Wayne Pendragon Owens

Reclaiming the word Hacker

The term Hacker should be kept as they was originally intended, to describe those people who are curious about how things work, whether it be computers, networks, phones, electronics, maths, whatever. People who find ways to use things in ways that was not in the original specification. We used to cherish these people as innovators, explorers, etc. (Well apart from the early days when the church would burn them as heretics). We should go back to using “Hacker” as a positive description, and just call criminals “Criminals”. 

So Media People pay attention, to quote Randal from Clerks. “I’m taking it back”.

by Wayne Pendragon Owens

I am an Author, Freemason, Rosicrucian, Blood Biker, Widows Son, CodeNinja, Spod, Hacker, Son, Uncle, Brother, Man, AN INDIVIDUAL!

Hacking

18th August 2010

Hackers – Getting More from Your Wii

There are many things you normally do with your Wii. You can play with it, Sing with it, Get fit with it. Lots of things.  But have you ever wanted to do MORE. get more fun with your Wii?

This is the kind of questions a “Hacker” will often ask. “How can I do more with X bit of equipment?“.

NOTE: Anyone here looking for water sports, please go away now. Unless you are a Good looking Female with an ENTP personality, who should send me her Photo + CV.

 

This post is about the Nintendo Wii, and how to get more from it.  I got a Wii last weekend. Mainly to get Wii Fit and play the fun looking games with the Balance Board.  The only thing is, I have not yet got the board, only the Wii.  Within Twenty four hours of receiving the Wii in the post the immortal words were uttered. “Hummmmm! I wonder if I could use this as a media server to stream films/tv from the network?”

After these words were uttered all other projects were dropped and the Wii was studied and hacked/jailbroke/improved.  Here’s the process that was used, in case anyone else out there wants to play media files on a Wii.

NOTE: This is only a “soft mod” you do not open the Wii at any point, or do any physical modifications to the device.

For this you will need 1xSD Card. (I used two cards to save time, but you only really need one).

You need your Wii connected to your wireless network. (You can do this with a none networked Wii, But networked is easier)

You will also need to download a few files off the internet and unzip them.

Phase 1: (Getting the Homebrew Channel)

The HomeBrew channel is a Wii channel that lets you run Applications & Software written by third party’s, extra applications, and games that are made available for you to use by people other than Nintendo.  It also helps for you launching Linux apps, or distro’s.  So before we can have fun we need to get this on the Wii.

FILE Pack 1: Download <=- Files not stored on this Blog.

  1. Download this pack, and extract the files onto your SD Card. (There should be three folders & four files)
  2. Place the SD Card into the Wii (The slots under the cover at the front.)
  3. Click on the SD Card Icon (Bottom Left), You should get a warning screen (Press OK), You get a black screen with disclaimer (Press 1 )
  4. You now should have a screen with three lines. Homebrew channel, which can be isntalled, DVDx, also can be installed, Bootmii, which possibly will give you an error. Install Homebrew Channel, DVDX. On bootmii option, select “prepare SD card“. After it finishes, install it as boot2 (if possible) or as an IOS.
  5. When your finished, Remove the SD Card and return to computer.

Phase 2: (Fixing the Nintendo Fix to Stop people doing what were doing)

You see, Nintendo did not like people getting full use of their Wii’s so the put a fake empty bit of code in the area most programmers use, this prevents “Other” code being fully run on the Wii. Well we say “Hack The Planet!” and fix this fix. :0)

FILE Pack 2: Download <=- Files not stored on this Blog.

  1. Download this pack, format SD Card. and extract the files onto your SD Card.
  2. Place the SD Card into the Wii
  3. Go to The Homebrew Channel, Press the Home button and select Bootmii (Some Wii’s auto start Bootmii so you can skip this one)
  4. Wadmanager should start.(On ios select, select ios36
  5. Select SD card and (Press A).
  6. Select ios249 from wad folder and (Press A).
  7. change the action to “uninstall wad“, (Press A).
  8. When your finished, Remove the SD Card and return to computer.

Phase 3: (Adding cios)

You need this fix if you want to stream media over the Wii’s WiFi. or if you should want to play “Backup Games”

FILE Pack 3: Download <=- Files not stored on this Blog.

  1. Download this pack, format SD Card. and extract the files onto your SD Card.
  2. Place the SD Card into the Wii
  3. Go to The Homebrew Channel, Press the Home button and select Bootmii (Some Wii’s auto start Bootmii so you can skip this one)
  4. At the beginning you should see ios249 highlighted. Keep pressing left on the wii pad until you see “Do not reload IOS” at the ios select screen, press A.
  5. If you have internet connection, select “Network install“, else select “SD card“, (Press A).
  6. When your finished, Remove the SD Card and return to computer.

Phase 4: (Setting up the final Card)

You are all finished now. You just need to set yourself up for day to day running of Apps. Oh and to add a media player. Basically you can place apps in a folder called apps on the SD Card and they become runnable from the HomeBrew Channel. To get you started :-

Format the SD Card and extract File Pack 1 back onto it. This one has a few applications already on it for Playing Back up Games and fixing a few bugs.

To get a media server on there, Just download and extract to the apps folder. I tried and liked two applications.

1) Geexbox Which is a multi platform media server. The only downside is that it can not access the Wii’s WiFi drivers so will only play of USB harddrives, or using a Wired Network connection. There is a Lite version that can use WiFi.

2)MPlayer CE Which is the one I’m using, It works from the box over the Wii’s WiFi. and plays a good amount of different file formats. And connects to local media, or network media using ftp, Windows Shares, SMB Shares.  You do have to edit the smb.conf in the MPlayer_CE folder to add up to 5 network shares (and optional passwords)

And its as easy as that. You can go from Taking a Wii out the box, to having it up and running as a full media server in less than an hour.

Happy Hacking.

P.S. The password for the files listed is: www.wiihacks.com