HackMii is the site of Wii homebrew hackers covering Nintendo's lockout chip, exploits, and the Homebrew Channel.
Commenters point to it as a still-online source of interesting Wii notes, and link its post about trying to contact Nintendo.
> But taking advantage of that feature requires a five-figure-priced JTAG debugger
Reading RAM in a running system (even a "hardened" one) is easier than most think. Micah Elizabeth Scott's work on the Nintendo DSi [1] is an excellent example: with a budget of just $500 and a month or two of work [2] she could read a video stream out of RAM as it was being DMAed to/from the camera [3].
I can't even begin to describe how impressed I am with Micah's work, but cloning her FPGA tool from GitHub [4] and repeating the feat for a relatively static segment of executable code on a system that's less physically hardened against tampering, that seems trivial to me in comparison. Certainly doable with $500 and a couple of weeks time.
1. http://scanlime.org/2009/09/dsi-ram-tracing/
2. https://twitter.com/scanlime/status/562925122106191873
3. http://hackmii.com/2009/09/dsi-ram-tracing-camera/
4. https://github.com/scanlime/ram-tracer
If any of this is true and actually delivers, coupled with technical limitations on the Wii (1), it would seem the story is that they can't. At least not without pumping out a new console.
What will be interesting to see is how Sony responds to this. If the Xbox 360 software wasn't already a million times better than the PS3 software, project Natal seems hellbent on making it so. And Sony, unlike Nintendo, have a platform which to some extent allows expansion and further development.
Definitely interesting times ahead in the console world.
1: http://hackmii.com/2009/02/why-the-wii-will-never-get-any-better/
> In the UK where 20% of the internet is blocked
That’s not true. I’ve experienced this once before that I can remember, on https://hackmii.com/ and it doesn’t happen on my home network except on actual scam sites which isn’t a government thing but an ISP feature that can probably be turned off. This is a Vodaphone thing, not a UK thing.
I don’t care that much about this specific site, I guess I just want to complain that they don’t have a way to report false positives which maybe isn’t the best reason to post a comment on an unrelated article but still
The Chaos Computer Club archives have some amazing talks on console hacking: https://media.ccc.de/search/?q=console+hacking (most of them are also on YouTube)
One of the prominent figures out of that scene, marcan, is now leading the Asahi Linux (i.e. Linux on Apple Silicon) project.
(Another, bushing, sadly passed away in 2016: https://hackmii.com/ben. RIP.)
Here’s the post where they tried contacting Nintendo (and just heard from a bunch of pirates and trolls trying to prank them), but I can’t find Nintendo’s actual response: https://hackmii.com/2008/07/dear-nintendo/
I think the rest of that story might have been in their 25c3 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rjaiNIc4W8
The CIC (copy-protection chip) in the NES used a tiny 4-bit MCU that also had an LFSR for a program counter:
http://hackmii.com/2010/01/the-weird-and-wonderful-cic/