tonatonari

A lot of people have been up in arms about marcan’s “Wii Recovery Dongle” video, and the resulting epic media fail and drama. I made an attempt to dispel one such speculation spree.

The Hackmii post explains what the potentials of the Recovery Dongle are, but they don’t really explain how the device does what it does–which may be the cause of some of the random speculation.

Here’s the deal:

The Wii System Menu will check for a “Nintendo Waikiki Adapter” when it boots. If it finds one, it will load up a “Recovery” mode, which really just boots diagnostic/autoboot (Disc ID 0) discs and displays the current System Menu version.

Marcan’s device (at this point) merely identifies itself in the same way as the Waikiki Adapter, with no other functionality as far as I know. Duplicating other Waikiki functionality may even be superfluous, as I’ve gathered that it’s just an EXI2USB device like the USBGecko.

So, in short: System Menu boots, says “Is there a Waikiki plugged in?” Then marcan’s device replies, “I’m a Waikiki!” Then the System Menu goes into “Recovery” mode.

If you want to see this functionality for yourself, you can try crediar’s Starfall, which will let you access the Recovery Menu by holding a button on your Gamecube controller.

What exactly does the Recovery Menu do? What is it good for?

That’s a good question. The Recovery Menu will load before the system menu performs a number of checks/actions, so you may be able to boot to it when your System Menu will not otherwise load. However, as far as functionality, as I mentioned before it just boots autoboot discs, which are discs that have the Disc ID set to ‘0′. Now, there’s only two kinds of discs that have a Disc ID of 0: The Pink Fish Disc (and probably other factory discs), and burnt discs with the Disc ID artificially set to 0. In terms of recovery, this means that the Recovery Menu is only useful if you have Nintendo diagnostic discs or a drivechip. Furthermore, if you’re on System Menu 3.3 (With the new IOS30) or newer, you still won’t be able to boot fakesigned discs, leaving you high and dry on recovery options if you don’t have the Twilight Hack (or some other savegame exploit) installed.

As you can see, It doesn’t have any functionality beyond that of the normal System Menu, so it’s only really useful for when you are stuck with a System Menu-related brick, and even then it’s not guaranteed to help, and requires knowledge of the brick.

Here’s an example runthrough of a use of the recovery dongle.

Your unmodified 3.3 Wii has a full Banner Brick or Region Brick. You would need:

1. Recovery Dongle/Waikiki Adapter
2. The Twilight Hack ALREADY installed,
3. An image of Twilight Pricess, modified to have a boot code of 0, and burned to a disc.
4. A drivechip installed to allow said disc to boot.
5. Some homebrew to run through the Twilight Hack that would fix your brick somehow

Is it useful? Sure, but not to most. And it’s only useful in very specific cases. As for trying to keep it secret to try to capitalize on it, that’s not likely. Few people will ever get into a situation where the Recovery Dongle is the fix they need. Even fewer will actually look into purchasing such a device. It would only be useful if you were in the business of fixing bricked/broken Wiis.

“Much ado about nothing.”

Well, I’m tona.

As most people finding this blog probably know, I write code for the Wii from time to time. I wrote a few utilities for the Wii, mostly dealing with the Wii’s specific way of doing things, rather than anything interesting on a low level –i.e. nothing dealing with security.

There’s a few things that you may be interested to know about me:

• I am a beginning undergraduate majoring in Comp Sci
• I am nothing close to a “professional” coder in any sense.
• I never touched C until I started working on the Wii (Although I’ve had quite a bit of exposure to programming in general)

Please consider this in your judgments of myself and my applications. For the most part, this just means that I’m a slow coder. I’m actually rather confident in my code’s merit as a part of a finished product. That said, I haven’t really written anything all that incredible, either, but I’m not sure that’s necessary for making a useful application.

These past few months I’ve been incredibly lucky to be able to speak and work with all the members of the Wiibrew/#wiidev community. The Wii is a very interesting system, and understanding its inner workings is a great motivator in itself to me. Between the Homebrew enablement of the Wii and the aforementioned community, I’ve been able to learn great amounts about the Wii’s software system itself and manipulate it in various ways.

Now, concerning this blog:

While I’m not a great coder or a “hacker,” I do have the ability to understand these systems to a fair extent. Through this blog, I plan to inform the community on various portions of the Wii’s hardware/software systems to the best of my ability. Of course, I will probably also use this blog for more personal purposes–e.g. updates to my applications–however, the purpose of informing the community should remain the primary one for this blog.

Nom nom nom.