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Games

Submission + - Wii Update 4.2 tries (and fails) to block homebrew (hackmii.com) 3

Submitted by
marcansoft
marcansoft writes: "On September 28, Nintendo released a Wii update, titled 4.2. This update was targeted squarely at homebrew, performing sweeping changes throughout the system. It hardly achieved that goal, though, because just two days later a new version of the HackMii installer was released that brings full homebrew capabilities back to all Wii consoles, including unmodified consoles running 4.2.

However, as part of their attempt to annoy homebrew users, Nintendo updated the lowest level updateable component of the Wii software stack: boot2 (part of the system bootloader chain). Homebrew users have been using BootMii to patch boot2 in order to gain low level system access and recovery functions (running Linux natively, fixing bricks, etc). The update hasn't hindered this, as users can simply reinstall BootMii after updating (it is compatible with the update). But there's a much bigger problem: Nintendo's boot2 update code is buggy. Boot2 had never been updated in retail consoles until now. During BootMii's development, its authors noticed that Nintendo's code had critical bugs and could sometimes permanently brick a console by writing incorrect or unchecked data to flash memory, so they decided to write their own, much safer flashing code. Now, Nintendo has pushed a boot2 update to all Wii users, and the results are what was expected: users are reporting bricks after installing 4.2 on unmodified consoles. Nintendo is currently attempting to censor posts and remove references to homebrew.

It is worth noting that the new boot2 does not attempt to block anything or offer any additional protection or functionality. Its sole purpose is to simply replace current versions which may or may not have been modified with BootMii. Another interesting tidbit is that Nintendo is not believed to have any method to repair this kind of brick at a factory, short of replacing the entire motherboard."

Comment Re:And yet... (Score 1) 509

by d235j (#28764259) Attached to: How Apple's App Review Is Sabotaging the iPhone
Apple has tools like otool and nm which can detect what's going on. class-dump can output headers if it's given an Obj-C binary. I'm not sure what exactly happened, but maybe you attempted to dynamically link the PhoneGap framework instead of statically incorporating it into the main application binary. Such dynamic linking is simply not allowed. However, I could be wrong.

Comment Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties (Score 1, Insightful) 242

by d235j (#28412125) Attached to: Questioning Mozilla's Plans For HTML5 Video

Unfortunately, Theora still needs twice the bitrate as H.264 to deliver the same quality, even with the "Thusnelda" rewrite of the encoder.

Not really. Thusnelda is noticeably better than H.263 (which is what YouTube used to use) and it's more like a 15% higher bitrate [and that's probably higher than necessary]/

Comment Re:How does the GS look to game devs? (Score 3, Informative) 770

by d235j (#28255457) Attached to: Apple's WWDC Unveils iPhone 3.0, OpenCL, Laptop Updates, and More

Any iphone devs have any idea how the new graphics chipset might affect things? Are there going to be GS-specific graphics API calls?

Also I wonder if we'll see 3gs-only games? Obviously it would unwise to do so from a sales perspective, but I wonder if apple will even allow such a thing.

Yes, the GS has OpenGL ES 2.0, which is not backwards compatible with OpenGL ES 1.1. So we'll probably see some GS-only games.

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