gtrunner _ oh man what a day that was when that was released to the public, I flipped my shit knowing my PSP could be hacked no matter what using just a spare battery 😂
Actually I think Nintendo to their credit was not responsible for that one. IIRC it was a bug in the recovery mode of the nVidia Tegra chip, so it was nVidia's mess up. The paperclip is used to activate the recovery mode, but if it functioned properly the recovery mode would be useless for everything except officially done repairs.
That’s literally what my friend did to my wii one night trying to get his kirby airride out when it wouldn’t eject. Literally sucked the tweezers out of his hand.
I had one like that but i dropped it one to many times and Kirby Epic Yarn got stuck inside of it and my sister wanted to play Kirby on a different Wii so, with me crying cause it was the first Wii our family had gotten and I didnt care if it was stuck cause it had the backwards compatibility, he took a screw driver and literally broke the Wii and killed it but the game was unscathed and now she never plays the game and I dont like her for it
Corrections: 3:03 - the hack did not require extracting any signing keys (those signing keys are held by Nintendo and not on the console). It just relied on the strncmp flaw that was later published. This was full Wii mode homebrew, but the ecosystem was too young (no developer tools) to just publish it at this point. 4:10 - games are encrypted by a per-game encryption key and signed by a signing key. Per-game encryption keys are encrypted by a common key. Encryption and signing are different things. The signing key is held by Nintendo and nobody else has access to it. "License key" means nothing here; the key we were looking for is called the "common key", that would let us *decrypt* games and software, to look for flaws (even though it wouldn't let us create our own software). 4:53 - that's a die shot of the whole GPU/SoC, not the ARM9 in particular. The ARM9 is not visible due to power routing. I have an annotated photo of the Hollywood that shows the ARM9 here: marcan.st/transf/hollywood_annotated.jpg 4:58 - the master key used to decrypt game titles is not unique to each console. It is the same common key for all consoles. Unique per-console keys are used to encrypt the NAND flash, and to deliver decryption keys for downloadable games and content (which are tied to a specific console), not disc games. It doesn't make any sense to have "per-console" encryption keys because all consoles have to be able to decrypt all disc games. 5:36 - Not sure what you mean by "everything is encrypted". IOS does not use memory encryption or anything like that. The Wii doesn't actually do a particularly good job of keeping things encrypted/signed all the way; for example, when you install stuff to NAND flash, it is stored encrypted by the per-console NAND flash storage encryption but the actual files are plaintext within that (decrypted at installation time) and the signature is also only checked at installation time. 5:38 - IOS runs partially on internal 96K SRAM and partially on the external 64MB GDDR2, but it runs on a dedicated section of it (often called a "carve-out") that is not accessible to the Broadway. The size of the carve-out is a few megabytes and varies depending on the exact IOS revision that a game uses. 8:11 - RSA, not "RSA1". More specifically it's RSA-2048. Finally, the order of events is kind of jumbled here. It goes like this: - First we found the tweezer trick to dump memory and IOS - Then we found the strncmp flaw that allowed fakesigning and booting homebrew from disc with a mod, but did not publish it because having to mod your console sucks. This was how that first demo happened. - The plan was to develop the Twilight Hack to allow people to run homebrew without needing any mods, and not really publish the fakesigning flaw until later since it could more easily be used for hacks to pirate games - The fakesigning flaw was eventually re-discovered and published soon after the first version of the Twilight Hack was released anyway I suggest talking to the security researchers who did all this stuff when you make videos like this. We don't bite and we can help you get things right :-)
I had hoped the video maker had done a decent research job; it seemed likely as what was said and seen looked good and viable. But I do prefer to hear the words straight from the original sources, so thank you for speaking up. Respect, and regards from a fellow geek.
@@solomongainey838 Hey there, not a geek. But. Nintendo stopped supporting the Wii via the internet as of 2013. That means no updates to anything (including security) since then. Feel free to find anything post-2013 and you should be good. Just make sure you do it right so you don't have to go find another Wii.
I know that feeling as well, I've read so much on wii hacking before doing it because I only had 1 shot at it. Took me 3 weeks to hack the thing because I had to make sure I understood each step to the teeth XD but damn running that HBC for the first time felt great.
@@photlam9769 ironically cyber security is probably one of the most underpaid depts in most organizations. In another note, It also takes a lot of creativity and overall knowledge to make jailbreaks/homebrews
@@Tonybaloney6969 because cyber security doesn't inherently produce money. It's simply an expenditure that companies gamble on. Like a cheap insurance plan with a million dollar car. They will pay as little as they can "safely" pay, unlike paying a senior dev 150k because they produce 50% of the work in a small to medium company.
@@photlam9769 When it comes to companies, usually programmers get paid fixed, not so very high amount of money. Most of the times they don't really care about the end result much, just following guidelines, ensuring everything is up to them and receiving their monthly payment. Now, hacking usually comes with passion, people who hack hack out of the heart and soul rather than pursuing money.
@@H0ttabych the shareholders and thus the employers pay for implemented features. It is incredibly difficult to explain to a manager why you *need* to "fix" code that is working just fine and even when exploited, only has minor impact, because other systems act as fail-safes. There is also double standards in code review: Add 2000 Lines of codes and the review bounces between systemic questions and variable naming convention. Try to change 5 lines of code and you get a very tough review, where you get asked to fix misnamed variables, check for the same exploit in other areas, tripple check and proof that the fix does not cause unrelated issues... and also write unit test. The code is not written do be unit tested? Too bad, codeing rules changed, every fix needs a unit test proofing that the fix fixes what it claims and does not break existing functionallity. Note that "do not cause unrelated new issues" is in direct contradiction to "check for the same exploit in other areas" and "rename all variables you touched to our newest guideline". Also, try not to add new errors while rewritting everything to get it unit testable. So, now look at the productivity index: One developer commits 2000 lines of code in a week. An other developer needs weeks for just 5 lines.
Well the iPhone wasn't going to be released for another year and wasn't called iOS till 2010. However Ciscos routers OS is also called IOS and they own the trademark for it, which is why apple license the name from them but Nintendo got away with it, probably because it was never marketing as IOS
My understanding is that Nintendo assume that each and every hardware revision will eventually be hacked. And their 'security' implementations are designed to simply slow down and place obstacles in the way of such efforts, particularly during that initial period where console sales are enjoying the most momentum.
@@TheSterlingArcher16 I do recall some other console, I dont remember which, it was much older and took a special disc but almost everything was encrypted and it took years before people figured it out and the only way people figured it out was by backwards compatibility with a regular disc and through that they did some hacking magic and figured out how to break through the encyption and run homebrew. I think if it wasn't for the backwards comaptibility with normal discs it would have been considered unhackable. I don't remember which console this was, maybe the dreamcast or maybe something else. I know immediately afterwards they started releasing models that didn't have the backwards compatibility but it was too late.
What I have learned by watching this channel, no matter what security you put on a machine someone will find a way to hack it. Ultimately if you have physical access to the hard ware you will find a way to defeat the security. Excellent video, I love to hear these stories. I wonder how long it will take to defeat PS-5 security.
You can always alter physical hardware into almost identical physical hardware but with the adjustments you want. You might not know how, it might be so precise and delicate a human couldnt be expected to pull it off. But its always possible
@@lindlindlindlindlind it not I do have 3 brother they all 3 have girlfriend 1 has a wife and my 2nd brother have 2 son with special need his 1st son like put stuff in his PlayStation so he have to keep it away because his son love put shit in it
@@darkoni95 lmao well I think I was more of a genius dumb compared to him when I was a kid. I printed out cover pictures of games and cut it to make it look like a disc. Feelsweirdman
Correct. The PS3 first launched on November 11th, 2006 in Japan and November 17th in North America, while the Wii first launched on November 19th in North America and December 2nd in Japan.
I was going to say the same thing. The PS3 came out on Friday November 17, 2006 while the Wii launched on Sunday November 19,2006. 😊 it’s all good though, Love the video and all of Modern Vintage Gamer’s content 🙂
I bought the PS3 the day it came out, not to resell for a rediculous price but for my family who were rlin need of entertainment. Little did I know that a more family friendly console would come out 2 days later... But my family is the type of family that would play call of duty zombies together not Wii sports so lol
@@serch3ster Yeah, I closed my browser and shut down my computer after I heard that mistake, I even had to call my mom. This dude should be ashamed of himself.
@PolySaken yeah, but a baseball bat, or an equivalent blunt force weapon like a hammer can be found just about anywhere. Hell, even if you don't have a weapon, you can still toss a PC around untill it breaks.
Insanity Prevails To be fair Wii games could only max out at 576i so technically it wasn’t even outputting in HD so it wasn’t too taxing on its hardware at the time.
there's like a million other things developers of hardware will be working on while these guys are doing this one specific crack at one system in their spare time
Nintendo: NO YOU CANT JUST BREAK OUR SECURITY WITH A SIMPLE CONDUCTIVE METAL OBJECT NOOOO!!!!!!! some random dude with a pair of tweezers: haha touc go brrrrr
Microsoft learned. They gave people homebrew. Xbone still remains unhacked! Gotta give Microsoft credit, where credit is due! It also helps that nearly all their "exclusives" are on PC, and can be pirated a lot easier there, lol.
Cock Fucking Diarrhea Slurper that’s not really true, a lot of the time the hackers do have piracy in mind, there’s just a few hackers who are vocal anti-piracy whiners.
@referral madness Apple tried license the name, but Cisco turned them down (several times). Apple used it anyway, and Cisco sued. The terms of the settlement weren't disclosed, but Cisco definitely had the power to get terms in their favor, especially since Apple had already released this product and launched the marketing campaigns.
@@osco4311 LOL, makes me wonder does iPhone really sound like a name anyone would desire to use for their product? Moreover desire it so much so they'd go into a legal battle for it. OK, I understand they had been producing iPods and wanted cosistency with names, but still.
I remember when I first heard of homebrew, I pulled my wii out from 1 year of inactivity and played the hell out of emulation on it. Thanks Team Twiizers.
This was a great, informative video! It also made me chuckle. Imagine spending years coming up with an elegant security solution only for it to be undone by something you can find at the dollar store.
@@needyouknow8932 I'd check where you're getting your information from because the Wii came out in 2006 which was a whole year before the iPhone even existed and the operating system wasn't even named IOS until iOS 4 which came out in 2010
@@turle8645 Thank you for alerting me that I was misinformed, I was not active in the console game until recently, and mixed the dates up between the WII U and original WII
The Wii is still my favorite modded videogame of all time. With a USB drive it does wonders with emulators and still keeps the Wii style "sensor" gameplay, which is still quite unique. The only downside is the max 480p render, but honestly? I think it is quite enough for what it is supposed to run, including all the emulators it can run. Thousands and thousands of games.
Nintendo, 2006: "Our latest console with motion controls!" Hackers: use tweezers to hack drm Hackers: cut motherboard into tiny pieces Nintendo: *screams of pain*
Was wii u security ever defeated? Last time I looked into it, people only managed to get homebrew running when you launched it into wii compatibility mode.
Man, I wish you went over nintendos history on patching, like how they caused the infamous Error 003 brick on hacked wiis and how they completely patched out bootmii on boot2. Its a really interesting story cause most of the bricks that wiis can get are Nintendos fault.
@@WiretheAlligator The Homebrew group discovered the routines the Nintendo OS/Libraries offered to write to the flash were inaccurate and would fail a percentage of the time. The Homebrew group added a wrapper around the Nintendo code, to ensure the write completed correctly, to ensure they would not brick the console. Nintendo released an OS "Update" to try to beat the Homebrew group. Nintendo did not make the flash writing reliable. ANY Wii running the Nintendo "Update", even a console that had no homebrew on it, had a chance to brick because of Nintendo's bad code. A few weeks later, the Homebrew group released tools to unbrick some/most consoles bricked by Nintendo.
Bannerbomb is also outdated, the Letterbomb replaced it and now there's something that could be done just via the network without the need of an SD. It's impressive how things turned out to be, and quite frankly homebrewing allowed playing several games from different generations without the need to be limited to what is on the Wii Shop Channel. Also, the region free was such a great feature to run any game, especially those exclusive to Japan. Man, I love this system most out of that generation, and the 360 too, but the PS3 was such a bummer. Thanks for the infos btw! Good video
MVG, your "history of modding" videos are absolutely some of my favorites on TH-cam. Nobody is documenting this history, especially not to this quality level. Thank you for your hard work!
Im addicted to this channel 😍 When I was little I used to LOVE to tinker around with homebrew on my Wii and DSi, and now being a software engineer, I finally understand what was happening behind the scenes! Thank you so much for these vids!!
What consoles are afraid of: "normal" consoles: intense hacking and hardware modding Wii: " well I'm afraid of no- " *Pair of tweezrs enters room* Wii: *Confused screaming*
This was my favorite time in gaming. I wonder if age has something to do with it. Oh well love the days of the Wii, 360, and PS3. I still remember the night I bought my first Wii. They were so hard to find in the beginning.
My name called her credit company and got me approved to used it. friend had a job and told me when and how many they're have we both stood in line for 8 hrs.and agreed I played more and cared more on the 360,PS2,Wii generation.
I wasn't the biggest fan of this generation. Xbox 360 had the RROD issues, PS3 had YLOD and was super expensive/hard to find, and the Wii was doing its own thing. It wasn't until later on in the generation that things got way better.
Who would win? A sophisticated piece of kit that had millions of dollars put towards its development -or- A pair a tweezers purchased for $.50 at Walmart
I've been watching some of this "How security was defeated" videos you made on multiple consoles but couldn't find one about 3DS, if you could make that video it would be awesome!
Back in the day I was one of the founding members of a hacking group called Stack Smash which hacked Super Smash Bros Brawl on the original Wii, circa August 2008. Not a lot of people realize how important the Brawl modding community was for driving early innovation in the scene, trailblazing a lot of things that wouldn't have existed otherwise. We made the first mod anybody had ever made for in-game stages, for instance, by having to crack some kind of encryption method nobody had cracked before. In fact, back then, we were merely "texture hacking" the game and adding new skins, adding new models was impossible up to that point. Many characters in the game couldn't be modded at all, as nobody had figured out how their mipmaps worked yet. We worked extremely hard with the extremely limited toolset of options that they had, and tried to innovate within the context of only having 15 or so characters on the roster to work on, give or take. We were the second group of our kind, the first, ]Syntax Error[, or ]EE[, was working on a full modpack for SSBB which was allegedly cease and desisted in December 2008, although many of us have since arrived at the conclusion that they just wanted out, and we leaked their pack in turn, as we believed the threat of legal action was all fluff. Nevertheless, this early example of Nintendo supposedly seeking legal action galvanized the community with the Streisand effect, drawing in all sorts of innovators, and jumpstarted a trend of people thinking of Nintendo as extremely litigious, for both their real threats which do exist, and the copious amounts of threats issued by bad actors like (the person impersonating) Jason Allen. This cease-and-desist was covered on GoNintendo back when it happened if you want a source. Later on, Project M hired this pro-copyright extremist fear-mongerer video game attorney, who likely failed to do the due diligence over whether the C&D that killed Project M was fake or not, and still to this day he goes on Reddit to wax fear-mongering bullshit about how making fangames will "ruin your life", despite not a single person's life ever getting visibly ruined from fangames. For instance, not only was the developer for AM2R not legally pursued by Nintendo, but he was hired on for Ori 2 on the strength of his work. Edited out the attorney's name because he obsessively Googles himself and I don't want him to reply all butthurt. But I digress. Back then the people on our team who actually tested the mods were South American, with one of our founding members living in Venezuela, because South America was the only place that had Wiikeys readily available with people who had them and could test, as it was impossible to apply mods to a game using the Twilight Hack until 2009. My friends, bless their hearts, had to buy and consume expensive dual-layer DVD-Rs to test their work, as nobody had yet figured out how to trim SSBB down to a single-layer DVD-R. In fact, wanting to use our and ]EE['s work was the direct inspiration stated by the developer who coded the SD card mod loader for games, as that likely would not have been created, at least not so soon, if there wasn't anything people actively wanted a mod loader for so they could load and play with. One of the people on our team later spearheaded Project M in many ways, which was infinitely more impressive than anything my little gang was able to put out, and drove further creations such as model importing. The work done within the SSBB scene, some of the most dedicated people I've seen in my entire life, were basically responsible for cracking every in-game file encryption on the Wii so they could add more content to Smash Bros to play with. I feel like much of this work simply would have never happened if not for people wanting it for that main pragmatic reason. Eventually work tooling with attempting to hack the stage builder system in SSBB resulted in an SSBB equivalent of the Twilight Hack, which blew the fucker wide-open and is still in use today. I haven't done anything meaningful since high school. Sorry about the lack of line breaks and thanks for reading my blog.
I remember my friend in like 2010 buying brawl just so he could hack in call of duty games on the Wii. Now I'm a part of the smash community and love all the work the hackers do in smash. Just small quality of life stuff that Nintendo would never have done. Pm is sick and I hope it keeps on living with P+
I wouldn't call marcan and his crew some person, they are pretty insane hackers. You should watch some presentations from them, as example, this one: media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016
@@ruakij6452 Patched units? Those can be hacked up to 7.0.0. So you're right. However, it's still their fault for using a fully documented SoC that Nvidia essentially canned because their Shield TV was a big failure.
Hey man, this is a great video. I missed out on the modding scene when I was younger, and it's neat learning some history of this topic. Keep up the good work. :) First time watching your videos, and subscribed immediately.
For the Wii and 3DS it's a good time to get started since everything it well established now and Nintendo doesn't give a hoot about either anymore. Eager to see the Switch reach the same point
Just one thing to correct with the introduction of this video. The Playstation 3 came out only a few days before the Wii, not a year. Interesting video
When I decided to install homebrew on the Wii (after I bought a WiiU...why not, it was gonna become the more played with system). I hacked mine through memory card. But I saw a Twilight hack, but heard it was obsolete. Didn't look more into it. Thanks for giving some history on it.
This brings back memories of the twilight hack, having to start the game then trying to leave the area so the buffer overflow would occur due to the gamesave giving epona a really long name, felt like such a hacker lol
Man, it's so cool to listen to a guy that knows so much, break down the difficult bits in a way anyone can understand. I still have no idea what's done when these geniuses get to a memory dump. Do they just load that into some standard disassembler for the architecture and try to follow the function calls? I'm sure all-nighters were pulled for each of those clever exploits we take for granted.
@@Piunti_302 You then get to install the homebrew channel, which is a convenient way to install and run applications on the wii. See wiibrew.org/wiki/List_of_homebrew_applications for a list of some of the applications available. For example, you can run NES or SNES emulators, letting you run legal copies of your games on the wii.
i have both, we bought so many pirate discs, then in 2017 i put the epic homebrew channel and played games epically thru a usb, what a waste of maybe more than 600 dollars in pirated games bruh
@@Gaming_Legend2 Same dude, in my case it was around 1 dollar per disc, and that bastard that selled games never had the ones that i wanted to play, 8 year old me will never forget the money spent on those discs
@@michaeln3276 technically apple does not own the trademark for ios. Just the licensing. Cisco owns the trademark for ios and they filed it way back in 97
@Anthony Jones Yes, but Apple licenses the right to use the abbreviation "iOS" from Cisco, because they already owned the trademark "IOS," short for Internetwork Operating System. I guess no one at Cisco cared about Nintendo's use of "IOS" since it's only used internally in the code.
I still have my old Wii and my mom's old Wii, both of which have not even been turned on since before Twilight Hack was discovered. Maybe I'll try it one day just for lulz. And then one day at a thrift store I found a "broken" Wii which simply had a Mario Kart disc stuck inside that wouldn't eject. But it was already hacked! It took me about an hour to take it apart far enough to manually eject the disc.
“The system was released in 2006 one year after the PS3 and Xbox 360” Actually the Wii was released on the same year as the PS3, while the Xbox 360 launched a year prior to those two.
They probably used a logic analyzer to monitor the address bus going to the memory chips. When they discovered that the Wii in GC mode does not use the upper portion of memory they decided to force the upper address lines into an active state, basically bank-switching the memory, as was done on the Commodore C64 and many other older PC and console systems. It must be said though, that this could easily end up in blown memory, as they are basically creating a short circuit on the address bus.
What a fantastic channel, I just stumbled upon it by TH-cam recommendations, now binge watching all of your superb videos, I cannot believe such a channel exists. Trip down memory lane. Can't imagine how much effort went into making these videos. Superb work.
That's... insane! An entire CPU in the GPU to run the OS, and it has it's own RAM too! Impressive, but here's an idea, what if they used that real estate for you know, graphics?
@@MarcoGPUtuber Yes, Nintendo is selfish. They stop all custom code from running "to stop piracy". Because of the NES they're probably responsible for people not programming very much nowadays. Everyone with a computer used to program it (not that I was alive then)
Worth mentioning: IOS has nothing to do with Apple's iOS. RSA is asymmetric, so the keys recovered this way couldn't be used to sign games. They did allow for save file hacking. Using strncmp (string compare) on binary data (instead of text) meant that if the first byte was zero, the rest were ignored. So you only had to crack one byte of signature, which is laughably easy, instead of 16+ bytes which could take a few trillion years. The Twilight Hack didn't use the strncmp bug. That was such a valuable exploit, they didn't want Nintendo to know about it yet. The same bug appears throughout the system, including boot ROM, which allowed for BootMii to exist. RIP Bushing.
Can't wait to see the new "Mistakes Were Made" video about how a paperclip defeated security on the Nintendo Switch.
I believe it actually intended as a way for Nintendo to test the Switch (And probably to help fix them).
Amen, brother
I thought he already did switch mod videos but those were pulled down by Nintendo.
gtrunner _ oh man what a day that was when that was released to the public, I flipped my shit knowing my PSP could be hacked no matter what using just a spare battery 😂
Actually I think Nintendo to their credit was not responsible for that one. IIRC it was a bug in the recovery mode of the nVidia Tegra chip, so it was nVidia's mess up. The paperclip is used to activate the recovery mode, but if it functioned properly the recovery mode would be useless for everything except officially done repairs.
The S in Nintendo stands for secure.
There is no s but I get it nonetheless.
@Jake Makes Vids I understood the joke there is no S so Nintendo Stuff is just left wide open.
thre isz no S!!!!!111
Obviously, the joke is that there is no S - but nobody gets jokes anymore.
kargaroc386 bro u still make jokes in 2020 cringe
Bro, I just wanted to see someone stick tweezers into a Wii...
Plasticjuice that’s what she said
Yeah with the power on so they get electrocuted .
That’s literally what my friend did to my wii one night trying to get his kirby airride out when it wouldn’t eject. Literally sucked the tweezers out of his hand.
Ditto lol
Bilbo BT
Lol this guy hasn’t learned about sounding yet
his voice is so clear that even the auto translate subtitles know what hes saying
Yep...perfect Chinese
Honestly that's a talent all in it's own
@@superdude11235 he means the english auto translate mate
Way Mini, my favorite console
Put captions 0:59 and it says RVL 0 0 1 large bubble
Wait, the Wii had backwards compatibility removed in later editions? Jesus. Glad I didnt replace my original
well, at least Hardware Compatibility, you can still use Nintendont to Play NGC Backups, even in the WiiU
I had one like that but i dropped it one to many times and Kirby Epic Yarn got stuck inside of it and my sister wanted to play Kirby on a different Wii so, with me crying cause it was the first Wii our family had gotten and I didnt care if it was stuck cause it had the backwards compatibility, he took a screw driver and literally broke the Wii and killed it but the game was unscathed and now she never plays the game and I dont like her for it
@@joshuabaskin4458 And on the Wii U even the Gamepad is supported even though it runs in Wii mode
me too
@@joshuabaskin4458 yeah i hacked my wii mini and i can play gamecube games. Connected wii U controllers and they work.
Corrections:
3:03 - the hack did not require extracting any signing keys (those signing keys are held by Nintendo and not on the console). It just relied on the strncmp flaw that was later published. This was full Wii mode homebrew, but the ecosystem was too young (no developer tools) to just publish it at this point.
4:10 - games are encrypted by a per-game encryption key and signed by a signing key. Per-game encryption keys are encrypted by a common key. Encryption and signing are different things. The signing key is held by Nintendo and nobody else has access to it. "License key" means nothing here; the key we were looking for is called the "common key", that would let us *decrypt* games and software, to look for flaws (even though it wouldn't let us create our own software).
4:53 - that's a die shot of the whole GPU/SoC, not the ARM9 in particular. The ARM9 is not visible due to power routing. I have an annotated photo of the Hollywood that shows the ARM9 here: marcan.st/transf/hollywood_annotated.jpg
4:58 - the master key used to decrypt game titles is not unique to each console. It is the same common key for all consoles. Unique per-console keys are used to encrypt the NAND flash, and to deliver decryption keys for downloadable games and content (which are tied to a specific console), not disc games. It doesn't make any sense to have "per-console" encryption keys because all consoles have to be able to decrypt all disc games.
5:36 - Not sure what you mean by "everything is encrypted". IOS does not use memory encryption or anything like that. The Wii doesn't actually do a particularly good job of keeping things encrypted/signed all the way; for example, when you install stuff to NAND flash, it is stored encrypted by the per-console NAND flash storage encryption but the actual files are plaintext within that (decrypted at installation time) and the signature is also only checked at installation time.
5:38 - IOS runs partially on internal 96K SRAM and partially on the external 64MB GDDR2, but it runs on a dedicated section of it (often called a "carve-out") that is not accessible to the Broadway. The size of the carve-out is a few megabytes and varies depending on the exact IOS revision that a game uses.
8:11 - RSA, not "RSA1". More specifically it's RSA-2048.
Finally, the order of events is kind of jumbled here. It goes like this:
- First we found the tweezer trick to dump memory and IOS
- Then we found the strncmp flaw that allowed fakesigning and booting homebrew from disc with a mod, but did not publish it because having to mod your console sucks. This was how that first demo happened.
- The plan was to develop the Twilight Hack to allow people to run homebrew without needing any mods, and not really publish the fakesigning flaw until later since it could more easily be used for hacks to pirate games
- The fakesigning flaw was eventually re-discovered and published soon after the first version of the Twilight Hack was released anyway
I suggest talking to the security researchers who did all this stuff when you make videos like this. We don't bite and we can help you get things right :-)
Wow this guy REALLY knows his shit!
I had hoped the video maker had done a decent research job; it seemed likely as what was said and seen looked good and viable. But I do prefer to hear the words straight from the original sources, so thank you for speaking up. Respect, and regards from a fellow geek.
What's a current way to install homebrew on a Wii? Everything I've looked up on Google seems a bit dated. Any advice would be well appreciated.
@@solomongainey838 Hey there, not a geek. But. Nintendo stopped supporting the Wii via the internet as of 2013. That means no updates to anything (including security) since then. Feel free to find anything post-2013 and you should be good. Just make sure you do it right so you don't have to go find another Wii.
Also, at 0:33 - The Wii was released the same year as the PS3, and one year after the Xbox 360, not one year after both.
Uh oh,
I've wandered into the smart side of youtube
🧠🧠🧠🧠
oh yeah its
big brain time
@@Preinstallable ohh yeah, it's four brains time
STALIN!!!
Quick, back to the big dum side
@@goompo quick, quick, before they know we're here
I still remember the first time Homebrew booted up on my Wii, I was so excited. Hooked up an external hard drive and backed up all "my" games.
" + " = very important.
@@recoupxtra7270 the classic technique. Rent a game and then dump it. I'm pretty sure most hacked wii owners have at least done this once.
Me too. First console I had ever hacked. Felt like my third eye opened
I know that feeling as well, I've read so much on wii hacking before doing it because I only had 1 shot at it. Took me 3 weeks to hack the thing because I had to make sure I understood each step to the teeth XD but damn running that HBC for the first time felt great.
I have had this feeling and it was so satisfying. My Wii is a white RVL-001 model. I think mine was made in 2008.
Nintendo: The Nintendo switch is unhackable, you'll never get in.
Hackers: Hold my Paperclip.
Fr though. Nothing is unhackable.
Cole Miner what about a oxygen atom
@@airbornewarningandcontrols396 just split it
More like...
Hackers: Wait, don't! We need that!
@@TheAwesomeMiner99 ps4
Me watching this video pretending to know what he’s talking about
😂🤣
literally looked for this exact comment so I could say same.
Same here, but I understood a little bit of it.
Literally don’t know why I watched this all the way through thinking I’d understand it
Like anything else, you start to pick it up with practice :)
Wii: Defeated by tweezers
Switch: Defeated by paperclip
Future console: Defeated by iron filings
Futurer console:defeated by *_F I N G E R_*
Futurest console: Defeated by *_S T I C K_*
furturestiersies console: defeated by *N O T H I N G B U T A I R*
Futurester console: Defeated by oxygen molecule
All of goddamn google: defeated by a rock.
I'm always impressed how much knowledge people must have to hack into a system.
And I am always when companies lack the knowledge to properly counter it
@@photlam9769 ironically cyber security is probably one of the most underpaid depts in most organizations.
In another note, It also takes a lot of creativity and overall knowledge to make jailbreaks/homebrews
@@Tonybaloney6969 because cyber security doesn't inherently produce money. It's simply an expenditure that companies gamble on. Like a cheap insurance plan with a million dollar car. They will pay as little as they can "safely" pay, unlike paying a senior dev 150k because they produce 50% of the work in a small to medium company.
@@photlam9769 When it comes to companies, usually programmers get paid fixed, not so very high amount of money. Most of the times they don't really care about the end result much, just following guidelines, ensuring everything is up to them and receiving their monthly payment. Now, hacking usually comes with passion, people who hack hack out of the heart and soul rather than pursuing money.
@@H0ttabych the shareholders and thus the employers pay for implemented features. It is incredibly difficult to explain to a manager why you *need* to "fix" code that is working just fine and even when exploited, only has minor impact, because other systems act as fail-safes. There is also double standards in code review: Add 2000 Lines of codes and the review bounces between systemic questions and variable naming convention. Try to change 5 lines of code and you get a very tough review, where you get asked to fix misnamed variables, check for the same exploit in other areas, tripple check and proof that the fix does not cause unrelated issues... and also write unit test. The code is not written do be unit tested? Too bad, codeing rules changed, every fix needs a unit test proofing that the fix fixes what it claims and does not break existing functionallity. Note that "do not cause unrelated new issues" is in direct contradiction to "check for the same exploit in other areas" and "rename all variables you touched to our newest guideline". Also, try not to add new errors while rewritting everything to get it unit testable. So, now look at the productivity index: One developer commits 2000 lines of code in a week. An other developer needs weeks for just 5 lines.
The graphite pencil defeating the circuit board of the psp battery.
You don't say
Obviously
Great Video!
I thought you would have more comments
Pandora batteries!
- goes by the name sega
- wii OS called ios
Strange isn't it..
Well the iPhone wasn't going to be released for another year and wasn't called iOS till 2010. However Ciscos routers OS is also called IOS and they own the trademark for it, which is why apple license the name from them but Nintendo got away with it, probably because it was never marketing as IOS
Sorry to ruin the joke, but the name is actually "segher". Really did sound like MVG said "sega" though.
@@cheesypotatoson
nintendo: *commits crime*
nintendo: hehehehehe
nintendo customr: *pirates game*
nintendo: 😡😡😡
So in theory the Wii is an Apple product, since it does run IOS
My understanding is that Nintendo assume that each and every hardware revision will eventually be hacked. And their 'security' implementations are designed to simply slow down and place obstacles in the way of such efforts, particularly during that initial period where console sales are enjoying the most momentum.
That is literally the point of every consoles security
The closest we’ve been to an unhackable console was the PS3. And that was only for about 3 years.
@@TheSterlingArcher16 I do recall some other console, I dont remember which, it was much older and took a special disc but almost everything was encrypted and it took years before people figured it out and the only way people figured it out was by backwards compatibility with a regular disc and through that they did some hacking magic and figured out how to break through the encyption and run homebrew. I think if it wasn't for the backwards comaptibility with normal discs it would have been considered unhackable. I don't remember which console this was, maybe the dreamcast or maybe something else. I know immediately afterwards they started releasing models that didn't have the backwards compatibility but it was too late.
@@TheSterlingArcher16 Wii mini, "am I a joke to you"
@@junehanabi1756 sounds like the Sega Saturn?
What I have learned by watching this channel, no matter what security you put on a machine someone will find a way to hack it. Ultimately if you have physical access to the hard ware you will find a way to defeat the security. Excellent video, I love to hear these stories. I wonder how long it will take to defeat PS-5 security.
You can always alter physical hardware into almost identical physical hardware but with the adjustments you want. You might not know how, it might be so precise and delicate a human couldnt be expected to pull it off. But its always possible
*hardware
Ps5 homebrew is here now, and its rapidly improving. Its not as big as the wii's homebrew community but still.
Yubikey hard drive?
When my kids were young they used to love to stick pennies in the slot...
They defeated the Wii easily.
My brother son like put pizza in the PS4 lol no lie
@@darkoni95 ah yes brother son a classic make up ur mind liar
riun that shit was so funny 😂
@@lindlindlindlindlind it not I do have 3 brother they all 3 have girlfriend 1 has a wife and my 2nd brother have 2 son with special need his 1st son like put stuff in his PlayStation so he have to keep it away because his son love put shit in it
@@darkoni95 lmao well I think I was more of a genius dumb compared to him when I was a kid. I printed out cover pictures of games and cut it to make it look like a disc. Feelsweirdman
So THATs why they were called team twiizers.
RIGHT! Blew my mind!
I assumed it was just a generic hacker name.
Yea that was my first thought 😂
that's*
Jorge C. M. Correct. Apostrophes are indeed important.
TOP KEK xD
Me: Its 1AM I should go to sleep.
TH-cam: How a pair of tweezers defeated the Wii's security system.
Me: Well well well then let's find out.
What about this “ I don’t need sleep I need answers”
Literally the exact same thing happened to me.
Looll it's 1 am for meh
Yoooo im actually watching at 3:20 am
Same right now in fact
0:32
CORRECTION: The PS3 went on sale in 2006, very shortly before the Wii launch, not with the Xbox 360 in 2005.
Correct. The PS3 first launched on November 11th, 2006 in Japan and November 17th in North America, while the Wii first launched on November 19th in North America and December 2nd in Japan.
Yeah, I remembered this because they had their lineups while my brother and I were convincing my dad to take us to lineup for the Wii
Nerd
0:30 The PS3 was also released in 2006, only a few days before the Wii, it was only the 360 that got a year headstart...
I caught that right away lol.
I was going to say the same thing. The PS3 came out on Friday November 17, 2006 while the Wii launched on Sunday November 19,2006. 😊 it’s all good though, Love the video and all of Modern Vintage Gamer’s content 🙂
#MistakesWereMade
I bought the PS3 the day it came out, not to resell for a rediculous price but for my family who were rlin need of entertainment. Little did I know that a more family friendly console would come out 2 days later...
But my family is the type of family that would play call of duty zombies together not Wii sports so lol
@@serch3ster Yeah, I closed my browser and shut down my computer after I heard that mistake, I even had to call my mom. This dude should be ashamed of himself.
My teacher when teaching us internet security, first word he said : " Easiest way to destroy computer is a baseball bat, not a bunch of code."
tHaTs NoT a WoRd!!!!!1!!!1
and the easiest way to destroy a bunch of Blackberry Phones is a hammer. 😂
ah, so the opposite of a Nokia phone
Most accessible? Sure. Most efficient? Not in hell.
@PolySaken yeah, but a baseball bat, or an equivalent blunt force weapon like a hammer can be found just about anywhere. Hell, even if you don't have a weapon, you can still toss a PC around untill it breaks.
It's so strange to see these consoles with such low specifications, like in the RAM, and how good some of the games looked!
I like to say it's not about what you have, it's how you use it that counts.
Insanity Prevails To be fair Wii games could only max out at 576i so technically it wasn’t even outputting in HD so it wasn’t too taxing on its hardware at the time.
Nintendo's strategy has usually been to focus on low-cost hardware. Parents would rather buy the $250 Wii than the $600 (at the time) PS3.
back then was a lot
@@omegarugal9283 64MBs of ram was definitely not a lot in 2009 lmao
"a pair of tweezers defeated security"...
Picking lawyer: interesting
I love seeing companies spend millions on security just to be defeated by a couple of guys lol.
Keep it up, your content is amazing.
Tons of money spent on security but defeated by a cheap pair of tweezers...
Hey gordon, when valve is gonna make half life 3?
Ah sorry thats impossible
Defeat in security is inevitable when it comes to consumer devices. The goal is to stall efforts for as long as possible.
wheres half life 9
there's like a million other things developers of hardware will be working on while these guys are doing this one specific crack at one system in their spare time
any conductive metal object: **exists**
nintendo security: Bravo Six, going dark.
@Omgguy And the 3DS was vulnerable to a buffer overflow. Twice.
Metal objects: *exist*
Nintendo security: splish splash your opinion is trash
(I know that doesn't make sense sorry)
Nintendo: NO YOU CANT JUST BREAK OUR SECURITY WITH A SIMPLE CONDUCTIVE METAL OBJECT NOOOO!!!!!!!
some random dude with a pair of tweezers: haha touc go brrrrr
Imagine people wanting the freedom to run any software they choose on the hardware that they purchased. The nerve!
@apple
Microsoft learned. They gave people homebrew. Xbone still remains unhacked! Gotta give Microsoft credit, where credit is due! It also helps that nearly all their "exclusives" are on PC, and can be pirated a lot easier there, lol.
PC Master Race has entered the chat.
Imagine only buying hardware that runs the software you want.
Cock Fucking Diarrhea Slurper that’s not really true, a lot of the time the hackers do have piracy in mind, there’s just a few hackers who are vocal anti-piracy whiners.
The Verge: Those are not tweezers, those are zip ties
i see you are a man of culture.
needs more zip ties
thermal paste
It works with zip ties too, but you need to hopefully have a bracket applicator to hammer the brace until you hear a clasp.
@@dalejeremiah08 mayonnaise
I had no idea Twiizers renamed themselves failoverflow - I just thought it was a separate group. Good to hear the legends are still at work!
Wii: Has OS named IOS
Apple: Makes iOS
Nintendo: Am I a joke to you?
Don't forget Cisco
@@hansisbrucker813 Cisco also owned the trademark for the term iPhone, which they ultimately licensed to Apple
@referral madness Apple tried license the name, but Cisco turned them down (several times). Apple used it anyway, and Cisco sued.
The terms of the settlement weren't disclosed, but Cisco definitely had the power to get terms in their favor, especially since Apple had already released this product and launched the marketing campaigns.
@@osco4311 LOL, makes me wonder does iPhone really sound like a name anyone would desire to use for their product? Moreover desire it so much so they'd go into a legal battle for it. OK, I understand they had been producing iPods and wanted cosistency with names, but still.
@@nikolayrybkin3265 Cisco (through their Linksys brand) used it for their internet (VoIP) telephones (like Vonage).
I remember when I first heard of homebrew, I pulled my wii out from 1 year of inactivity and played the hell out of emulation on it. Thanks Team Twiizers.
This was a great, informative video! It also made me chuckle. Imagine spending years coming up with an elegant security solution only for it to be undone by something you can find at the dollar store.
that moment when you realize that Nintendo could of made a shitload of money by suing apple for copying the name of the wiis operating system
@@needyouknow8932 I'd check where you're getting your information from because the Wii came out in 2006 which was a whole year before the iPhone even existed and the operating system wasn't even named IOS until iOS 4 which came out in 2010
@@turle8645 Thank you for alerting me that I was misinformed, I was not active in the console game until recently, and mixed the dates up between the WII U and original WII
@@needyouknow8932 you're welcome
Well I’m no expert or anything but the meaning of the acronym is probably different, if the Wii’s is even a acronym.
Jefferton Ahyeeoobee r/woooosh
2006: tweezers defeats wii security
2021: finger nails defeats ps5 security
it’s 2021 now and i’m waiting
Oh boy
Foxx S no
2029: Elbow Defeats Xbox Two Security
2030: Tongue Defeats Xbox 720s Security
2040: how carbon dioxide defeats the nintendo zengo
Long live team twiizlers
Long live fail_0verflow
@@TrolleyMC See, I didn't know they were the same people. I learned something today.
@@MrV902 same
mmmmm, i like Twizzlers
They're the same team though unfortunately Ben "Bushing" Byer, the lead member of the team, died a few years ago.
The Wii is still my favorite modded videogame of all time. With a USB drive it does wonders with emulators and still keeps the Wii style "sensor" gameplay, which is still quite unique. The only downside is the max 480p render, but honestly? I think it is quite enough for what it is supposed to run, including all the emulators it can run. Thousands and thousands of games.
The wii isnt a videogame.
@@symbiote1982pk Nopes. It is an Air Fryer
Can it play ps2 n ps3 roms smoothly though
@@britishwordplay4335 obviously not.
As of what I’ve seen so far, the PSVITA may replace it, or at least come into #2.
3DS would probably come into #3.
Nintendo, 2006: "Our latest console with motion controls!"
Hackers: use tweezers to hack drm
Hackers: cut motherboard into tiny pieces
Nintendo: *screams of pain*
Portable Wiis and their extremely cut-down boards are a thing of beauty imo, shoutouts to the BitBuilt community!
Why does everybody write this stupid shit? It's taking over for the stupid date spam in that fills every comment section.
How about be original?
@@J__C__ shut up boomer
J C Ok boomer
@@J__C__ ok boomer
Me, a biologist, watching this video: Ahh yes the code is made out of code
So basically they took a bunch of sand and put lightning in it and now it can think
Rumor mill
At the subatomic level, transistors operate in a way that is more similar to stochastic biological processes than one might think.
it's not that different from RNA
they turned the wii into a GMO
Next video:
How a eye lash defeated the Wii U's security.
Nice
Was wii u security ever defeated? Last time I looked into it, people only managed to get homebrew running when you launched it into wii compatibility mode.
@@Gellis12 You do realize this post is sarcasm, right?
Gellis12 Yes, the Wii U is fully hacked.
Stop: this memw
“this arm9 processor was nicknamed starlet by a security researcher nick named ‘sega’”
Ironic
I really enjoy how much more technical this channel is than most retro channels.
Man, I wish you went over nintendos history on patching, like how they caused the infamous Error 003 brick on hacked wiis and how they completely patched out bootmii on boot2. Its a really interesting story cause most of the bricks that wiis can get are Nintendos fault.
I had the Error 003 brick my first wii. Ahh good times.
@@evmanbutts I love debricking 003 Wiis.
>load illicit code
>code gets patched and locks your illicit wifi
>somehow Nintendo's fault
Nani?
@@WiretheAlligator The Homebrew group discovered the routines the Nintendo OS/Libraries offered to write to the flash were inaccurate and would fail a percentage of the time. The Homebrew group added a wrapper around the Nintendo code, to ensure the write completed correctly, to ensure they would not brick the console.
Nintendo released an OS "Update" to try to beat the Homebrew group. Nintendo did not make the flash writing reliable. ANY Wii running the Nintendo "Update", even a console that had no homebrew on it, had a chance to brick because of Nintendo's bad code.
A few weeks later, the Homebrew group released tools to unbrick some/most consoles bricked by Nintendo.
Thats what you get for not putting rhythm tweezers in rhythm heaven fever.
I don't think I like that pfp
@@MonkeyDLuffy-ew4xy METAMORPHOSIS
LMAO
At least it’s in Megamix
Bannerbomb is also outdated, the Letterbomb replaced it and now there's something that could be done just via the network without the need of an SD.
It's impressive how things turned out to be, and quite frankly homebrewing allowed playing several games from different generations without the need to be limited to what is on the Wii Shop Channel. Also, the region free was such a great feature to run any game, especially those exclusive to Japan.
Man, I love this system most out of that generation, and the 360 too, but the PS3 was such a bummer.
Thanks for the infos btw!
Good video
Every time I see "mistakes were made" I instinctively click. Don't even check to see what console it's about. Love these.
"mista-
***CLICK***
Ah, the wii. I love that son of a box. It was my childhood, after all.
MVG, your "history of modding" videos are absolutely some of my favorites on TH-cam. Nobody is documenting this history, especially not to this quality level. Thank you for your hard work!
He was also heavily involved with porting existing emulators to the OG Xbox back in the day
I remember using Twilight Princess to get Homebrew! Wow, what a throwback.
Im addicted to this channel 😍 When I was little I used to LOVE to tinker around with homebrew on my Wii and DSi, and now being a software engineer, I finally understand what was happening behind the scenes! Thank you so much for these vids!!
Nintendo Systems: I fear no man, but that thing
Random metal things:
Nintendo Systems: That thing scares me
Heres a better format for that meme:
-I fear no man...
-But that thing..
**metal objects**
*-It scares me.*
Funny because metal objects are what are used to hack the switch. Go figure.
@@hellacia8151 That's the joke
@@hellacia8151 r/woosh
What consoles are afraid of:
"normal" consoles: intense hacking and hardware modding
Wii: " well I'm afraid of no- "
*Pair of tweezrs enters room*
Wii: *Confused screaming*
Man, big thanks to team twiizers. They allowed me and so many others to make the most out of our Wii's.
Nintendo: Let's see how you hack the console this time around.
Hackers: Hold my tweezers!
Switch:
Hackers: Hold my paperclip!
Do you mean Controller? XD
actually could you give the tweezers back I kinda need them to hack your console thanks
@@Elmerturnipseed Lmao!
Rex815 they would need the tweezers to hack the console so why would they want someone to hold it
This was my favorite time in gaming. I wonder if age has something to do with it. Oh well love the days of the Wii, 360, and PS3. I still remember the night I bought my first Wii. They were so hard to find in the beginning.
My name called her credit company and got me approved to used it. friend had a job and told me when and how many they're have we both stood in line for 8 hrs.and agreed I played more and cared more on the 360,PS2,Wii generation.
I wasn't the biggest fan of this generation. Xbox 360 had the RROD issues, PS3 had YLOD and was super expensive/hard to find, and the Wii was doing its own thing.
It wasn't until later on in the generation that things got way better.
Who would win?
A sophisticated piece of kit that had millions of dollars put towards its development
-or-
A pair a tweezers purchased for $.50 at Walmart
A tweezy boi*
Some random dudes*
One time when I was little I stuck a 3DS AR card into my wii and my mom had to call nintendo to tell us how to get it out
lmao
Sorry if I sound mean
IM VERY INTRESTED WHAT HAPPENED AND WHY PLEASE TELL ME
Wild as hell
who would win:
giant Japanese company with millions of dollars of security
or
one pinchy boi
Eason Choo Lol
The Team Twiizers name makes so much sense now
Imagine using toothbrush to defeat the Switch security?
I mean, I'm sure you could fashion it into an RCM jig
paperclip
Imagine a brush for one’s teeth. Whichcraft.
Well, there are toothbrushes with AI hardware now...
Imagine using a pizza to kill a PlayStation lol
You’re like, a modding historian. At least that’s the quality of your production.
I've been watching some of this "How security was defeated" videos you made on multiple consoles but couldn't find one about 3DS, if you could make that video it would be awesome!
Tweezers: *H A C K E R M A N*
Paper Clip: *U L T R A H A C K E R M A N*
Saints Row Isn't Cancelled Anymore Power Glove: *L e t ‘ s D o T h e T i m e W a r p A g a i n*
You must have deleted the c.
Tweezers:
ＨＡＫＥＲＭＡＮ
You missed the opportunity to say T W E E Z E R M A N
Just call me TWEEZER
Back in the day I was one of the founding members of a hacking group called Stack Smash which hacked Super Smash Bros Brawl on the original Wii, circa August 2008. Not a lot of people realize how important the Brawl modding community was for driving early innovation in the scene, trailblazing a lot of things that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
We made the first mod anybody had ever made for in-game stages, for instance, by having to crack some kind of encryption method nobody had cracked before. In fact, back then, we were merely "texture hacking" the game and adding new skins, adding new models was impossible up to that point. Many characters in the game couldn't be modded at all, as nobody had figured out how their mipmaps worked yet. We worked extremely hard with the extremely limited toolset of options that they had, and tried to innovate within the context of only having 15 or so characters on the roster to work on, give or take. We were the second group of our kind, the first, ]Syntax Error[, or ]EE[, was working on a full modpack for SSBB which was allegedly cease and desisted in December 2008, although many of us have since arrived at the conclusion that they just wanted out, and we leaked their pack in turn, as we believed the threat of legal action was all fluff. Nevertheless, this early example of Nintendo supposedly seeking legal action galvanized the community with the Streisand effect, drawing in all sorts of innovators, and jumpstarted a trend of people thinking of Nintendo as extremely litigious, for both their real threats which do exist, and the copious amounts of threats issued by bad actors like (the person impersonating) Jason Allen. This cease-and-desist was covered on GoNintendo back when it happened if you want a source. Later on, Project M hired this pro-copyright extremist fear-mongerer video game attorney, who likely failed to do the due diligence over whether the C&D that killed Project M was fake or not, and still to this day he goes on Reddit to wax fear-mongering bullshit about how making fangames will "ruin your life", despite not a single person's life ever getting visibly ruined from fangames. For instance, not only was the developer for AM2R not legally pursued by Nintendo, but he was hired on for Ori 2 on the strength of his work. Edited out the attorney's name because he obsessively Googles himself and I don't want him to reply all butthurt. But I digress.
Back then the people on our team who actually tested the mods were South American, with one of our founding members living in Venezuela, because South America was the only place that had Wiikeys readily available with people who had them and could test, as it was impossible to apply mods to a game using the Twilight Hack until 2009. My friends, bless their hearts, had to buy and consume expensive dual-layer DVD-Rs to test their work, as nobody had yet figured out how to trim SSBB down to a single-layer DVD-R. In fact, wanting to use our and ]EE['s work was the direct inspiration stated by the developer who coded the SD card mod loader for games, as that likely would not have been created, at least not so soon, if there wasn't anything people actively wanted a mod loader for so they could load and play with. One of the people on our team later spearheaded Project M in many ways, which was infinitely more impressive than anything my little gang was able to put out, and drove further creations such as model importing. The work done within the SSBB scene, some of the most dedicated people I've seen in my entire life, were basically responsible for cracking every in-game file encryption on the Wii so they could add more content to Smash Bros to play with. I feel like much of this work simply would have never happened if not for people wanting it for that main pragmatic reason. Eventually work tooling with attempting to hack the stage builder system in SSBB resulted in an SSBB equivalent of the Twilight Hack, which blew the fucker wide-open and is still in use today. I haven't done anything meaningful since high school. Sorry about the lack of line breaks and thanks for reading my blog.
I remember my friend in like 2010 buying brawl just so he could hack in call of duty games on the Wii. Now I'm a part of the smash community and love all the work the hackers do in smash. Just small quality of life stuff that Nintendo would never have done. Pm is sick and I hope it keeps on living with P+
Thanks for sharing
The biggest surprise in a rollercoaster of surprises here was that the Wii had a GPU!
its printed on the left hand side of every wii console.
Who would win?
Nintendo's newest and most secure console,
OR
Some person with a pair of tweezers
Nintendo and security should never stay in the same sentence lol.
All their consoles are hacked so early on.
One tweezy boi!
I wouldn't call marcan and his crew some person, they are pretty insane hackers. You should watch some presentations from them, as example, this one: media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016
@@ruakij6452
Patched units? Those can be hacked up to 7.0.0. So you're right.
However, it's still their fault for using a fully documented SoC that Nvidia essentially canned because their Shield TV was a big failure.
@@ruakij6452
No. Deja vu is up to 7.0.1. However, no one has released that exploit for some reason.
Hey man, this is a great video. I missed out on the modding scene when I was younger, and it's neat learning some history of this topic. Keep up the good work. :) First time watching your videos, and subscribed immediately.
I'm modding at 13... its kinda easy now tho.
For the Wii and 3DS it's a good time to get started since everything it well established now and Nintendo doesn't give a hoot about either anymore.
Eager to see the Switch reach the same point
Just one thing to correct with the introduction of this video. The Playstation 3 came out only a few days before the Wii, not a year. Interesting video
When I decided to install homebrew on the Wii (after I bought a WiiU...why not, it was gonna become the more played with system). I hacked mine through memory card. But I saw a Twilight hack, but heard it was obsolete. Didn't look more into it. Thanks for giving some history on it.
This brings back memories of the twilight hack, having to start the game then trying to leave the area so the buffer overflow would occur due to the gamesave giving epona a really long name, felt like such a hacker lol
Next video...
"How the Casio Calculator was defeated"
Impossible
@@arm9180 Completely possible by Chinese copycats :D
Defeated by the existence of Texas Industries? Lol
@@arm9180 I have one. Search casio fx 82 ms hack, they will show you to transform it into a 570 😉
You'll need a JBC.
Next Video: "How a magnet defeated the Nintendo 3DS security"
Not just the security, lol
What? Haha
@@drd5455 you can use a magnet to enter flash mode on 3DS and then use prepared DS flash card to install a custom firmware.
Damn.......... Seriously?!
@@kenrickkahn yeah, a magnet was an old cracking method
Nintendo WII: **exists**
A pair of tweezers: "Im about to end this mans whole career"
I remember when people installed linux on a ps3 and then proceeded to play linux portal 2 on it. With bare graphics, but still worked.
Pedro Boh see, this is the flaw with the English language. Bare means lots of and also not a lot
@@Abigart69 Well, the fact he used the conjunction 'but' shows that the word 'bare' was being used in a minimal sense
Man, it's so cool to listen to a guy that knows so much, break down the difficult bits in a way anyone can understand.
I still have no idea what's done when these geniuses get to a memory dump. Do they just load that into some standard disassembler for the architecture and try to follow the function calls? I'm sure all-nighters were pulled for each of those clever exploits we take for granted.
I used to love hacking Wii's for my homies. That letter bomb was so simple. Kudos to the devs
What exactly do you do when you hack a Wii? Like not how do you do it but why, what do you get from it or what are you able to do on hacked wii?
@@Piunti_302 You then get to install the homebrew channel, which is a convenient way to install and run applications on the wii. See wiibrew.org/wiki/List_of_homebrew_applications for a list of some of the applications available. For example, you can run NES or SNES emulators, letting you run legal copies of your games on the wii.
Yes, this is fascinating. The minds on these guys who do this work is just mind blowing.
2:53 Accurately sums up my experience with the Wii
Plug in a wii pro controller
Imagine using modchips
This post was made by homebrew gang
Good grief
i have both, we bought so many pirate discs, then in 2017 i put the epic homebrew channel and played games epically thru a usb, what a waste of maybe more than 600 dollars in pirated games bruh
@@Gaming_Legend2 Same dude, in my case it was around 1 dollar per disc, and that bastard that selled games never had the ones that i wanted to play, 8 year old me will never forget the money spent on those discs
Wii : no man can stop me
Tweezers : I am no man
Take it tweezy, pal.
"Tweezers don't defeat security on the Nintendo Wii, PEOPLE defeat security on the Nintendo Wii."
RIP Ben "bushing" Byer
Funny, Nintendo didn't even bother to sue Apple for the IOS.
they should tbh. Apple sues the shit outta everyone too...
@@michaeln3276 technically apple does not own the trademark for ios. Just the licensing. Cisco owns the trademark for ios and they filed it way back in 97
@Anthony Jones Yes, but Apple licenses the right to use the abbreviation "iOS" from Cisco, because they already owned the trademark "IOS," short for Internetwork Operating System. I guess no one at Cisco cared about Nintendo's use of "IOS" since it's only used internally in the code.
69 likes, don ruin it
@@ky9nth no.
I'm pretty sure my old Wii still has the twilight p hack. Many childhood hours spent to try and get free games 🤣
I still have my old Wii and my mom's old Wii, both of which have not even been turned on since before Twilight Hack was discovered. Maybe I'll try it one day just for lulz.
And then one day at a thrift store I found a "broken" Wii which simply had a Mario Kart disc stuck inside that wouldn't eject. But it was already hacked! It took me about an hour to take it apart far enough to manually eject the disc.
“The system was released in 2006 one year after the PS3 and Xbox 360”
Actually the Wii was released on the same year as the PS3, while the Xbox 360 launched a year prior to those two.
And now how a paper clip has defeated the switch security.
Reminds me of the spring trick with the PS1
Paper clip, safety pins, tinfoil, and cheap wires, also what's worse is that you don't even need to open the switch to exploit it.
This series needs a comeback
Ill never look at tweezers the same way again. Awesome how they figured that out.
They probably used a logic analyzer to monitor the address bus going to the memory chips. When they discovered that the Wii in GC mode does not use the upper portion of memory they decided to force the upper address lines into an active state, basically bank-switching the memory, as was done on the Commodore C64 and many other older PC and console systems. It must be said though, that this could easily end up in blown memory, as they are basically creating a short circuit on the address bus.
Any piece of metal can short pins.
What a fantastic channel, I just stumbled upon it by TH-cam recommendations, now binge watching all of your superb videos, I cannot believe such a channel exists. Trip down memory lane. Can't imagine how much effort went into making these videos. Superb work.
3:28 OMG me and my friends played TimeSplitters: Future Perfect soooo many times, probably one of my fondest memories of the GameCube!
Video idea: I managed to run IOS on my Wii and then it’s just gameplay
I get it
Nice April Fool's prank.
1:39 How many takes did it take to get that logo in such a perfect position? 🤔😄
Dear Macgyver, enclosed is a paper clip, a rubber band and a drinking straw, please hack my Wii.
That's... insane! An entire CPU in the GPU to run the OS, and it has it's own RAM too! Impressive, but here's an idea, what if they used that real estate for you know, graphics?
Good idea, go back to the early 2000's and tell Nintendo that their decision to not focus on graphics is not going to sell 100 million units
Wii: What's your SHA hash?
Disc:
Wii: Okay you're good to go
This is a never ending game of cat and mouse.
I'm Team Mouse.
I can't tell whether that's Nintendo or the hackers
@@circuit10 Hackers are the mice.
Nintendo is obviously the....fat cat.
Pun intended.
fancy seeing you here marco, we need some taiwan pc action here 😁
@@tobiaspauli Lmao. I always love me some Modern Vintage Gamer footage!
@@MarcoGPUtuber Yes, Nintendo is selfish. They stop all custom code from running "to stop piracy". Because of the NES they're probably responsible for people not programming very much nowadays. Everyone with a computer used to program it (not that I was alive then)
I fear no man
But that thing:
**tweezers**
It scares me
Worth mentioning:
IOS has nothing to do with Apple's iOS.
RSA is asymmetric, so the keys recovered this way couldn't be used to sign games. They did allow for save file hacking.
Using strncmp (string compare) on binary data (instead of text) meant that if the first byte was zero, the rest were ignored. So you only had to crack one byte of signature, which is laughably easy, instead of 16+ bytes which could take a few trillion years.
The Twilight Hack didn't use the strncmp bug. That was such a valuable exploit, they didn't want Nintendo to know about it yet. The same bug appears throughout the system, including boot ROM, which allowed for BootMii to exist.
RIP Bushing.
Did they end up getting Linux to run?
Of course 👍
@@ModernVintageGamer Cool
it's called whiite linux if you're interested
@@AfroSnackey Sweet might check it out!
"Commander Cody, the time has come. Execute custom loader"
Generally speaking, the more robust your security system is, the simpler the measure required to defeat it is