I love f4mi’s videos. They’re an absolute treasure and she’s clearly passionate about the Wii/DS era of gaming which was my own awakening point for modding the absolute christ out of every bit of tech I can get my hands on.
Holy shit! My time as a wii homebrew developer to shine haha.
SO, this is half myth half suspicion. On the wii, nintendo was able to update a part of the booting process called “boot2”. Boot2 can be considered like a kind of early program running while the system boots ( think of the windows logo you look at when booting your pc ). The group of people who made the tools/programs that made it possible to run homebrew on the wii, called team twiizers or fail0verflow, said the code used to update that part of the system was unsafe and could brick wiis. Personally, i havent seen that code yet to verify, but i degress.
People read that, and took it as boot2 update == brick.
Come the wii’s 4.2 update ( i think it was 4.2 ), nintendo pushed a boot2 update (boot2v4) and it would install when the wii connected to the internet and checked for updates. This made people scared that it would brick, which resulted in what you think off.
Personally, i havent heard of any brick stories by the update ( besides people doing weird ass, unsafe, shit ). But without seeing the actual code from nintendo, it is possible i guess
Hm, kinda? if id compare the wii booting process then id say grub is part boot2, part later stuff. Boot0 is arm cpu bootrom, boot1 is like a mbr, first page on nand, boot2 is more like a step between boot1 and ios and handles backwards compatability stuff on top of booting mios ( gamecube mode if you will ) or system menu ( the wii main menu ). When it boots system menu, boot2 loads the correct “kernel” (ios) which boots system menu on the other (ppc) cpu. So ye, it decides what to boot, but it only sets up a single file that tells the ios what to boot hehe.
It doesnt do any hardware inits or checks at all unlike bios/grub.
Whoa, DacoTaco themself! I instantly recognized your name from the homebrewing fun I had with it last year. Thank you for all of you efforts on the WiiU!
If I had more time I’d love to have contributed to homebrew software but I’m just glad you’ve been able to make the sacrifice for the rest of us. In an increasingly corporate video game world where extracting the last penny is prioritized over the passion of the fans, it’s people like you that keep that magic feeling, that sparked our interest in the first place, alive.
Hey, thanks for the message! Its good to read these! Though credit where credit is due, gary did 90% of the wiiu port of priiloader, and i was just the encylopedia for gary on how the wii worked and how priiloader injects itself in system menu!
And tbh, without devkitPro and their libogc i couldnt have done anything. Not even 14 years ago when i took over the preloader source and created priiloader!
Edit : and though it has no actual function at this time, the starstruck project has also helped to understand the wii more
But with that “reward” program its rather suspiscious to do such program. And generally in times like today, where every company wants to brick old game consoles to force them to play the more locked up newer console. But lets hope nintendos intension isnt that.
It wasnt, this was never their strategy and i doubt nintendo would ever go down that route. The reason they made the boot2 update was an (useless) attempt to overwrite the boot2 replacement team twiizers made (bootmii). If anything most of the wii updates were attempts to stop homebrew and backup loading/piracy which i cant say they were wrong in doing so.
The reward for users mightve been the functionality to store channels on an sd card, which was introduced in 4.0. Or maybe even the newer versions of the wiiconnect channels, that got updates and functionality over time. Or the wii shopping channel, so you could access the wiiware and vc channels (which needed latest channel version & ios’ installed )
This video is talking about 2010. The goal was likely to make it up through sales to users with newly connected Wiis who otherwise would have never made a digital purchase.
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