Wii USB Support / PlayOn on the Wii

Back when I “hacked” my Wii (installed cIOS Rev 10) to allow my games to run off of a USB hard drive, I had to switch over to using Wireless instead of my USB Ethernet adapter.  You see, Rev 10 would only let me use either my USB Ethernet adapter, or my USB hard drive.  My problem with this is that the Wii doesn’t support Enterprise Authentication on wireless, and I don’t really trust anything less with wireless.  Anyhow, I set up another SSID running WPA-PSK just for the Wii and placed it on another subnet, on the other side of my firewall from my secured LAN.  Problem solved, right?  It was until very recently…  PlayOn just added support for the Wii so you can now watch Hulu, NetFlix, etc on your Wii.  In my case, however, from this separate subnet my Wii could not see my PlayOn server.

Back a few weeks ago I had read that running Rev 12 of cIOS would let you use an additional USB port for other USB devices.  So, I upgraded last night from Rev 10 of cIOS to Rev 12.  (Yes, I know that Rev 13, 13b, and 14 are also out, but I’m not one for the bleeding edge unless there’s a real need.)

After upgrading to Rev 12, I moved my USB drive to the other USB port (it only works from one of them now), attached my USB Ethernet adapter to the newly vacated USB port, and was up and running on the network with wired Ethernet connectivity.

At this point, I was able to find my PlayOn server and navigate the interface to watch a few shows.  The quality isn’t nearly as good as watching PlayOn on my SageTV HD200, but navigation of the shows from Hulu is much faster, and you can’t screw up (like you can with the HD200) and accidentally restart the show by trying to fast forward past a commercial.  PlayOn states that they plan to add support for rewinding and fast-forwarding on the Wii, so that will be a plus.  This is the first time they actually have control of the 10 foot user interface, so I expect they will make this nice, as it will directly drive sales.

The bottom line?  Even with the reduced video quality, it was still very watchable.  There were occasional issues with the playback (very brief audio pausing mostly), but you don’t need to worry – Just watch and the interruptions aren’t bad enough to really take away from the experience…

BootMii for your Wii

With BootMii, if you install it in “boot2″, you can pretty much do anything (software wise) you want to your Wii.  Once you make a good backup of your NAND memory, if you brick your Wii, or otherwise hose it, you can simply restore to the backup you made with BootMii.  Now that I know about it, I wouldn’t recommend updating any Wii without it!

Ideally, you want to install BootMii and take a good backup of your system before you do any hacking that results in anything being on your Wii permanently (like patching your IOS).  Your NAND memory (basically, where the OS lives) can be completely backed up and later restored.

Note:  I believe BootMii Beta 3 has an issue restoring that requires you to make a change to be able to successfully restore a backup.

Grab it here:  bootmii.org

Snes9X on the Wii

I admit, I didn’t see this one coming.  Since getting Snes9X installed on the Wii (Sunday night, I think) along with the 15 ROMs from the SNES games we actually own, my kids have almost exclusively played SNES games.  They’ve happily jumped back and forth between Tetris and Super Mario All Stars mostly.  The Wii games (mostly costing around $40 each) have almost went unplayed.  Even Mario Kart Wii.  I guess the classics are still in.

Snes9X GX for the Wii

Most of us have (or had) old SNES games that we loved.  With Snes9X GX for the Wii, we can play them all again!  If you still have your old SNES cartridges, there are devices that you can get to Rip the ROM files right off of them, though they are relatively rare.  Instead of going to that trouble, there are lots of sites on the Internet where the ROM files are freely available.  Of course, I only recommend actually using the ROMs that are from games you actually own.  We don’t want to encourage piracy.  If you do happen across a ROM for an old game that you don’t have, you may be able to pick it up at a fleamarket or garage sale.  Then, the way I see it, you’d have every right to run that ROM.

Back to the point, though.  Snes9X GX for the Wii is simply awesome.  If the initial user interface (game selection screen) were more polished, you might even think it was a Nintendo product.  The interface is easy to navigate with the Wiimote, even to the point of setting up your network connection so it can find your ROMs.  (In my case, I can read the remote directory fine, but can’t seem to write to it.  That’s OK, as Save Game files are small and it can write them to the SD card.)

When you are actually in a game and hit the Home screen, the game pauses and up comes a very Wii-looking screen, with dark bars coming in from the top and bottom, the close button in the upper right, even battery level indicators for all four Wiimotes.  Easy enough for even my 5 year old to navigate, I think…

Great work guys!

Wii HomeBrew Browser & FTP server

After you install the Wii HomeBrew channel, pretty much the next thing you should do is install the HomeBrew Browser and ftpii, an FTP server.

The HomeBrew Browser is a 10 foot GUI interface that lets you browse different categories of HomeBrew software that has been released by the Wii HomeBrew Community.  This includes Demos, Games, Media Players, Emulators, and Utility software.  It has descriptions, icons denoting the supported controllers, and most importantly, allows you to download and install said software directly from within the application. It does not have the USB Loader stuff in it… Perhaps for legal reasons, or perhaps because of all the behind-the-scenes work you have to do to get that stuff to work, but it is easy to use.

ftpii is a FTP server, allowing you to FTP to your Wii, writing to your SD card across your network.  This lets you add programs to your HomeBrew channel that aren’t available via the HomeBrew Browser.

Loading Wii games from a USB drive

There have been a recent rash of people posting instructions on how to add USB drives to their Wiis.  This is something I was very interested in, but in all of the posts I’ve seen recently, none of them seem to fully address the issue.  None of them seem to go into any detail on what to do if things go wrong.  Performing this mod is not for the faint of heart.

In my case, I first started following the directions here:  Kringg.com

It’s very light on explanation, just giving steps to follow, which made me think it would be a very straightforward process.  Truth be told, it is, but there are some gotchas along the way.

Following those instructions seemed to go smoothly until I got to the point that I was actually ready to Rip my collection of games.  When I attempted to do that, I got crash after crash, no matter which game I tried.  I had two USB drives to try and both had the same failed results.  And while parts of the installation when fine via the network connection, later I was unable to get to the network from the WAD manager.  I later determined that the problem arose when I attached the USB drive.

I had an alternative way in mind from the beginning: mikeandheth.com

Unfortunately, this did not overcome any of my issues.  The crashes continued.

At this point, I was wondering if these software mods to my Wii were doing something to break my Wii.  So, I tried running Zelda.  To my surprise, the Wii did not see my Zelda disk at all.  I ejected it and re-inserted it and was relieved to see that it finally recognized it.

One thing that bothered me about these guides was at just which level of Nintendo software did they expect me to be at when starting?  In searching around, I found some posts saying that you’d have issues if you had some older software installed when you started, so I updated to the latest software via System Update.  That got me to 4.0U (shown on some of the Wii settings screens).

I then followed this post: gbatemp.com

I used the “Offline Downgrade/Upgrade” procedure.  Since I still had the homebrew channel installed from my first attempt, I only performed steps 1 – 3, A, B, and 9 – 15.  The scariest part was step 11, where you have to install 18 WADs in sequence.  Note the item “If WAD Manager freezes during installation just try again from the WAD it froze on.”

Well, it froze on me.  A couple of times.  And just after finishing one WAD installation, it crashed.  But, true to the instructions, I rebooted, and picked up with the failed WAD (except the crash, since it had completed that WAD first, so I didn’t reselect it).  Each time, on the second attempt at installing the WAD, it completed just fine.

One appendix to these instructions – After installing the pre-loader (step 13) and rebooting, the pre-loader comes up by default.  There is a setting to make it boot to the System Menu at startup.  Set that, then I assume the “Hold Reset” while starting will cause it to go into the preloader (though I haven’t tested that).  Also, in my case, I didn’t have to do step 15.

After going through all this, I had determined that part of my problem was with my network connection.  I use a wired USB adapter, and found that when I when to “download missing covers” from the USB loader that I got a crash.  So, off to using wireless I went.  So far, so good.

Last night, the kids played Mario Kart and Wii Sports, and everything worked just like always.

One potential caveat to using this method is found a bit down in the post:  “If you want to load games from the disc channel you must install CIOSCORP”.  Well, I haven’t done this yet, and I haven’t tested to see if I could still play games directly from the disk.  But I’m not terribly concerned, as the games seem to be working well from the hard drive.  I’ll probably undertake this, if I find that some games don’t run properly from the USB drive.  (I’ve read that some don’t)

Edit:  Since this original post, I have successfully ran a game directly from the disc with no problem.  Since I updated to the original 4.0U software before undertaking the “Offline Downgrade/Upgrade” procedure, I didn’t expect this to work, as my Wii should have been a clean slate at this point (except for the HomeBrew channel).   Back to the original post:

Anyhow, take it from me – this mod is not for the faint of heart.  I see the advantages in that my kids aren’t likely to break the Wii’s mechanical parts, but it sure was a pain to install.

AT&T/BellSouth DSL Ultra is not so Ultra…

I recently ordered DSL direct from AT&T (formerly BellSouth in my area).  DSL direct is their name for naked DSL.  It costs $5 more than if you had it with a regular phone line.  So, I chose the “Ultra” level of service.  It has a whopping 1.5 Mbps downstream and 256Kbps upstream, according to their marketing materials.  I ordered this because I thought it would be sufficient for our uses, figuring that one VoIP call was about 64K – 96K or so.  Yes, it would be a major step down in speed and a small step down in cost (about $10/month less than Comcast), but I thought it would actually be fine.

Color me wrong.  Using Speedtest.net, I’m maxing out at 1.25 Mbps download and 210 Kbps upload.  That’s about 83% of the advertised rate. Sometimes this test has returned rates as low as 800 Kbps download and something like 120 Kbps upload.

To be completely fair, when it was originally installed, I had issues with the DSL sync light dropping out on me at random, dropping me off the Internet with it.  This was annoying, but AT&T does seem to have cleared this up (or perhaps it’s better because the weather has improved).  And I don’t think I’ve had any of the 800/120K speed tests since they’ve fixed the DSL Sync issue.

Now, I’m thinking that I’d need to upgrade to AT LEAST their 3 meg service to have enough bandwidth for our needs.  (Apparently, Hulu thinks you need 2 Mbps to get their videos down in HD with Hulu Desktop.)  So, I’m seriously considering scrapping the whole DSL thing…  I’ve not put the Ooma system on DSL yet, so I can’t say if calls through it are any better, but I’ll try to test that this week.

Use an external drive with your Wii!

The weakest link with a game system like the Wii is the optical disks and drive.  With children handling the disks, they get tons of fingerprints and probably occasional scratches, and that’s if the kids are good about being careful.  I imagine some people have had to buy a second copy of a game that their children have accidentally rendered unreadable.  Add to that the fragility of the slot-loading optical drive that I recently discovered, and issues like what happened to my Wii can happen.

So, when my Wii gets back from being repaired, I’m doing this:  Load / Save Wii Games to Hard Drive

I’ve not done this yet, so what I’m posting here is my general understanding of how this works, but it seems pretty straight forward.  This “hack” basically consists of some software you install via the HomeBrew channel that lets you rip your Wii games to an external USB drive.   Then, you play them off the external drive, never needing to insert the optical disks again.  This keeps the expensive game content free of fingerprints, scratches, the possibility of getting lost, plus from what I understand it is faster to get to the game itself (since there’s no disk spin-up time).  Each game is generally between 1-2 GB, so I should be able to put about 40 games on the 80 GB drive that I removed from my G4 Mac Mini (it’s now in an external case, of course), assuming that it works with the Wii (some drives don’t).  I only have 15 games now, so that should last me for years.  If this drive doesn’t work, I have some others to try too, but I don’t feel that a 250 GB drive is appropriate for something with such a low need for storage.

Once my games are ripped, I’m planning to pack the disks in their original cases with the instructions, and put them in a locked drawer, away from the Wii.  I mean, why will I need the disks again, if they are ripped to an external drive.  (Short of drive failure, or Nintendo breaking this hack in some way with a future software update.)

If you are considering doing this because you want to pirate Wii games, then don’t bother.  Borrowing a game from a friend and ripping it this way is piracy.  So is renting it from a store and ripping it.  Buying a game, ripping it, then returning it or trading it in is still piracy.  Basically, once you no longer have the original disk, but still have the ripped copy, you are pirating the game.

If piracy grows to be rampant on any platform, the people that make a living making the games will simply switch to a more secure platform where they can make a living.  And nobody wants that.

Wii self-repair FAILED…

About a week ago, my 5 year old broke our Wii.  He was attempting to place a game disk into the optical drive when it happened.  We’ve taught him to hold onto the disks by the edge and the center hole.  In this particular case, he was holding onto the center hold with his thumb.  When the Wii began to suck the disk inside, he realized his thumb was stuck.  He ripped the disk out and then it began making an unusual noise whenever a disk was placed inside, plus it never fully accepts disks.

Being a generally handy person when it comes to electronics, I thought I’d try to repair it myself, especially after having read online how easy it was to disassemble the Wii.  I was also encouraged by a post explaining that it was possible to fix a Wii’s optical drive so that it would accept disks (when it previously wouldn’t load them).

The hardest part was getting the Tri-wing screwdriver.  Think Phillips head, but three “wings” in a “Y” arrangement instead of the Phillips cross shape.  Nintendo uses these in an attempt to make it difficult for people to open their units themselves.  I had some success with a precision flat-head screwdriver by wedging it between two of the three wings, but that only worked for about 5 of the tri-wing screws before the flat-head bent to the point that it would no longer work.  After looking at various local stores with no success, and trying to buy a few flat-head packs, none of them being the same as the original one I had, I ran across a post stating that you could make your own, in a pinch, by taking a phillips and filing off two of the 4 “wings”.  This left me with a screwdriver that fit fairly well into two of the three “wings” on these tri-wing screws, and I was able to get it disassembled.  Good thing too, as a few of the tri-wings were starting to strip out on me from my failed attempts at using a flat-head.

Unfortunately, my troubles didn’t stop there.  While I was able to get the Wii to load disks, it would not spin them up, only eject them partially before taking them back in, then finally fully ejecting the disk.

So, I opted for the $75 repair option that Nintendo offers.  For $10 more, they cover the shipping to them as well via Fedex ground via a printable label.  They should have recieved my unit on Friday (but the Nintendo website doesn’t indicate they’ve received it yet).  Hopefully, they can fix it and ship it back by the end of this week.

Tame the IM Jungle

iChat is a really nice chat app that Apple includes with every copy of Mac OS X.  I rarely use the video or audio capabilities, typically using it strictly for instant messaging. But iChat can’t communicate with MSN Messenger, or Yahoo Messenger contacts.  Another annoyance is that if you add accounts for the various services that iChat supports (AIM, ICQ, Jabber, and Google Talk), they show up in separate windows.  (There may be a way around this, but I could not find it.)  Assuming you have friends on MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger, you could end up with a pile of windows on your desktop to handle basic IM tasks (several of them being iChat windows).

You might say “Just switch to Adium”.  That would be one solution, since it supports literally butt-load of IM protocols.  Literally.

For many people, changing to Adium is a fine solution.  But I had other needs:

1.  My wife REALLY likes iChat.
2.  I need a private IM network.
3.  I wanted a centralized way of controlling all the IM that takes place on my network out to all the major IM services.
4.  And I wanted to log it all.

If you have similar needs and a server laying around to use that runs either Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, then the answer to all these things is OpenFire.

My wife home schools several of our children and the majority of their school work is done on computer using the excellent program Switched-On Schoolhouse (which I highly recommend to anyone interested in home schooling their children).  We wanted an instant messaging system the kids could use for school work that was completely separate from the public IM networks.  This way, they can IM my wife with quick questions and get a quick answer without the worry of anyone on the outside talking to the kids when they should be working.  Openfire took care of this easily.

It wasn’t until my wife mentioned how annoying it was that she had an iChat windows for every service that I paid attention to the plug-ins available for Openfire.  I discovered the “IM Gateway” plug-in, which lets you register an internal (openfire) user with their corresponding external IM services.  So, a single openfire user can be linked to multiple external services, but as far as iChat (or any other Jabber-enabled chat client) is concerned, all your MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, etc. friends are accessible through the same IM service.  This gets rid of the multiple window problem my wife had with iChat.

Perhaps I’m a control freak, but I wanted all IM services on my network to run through a central server.  I haven’t locked down the outgoing firewall ports for these IM services yet (to only allow them from the openfire server), but that’s probably coming soon.

I have a teenage daughter and son, and I’m concerned about who they are chatting with.  I’m not terribly interested in the messages they send back and forth to their friends, but I’d like to have the ability to check up on them if I suspect anything is going on, or if, heaven forbid, one of them goes missing.  Openfire’s “Monitoring Service” plug-in handles this nicely, allowing you to either just keep statistics, or to actually log entire conversations.  And, you can search the logs by date, keyword, participants, etc.  Oh, and don’t worry about the privacy of my kids…  I specifically told them I’d log their IM, so they are aware.

Anyhow, there are a bunch more plug-ins for openfire, many of which would be more useful in a business setting (like the one to integrate it with Asterisk, or the FastPath plug-ins for managing chat queues, such as a support team might use).

So, if you have any of these needs, tame that IM Jungle and get openfire!