State of Wii Hacking in 2020

[ASDR]

Can somebody in the know please clarify this for me? Thanks

1.) Every Wii RVL-001 is exploitable with just https://please.hackmii.com/, correct? No special system firmware, game, hardware revision etc. needed?
2.) I don't need a unit with a working DVD-drive? The jailbreak and playing Wii & GC games from USB/SD will work fine?
3.) When I looked into playing games from USB/SD storage, it always seemed like I needed some weird Windows-only piece of software. Is there no way to just dump a bunch of Wii & GC ISOs on a FAT-formatted storage medium and just launch them?

Thanks!

[fernan1234]

1-2) Yep, you're good to go. The Wii is a great console to softmod.
3) I'm pretty sure you can just load the ISOs with loaders like USB Loader GX (my personal favorite), Configurable USB Loader, or Wiiflow. The Windows tool you may be referring to is simply to compress and trim them to save on storage space, but it's not necessary. I think you do need to name the ISO files and the folders they are in in specific ways. You'll also need Nintendont in your apps folder for the loader to access for GC games.

[ASDR]

Awesome, thanks. The 'documentation' for anything softmodding is always such an incomprehensible trainwreck of out-of-date information, 800p forum threads full of dead links and weird names and lingo with circular explanations.

So I just need to run that Letterbomb exploit, copy that USB Loader GX thing on my Wii's SD card and then attach USB storage with ISOs? There's so much talk about 'Bootmii' and 'Priiloader' and IOS and cIOS and how I need a custom one and something about 'boot2' and I have no idea if I actually need to worry about any of that stuff or what any of it actually does. Reading the Wiki I see stuff like

"BootMii should be compatible with most Wiis released before late 2008. Support for newer Wiis (with reduced functionality) will have to install BootMii as an IOS "

Ok? What does that mean? Do I need to worry about this and get a Wii 'released before late 2008'?

[Syntax]

Use this, it will walk you thru every step.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/modmii/

[spmbx]

I don't really get what you're saying to be honest. I modded a few wii's at the beginning of this year and found that you can pretty much find everything you need to know if you spend a few minutes googling. There are tons of great tutorials.

[ASDR]

Use this, it will walk you thru every step.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/modmii/

I don't get it, there's a download full of EXE files? I don't use Windows, SourceForce has changed owners and was in the news for distributing malware and why would I need to run anything on a PC to mod my Wii? Their link to the modmii Web Site doesn't work.

I don't really get what you're saying to be honest. I modded a few wii's at the beginning of this year and found that you can pretty much find everything you need to know if you spend a few minutes googling. There are tons of great tutorials.

I spend a few hours reading up on it and haven't found answer to basic questions. I don't know why, but anything related to 'softmodding' consoles is always the most incomprehensible, scatterbrained, jargon filled mess in existence. Tons of outdated info, projects changing names/owners, guides directly contradicting each other, dead links everywhere. I still have no idea what exactly happens if I have a post 2008 Wii and what it means that 'bootmii' runs 'with reduced functionality' if I install it as a 'IOS' replacement, and if that matters at all.

If I could find these answers with a few minutes of googling, I wouldn't have asked here.

And 'tons of great tutorials'? The most legit looking page I could immediately find was this:

https://wiibrew.org/wiki/Homebrew_setup

There they list and explain every single jailbreak method, but of course, the easiest and most widely compatible one, the only one that should probably even be on this page, is mentioned dead last

Oh and I know, all of this is probably dead simple and could be explained in like three paragraphs of text. At least it was for PS2, OGXB etc.

[bobrocks95]

You didn't find https://wii.guide/? First google result for me...

[ldeveraux]

You don't have access to a single Windows pc with which you can perform a softmod?

[qjkxbmwvz]

You don't have access to a single Windows pc with which you can perform a softmod?

What does Windows have to do with the Wii? It doesn't run Windows, so what sense does it make for anything to do with it to be specific to Windows?

[RocketBelt]

I did all this a few weeks ago. You shouldn't need a windows PC.
Hack your wii using letterbomb.
During this process, install bootmii as ios, and if possible bootmii as boot2, and the homebrew channel.
Use the homebrew channel to launch d2x cIOS Installer and follow wii.guide to install cios.
Use the homebrew channel to launch usbloadergx.
Use wiims tools to process wii isos into wbfs files split into chunks less than 4gb on a fat32 usb drive formatted with 32kb clusters in the correct folder. Lots of sources say these files need to be named in a specific way on the usb stick using a windows tool, but i haven't found this to be the case.

[fernan1234]

Use wiims tools to process wii isos into wbfs files split into chunks less than 4gb on a fat32 usb drive formatted with 32kb clusters in the correct folder. Lots of sources say these files need to be named in a specific way on the usb stick using a windows tool, but i haven't found this to be the case.

You don't need to do this. Loaders now can load Wii isos as is, wbfs is optional. They also work with exFat drives (not sure about NTFS) so you also don't need to split files larger than 4GB. It's true that naming may not be important for Wii games. Pretty sure it's necessary for GC games via Nintendont though.

[orange808]

The boot sectors and the current running IOS are distinct and important concepts. Understanding them is key, if you decide to peek under the hood at the Wii's internal workings.

Here's an overview. Digest the information; afterwards, general details of the Wii won't sound like alien jargon anymore:
https://www.copetti.org/projects/consoles/wii/

Please keep in mind that not everything there 100% accurate, but it's a decent write up written in plain language.

[Lawfer]

Can somebody in the know please clarify this for me? Thanks

1.) Every Wii RVL-001 is exploitable with just https://please.hackmii.com/, correct? No special system firmware, game, hardware revision etc. needed?
2.) I don't need a unit with a working DVD-drive? The jailbreak and playing Wii & GC games from USB/SD will work fine?
3.) When I looked into playing games from USB/SD storage, it always seemed like I needed some weird Windows-only piece of software. Is there no way to just dump a bunch of Wii & GC ISOs on a FAT-formatted storage medium and just launch them?

Thanks!

I am playing all my GC and Wii games from External HDD, before you hack it you should maybe update your console with the absolutely latest firmware (apparently there are multiple revisions of the last 4.3 firmware and the one you can download online is not the most up to date revision, you can see that if you insert the disc for the very last few games released on Wii like Rodea: The Sky Soldier) only use an SD Card to boot the loaders because running games from the SD Card slot is not good, put all your games inside the External Hardrive, overall it is a lot of work, but when you are finally set you can play all the games from the External Hardrives, plus you will get access to fan-translated games like Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, Captain Rainbow, Earth Seeker, Night of the Sacrifice etc.

Use wiims tools to process wii isos into wbfs files split into chunks less than 4gb on a fat32 usb drive formatted with 32kb clusters in the correct folder. Lots of sources say these files need to be named in a specific way on the usb stick using a windows tool, but i haven't found this to be the case.

You don't need to do this. Loaders now can load Wii isos as is, wbfs is optional. They also work with exFat drives (not sure about NTFS)

Can confirm it does for the Wii loader, it is for GameCube games that NTFS or exFat is not supported, so I use two different External Hard Drives, one for GameCube that's FAT32 and one that is NTFS for Wii games, I use the full ISO images, no scrubbed images.

[RocketBelt]

Bootmii as boot2 was a big deal in the early days when people were bricking their consoles left right and center doing any crappy ios hack they came across. Its basically an early startup that makes your wii brick proof if you took a nand backup.
The thing is, you don't need to do those crazy hacks any more, so bootmii as boot2 isnt really that big a deal unless you're determined to be a doofus. So you don't need to worry about having an early wii with boot2 support.
The steps I wrote up are the ones you need to look into in a bit more detail to play some wii games off usb. Like I said I went through this just a few weeks ago after getting a new wii, a late model as it happens. I found the whole process to be a mess with regards to documentation and guides, and found a lot of info to be massively overcomplicated. GbaTemp especially is a quagmire of misinformation, like a playground discussion. Quite a lot of recent stuff on Reddit as well turned out to be rubbish, really poor quality advice. For some reason the wii hacking scene is awash with poor quality info, compared to other scenes. There's tonnes of bullshit about forwarders, channels, stubs, preloaders, postloaders and god knows what else but the long and short of it is you just need the homebrew channel to launch usbloadergx off your sd card, and the cios installed to support that.
For example even on wii.guide, which is mostly pretty good, it says in the cios guide to install cios in slots 249,250,and 251. Over complicated. To play wii games using usbloadergx you only need to do the first step which is to install the specified cios to slot 249.

You might come across some people talking about neek. My advice is don't go there. I went down that rabbit hole and it was incredibly hard to wade through the misinformation and crappy out of date guides and eventually get it working, to find that usbloadergx works just as well and so much easier.

There's also Nintendont which is well worth looking into. It's just a file you put on your sd card and load up through the homebrew channel like usbloadergx, but you can play gamecube games off the usb in 480p and widescreen, even if the original game didn't support it. You can store them on the same usb your wii files are on. There's also a fair bit out of date info on how to set this up on gbatemp, making this massively more complicated than it needs to be, so steer well clear of that, but the readme on nintendont's github page has all the latest info and is pretty well written.

Last thing - Nintendont supports fat32 or exfat. Usbloadergx supports fat32, ntfs, or ext2/3/4. This is what it says on Nintendont's github page and usbloadergx's sourceforge page.
So if you want one usb (flash or hard drive) for both then fat32 formatted with 32kb clusters will do it. But then you have to split your wii games into sub-4gb chunks for fat32, so I maybe it's easier to use 2 seperate drives for wii and gamecube. USB Flash drives work fine by the way - another common bit of misinformation is that you have to use spinning rust.

[Lawfer]

Last thing - Nintendont supports fat32 or exfat.

Does it support exFat? Is it new? I don't remember it did a few years back...

[bobrocks95]

You might come across some people talking about neek. My advice is don't go there. I went down that rabbit hole and it was incredibly hard to wade through the misinformation and crappy out of date guides and eventually get it working, to find that usbloadergx works just as well and so much easier.

Neek's an emuNAND from what I can tell? Yeah, don't see why anyone would really have a need for that. I'm not even sure what the use case is on 3DS where it's much more popular.

[RocketBelt]

Last thing - Nintendont supports fat32 or exfat.

Does it support exFat? Is it new? I don't remember it did a few years back...

It was a fairly late in the day development but yes it supports exfat.

[Guspaz]

I messed up my near-launch wii through years of random softmod stuff installed (some of it by somebody else when I lent them the console), and now half the stuff on it doesn't work anymore. How I wish I could just factory reset the thing and re-softmod it or something. IIRC I even tried some of those all-in-one softmod tools that were supposed to upgrade/update everything present to bring it all up to modern standards, and they all failed at some point. Wii softmod stuff seems to be stupidly complicated with super poor documentation.

[RocketBelt]

You might come across some people talking about neek. My advice is don't go there. I went down that rabbit hole and it was incredibly hard to wade through the misinformation and crappy out of date guides and eventually get it working, to find that usbloadergx works just as well and so much easier.

Neek's an emuNAND from what I can tell? Yeah, don't see why anyone would really have a need for that. I'm not even sure what the use case is on 3DS where it's much more popular.

Neek is a virtual nand. I set it up with an NTSC nand image to play Castlevania Rebirth in 480p on a pal wii. But then you're getting into wiiware and wads and that's way out of scope of what the OP was asking about.

[RocketBelt]

I messed up my near-launch wii through years of random softmod stuff installed (some of it by somebody else when I lent them the console), and now half the stuff on it doesn't work anymore. How I wish I could just factory reset the thing and re-softmod it or something. IIRC I even tried some of those all-in-one softmod tools that were supposed to upgrade/update everything present to bring it all up to modern standards, and they all failed at some point. Wii softmod stuff seems to be stupidly complicated with super poor documentation.

If you have bootmii installed as boot2 and took a nand backup when it was first modded you can restore that and re-mod it. The early days were brutal for crappy hacks.
If it still boots, and you have the homebrew channel there tools available to clean up a lot of the mess.

[orange808]

Just in case it wasn't clear: You absolutely positively always need a NAND backup before you touch anything. Even now. That's not "outdated" and never will be.

"The Temp" isn't the best neighborhood on the interwebs for good company or up to date information, but the "make a damn backup!" mantra is one thing that you'll always hear.

So, make a backup first!

[Extrems]

There's https://github.com/comex/formatter as a last resort.

[Syntax]

I prefer Ohneswanzenegger_r85 to clean a Wii, You still need to know your bad blocks and the first 8 bytes of your nand.

[Lawfer]

Last thing - Nintendont supports fat32 or exfat.

Does it support exFat? Is it new? I don't remember it did a few years back...

It was a fairly late in the day development but yes it supports exfat.

Interesting thank you for the update, I had to convert my External Hard Drive to FAT32 and use 2 different External HDD (since Wii ISOs are too big to fit in FAT32), but now this is more conveniant.

[Guspaz]

I definitely don't have a nand backup from the very beginning, this was like 13 years ago via the twilight hack. I'm not sure if I have a nand backup that's more recent. I vaguely recall making one, but I have no idea where it might be now.

I think I have BootMii installed as Boot2, I see it every time I turn the system on. The system does boot, and can run stuff, but my understanding is that the current state of it is kind of a mess. At some point all the official wii shop stuff stopped running with error messages. I think I transferred the stuff I bought to the SD card, though none of it runs. Homebrew still runs mostly. I seem to remember trying to load backups of games using the backup launcher and the usb loader and having a lot of trouble getting things to work (if at all). If I try to run the wad manager, it crashes trying to access the SD card, even though other apps seemingly can access the SD card.

I think the only thing left of value on the Wii itself is some save games, but I'd imagine I can copy those to the SD card.

It doesn't seem like the "last resort" options are necessarily required, but are they the best way to get the wii back to something like a factory default to start fresh, without a lot of half-installed ios stuff in questionable states? Or is there some other way to just get this back into a kind of a known state, where you'd expect a softmodded wii to be today? Here's a syscheck log I just took:

sysCheck v2.1.0b18 by Double_A and R2-D2199
...runs on IOS58 (rev 6176).

Region: NTSC-U
System Menu 4.1U (v449)

Drive date: 2006.09.07
Homebrew Channel 1.0.0 running on IOS0
Hollywood v0x11
Console ID: 40387984
Boot2 v4
Found 87 titles.
Found 47 IOS on this console. 9 of them are stub.

IOS4 (rev 65280): Stub
IOS9 (rev 1034): No Patches
IOS10 (rev 768): Stub
IOS11 (rev 256): Stub
IOS12 (rev 526): No Patches
IOS13 (rev 1032): No Patches
IOS14 (rev 1032): No Patches
IOS15 (rev 1032): No Patches
IOS16 (rev 512): Stub
IOS17 (rev 1032): No Patches
IOS20 (rev 256): Stub
IOS21 (rev 1039): No Patches
IOS22 (rev 1294): No Patches
IOS28 (rev 1807): No Patches
IOS30 (rev 2816): Stub
IOS31 (rev 3608): No Patches
IOS33 (rev 3608): No Patches
IOS34 (rev 3608): No Patches
IOS35 (rev 3608): No Patches
IOS36 (rev 3608): Trucha Bug, ES Identify, NAND Access
IOS37 (rev 5663): No Patches
IOS38 (rev 4124): No Patches
IOS40 (rev 3072): Stub
IOS41 (rev 3607): No Patches
IOS43 (rev 3607): No Patches
IOS45 (rev 3607): No Patches
IOS46 (rev 3607): No Patches
IOS48 (rev 4124): No Patches
IOS50 (rev 5120, Info: rev 4889): No Patches
IOS51 (rev 4864): Stub
IOS52 (rev 5888): Stub
IOS53 (rev 5663): No Patches
IOS55 (rev 5663): No Patches
IOS56 (rev 5662): No Patches
IOS57 (rev 5919): No Patches
IOS58 (rev 6176): USB 2.0
IOS60 (rev 6174): No Patches
IOS61 (rev 5662): No Patches
IOS62 (rev 6430): No Patches
IOS70 (rev 6912, Info: rev 6687): No Patches
IOS80 (rev 6944): No Patches
IOS236[36] (rev 65535, Info: rev 3351): Trucha Bug, ES Identify, NAND Access
IOS247[57] (rev 21006, Info: d2x-v6): Trucha Bug, NAND Access, USB 2.0
IOS248[56] (rev 21006, Info: d2x-v6): Trucha Bug, NAND Access, USB 2.0
IOS249[57] (rev 19, Info: rev 19): Trucha Bug, NAND Access, USB 2.0
IOS250 (rev 65535): Trucha Bug, NAND Access, USB 2.0
IOS254 (rev 65281): BootMii
BC v5
MIOS v10

Report generated on 2020/10/13.

[ASDR]

Thanks for all the suggestions and the lively discussion everybody

That wii.guide is a lot better than the other ones I've read. I don't have access to a Windows PC and wouldn't really want to use something like a work machine or have a friend install sketchy stuff on their system. Also thanks for the link on the Wii system architecture, good read. "Neek virtual NAND" gives me flashbacks to XBox softmodding and Virtual EEPROMs

So, the plan is, following mostly wii.guide:

- Setup my Wii and update it to the latest 2010 Nintendo firmware (do I really need to track down the latest latest instead of just using online update?)
- Prepare my SD card with the Letterbomb exploit
- Install the Homebrew Channel, a universal launcher for all things homebrew
- Install BootMii, preferably on boot2 but as IOS is also OK. I need this so I can backup my NAND for emergency-restores
- Do a NAND backup with BootMii
- Install Priiloader. It's a little stub that boots before the main OS and it'll allow me to fix&restore stuff in case the system menu etc. is borked
- Install d2x cIOS. This provides OS-level support for things like playing games from ISO files
- Install USB Loader GX so I can play Wii games from ISOs
- Put Nintendont in the apps folder so I can play GC games from ISOs
- Done?

There's still a few things unclear to me. I just bought a 64GB SD card. It's less than 10EUR and I figure 64GB should be enough for a dozen Wii/GC games or so, fine for me. But some here say that's not a good idea? Online I've read reports of people storing & loading games from SDXC cards formatted FAT32 just fine, I figured that would be the cleanest, simplest solution. I guess FAT32 has a 4GB limit, which might not be enough for Wii games and I guess I can't format my internal SD card as exFAT. Also, should I get PAL or NTSC ISOs? I'll be getting a PAL Wii and hook it up over SCART RGB. From what I understand basically all Wii games support PAL60 so that 50Hz slowdown crap shouldn't be an issue and 576i > 480i. So PAL ISOs it is?

[cools]

How usable is a (softmodded) Wii without a sensor bar or other IR source? I'd like to have one that operates just with d-pad/stick + buttons (and the odd motion control). Accepting that some games will be absolutely unplayable, would the overall system be usable like this?

[spmbx]

You'd need to install some software for it to be usable, look into what they do for the portable wii conversions/mods

[ldeveraux]

You don't have access to a single Windows pc with which you can perform a softmod?

What does Windows have to do with the Wii? It doesn't run Windows, so what sense does it make for anything to do with it to be specific to Windows?

Not the point at all! The easiest software hack route is done in Windows, OP said he didn't have access to that, which is astounding.

[ASDR]

You don't have access to a single Windows pc with which you can perform a softmod?

What does Windows have to do with the Wii? It doesn't run Windows, so what sense does it make for anything to do with it to be specific to Windows?

Not the point at all! The easiest software hack route is done in Windows, OP said he didn't have access to that, which is astounding.

Nothing even remotely astounding about that. I think most people I know fall in two categories: Highly technical and wouldn't touch Windows with a stick and so non-technical that they don't need a computer and just use an iPad/smartphone.