Dangerous Hacking

Ok, so this Wii hack has hit Kotaku and it's pretty interesting stuff. I'm always hesitant to claim "oh, snap, it's hacked" because, really, until you get binaries in your hands and collaborated results you really can't say it.

Remember that the Wii controller uses standard Bluetooth technology, is capable of being tracked and interfaced on a PC, and video doesn't mean shit. I can very very easily produce such a demonstration on stage or in my own room with a multi-input AV switch, a Wii, a PC, a video doubler, two wiimotes, and the final broadcast device.

And the words are light on details. He goes into all this detail about the hardware and names of stuff, but the technique on how to munge the address lines and access higher memory was rushed through and covered up with some words and a hand gesture that I found rather suspicious. Definitely light on details.

That said, it's also worth mentioning that this is very similar to the technique used for hacking the DS and is probably the best argument against any system having a hardware backwards compatibility layer. That is, the DS was hacked thanks to it being built off of the original GBA hardware and the unavoidable shared hardware space, the GBA was hacked thanks to using pinouts to the classic GB/GBC cartridges* which are unavoidable to keep the hardware compact and robust and power efficient for delivering data to the execution hardwares (ARM7 and Z80). Even the PS2 is soft-hackable thanks to the way it handles PSX backwards compatibility.

* Except at different voltages, but, heh, that's easy to find out.

Three examples in 6 years (and now possibly a 7th) I think might just give the console hardware planners pause before including hardware backwards compatibility, particularly backwards compatibility to known cracked platforms.

Nintendo is actually in the best position to dump hardware compatibility in their 8th generation console. Since the Wii is the lowest powered of all the consoles, the next iteration could take the same hardware performance leap that, say, the Dreamcast took against the Saturn and perform all it's Wii/Gamecube compatibility in a software only hypervisor.

But, I guess we'll wait until the release of the hack comes out. I don't intend to do it to my system until I'm confident I can get another Wii without much fuss, personally. And I wonder when are companies going to just release sensible hobbyist programming kits at low cost to avoid having hackers try to fuck with their systems?

If Nintendo released a home dev kit for, say, $100 there would be no need for this kind of thing to develop. The homebrew people will be happy and Nintendo would be happy keeping people from openly developing an exploit that pretty much will immediately be used for piracy. Oh, that and stop making systems region-locked.