maybe more of these discs will show up now?.Nickwiiman // Sep 28, 2010 at 2:14 pm. Just a bit more info found on the below website:Posted: Nov 16th 2006 12:31PM(Unverified) said I work at Eagle Global Logistics (EGL), a company like UPS that ships stuff, and we are currently shipping these demo units to GameStop stores, and I read a letter attached to one of the boxes. It said something about a Nintendo associate needing to visit the store to “activate” the Wii.
That may have something to do with it.As this was posted in 2006 it would have been in the right era, but this was posted buy an american guy, but all the boxes that have shown the startup disc included have been european wiis mmm.STRANGE!.knarrff // Oct 2, 2010 at 6:53 pm. You write: “I’m not quite sure why we see multiple copies of it.”I am not sure if you figured that out already, but you write about the PRNG: “so that’s the sequence length”. I would ask, why would you only expect to see only one copy of it? If this was used to test the memory, there is no reason to only use one times the length of the sequence.
I would rather simply overwrite (almost) the whole memory for the test, and thereby create a number of copies of the sequence simply because the sequence length happens to be shorter than the size of the tested memory.knarrff // Oct 2, 2010 at 6:54 pm.
![]() Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2023
Categories |