1. Collect an image of your Wii NAND chip and the console-specific keys.
2. ???
3. Profit

Hopefully this post will shed some light on step 2.

When imaging the NAND BootMii creates two files, nand.bin and keys.bin. The keys.bin file, obviously enough, comprises of a hex dump of all of the console encryption keys. The other file (nand.bin) contains a block-for-block copy of the data stored on the console NAND with, just to be helpful, keys.bin tacked onto the end.

Before you can do anything useful with your NAND image you need to extract the NAND key from dump and put it in a new file. That’s where this post comes in!

getwiinandkey is a simple command-line program, written in C, which reads a BootMii NAND or key dump, extracts the NAND key, and writes it to a new file ready for use.

Usage: getwiinandkey <dump> <output>

The archive contains the source code for compilation on linux/OS X boxes, as well as a pre-compiled binary for Windows XP. I tend to do all my Wii-hacking work on a linux machine so I’m unsure just how useful a Windows binary will be, but for the sake of completeness it’s there!

This is the initial release (read: a bit of a hack which has undergone minimal testing) so please be gentle with it!

That having been said, it has been a while since I wrote anything in C and if you happen to spot something obviously wrong with the code I’d appreciate it if you let me know.

Download:

getwiinandkey-0.1.zip (SHA256: f5fd02faa801508ed0d9a7144036ee790301628d3cd6a35e37b284c10f7b8b57)

There have been loads of ports/re-imaginings since then and one of my favourites is Oolite. It was originally developed for Mac OS X, but I’m led to believe that it has been added to the Ubuntu repositories too.

The learning curve is a bit steep, but it’s well worth a look if you want to play at being Han Solo!

I’ve reinstalled from a USB stick and everything seems to work as it did before. The only loss appears to be my GPG private key.

I have a copy of it on a machine at home, but it’s not accessible over the ‘net, so I’ve decided to create a new keypair.

My new public key is on the MIT keyserver (and probably others by now).

Fingerprint: 6F0B A2DC 2CF8 12A1 4695 5A00 A4D0 7E58 8424 7B1B

There are a couple of reasons why I don’t like online poker. The first is an issue of trust. Between bots, collusion, and poor security, I just don’t believe that all the players in a game are on an equal footing. The second reason is that I think of poker as a social game. I like to be able to see the people I’m playing against!

PokerTH is a cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X & Linux) Texas Hold ‘em poker application, released under the GPL. It includes the option of a local game against AI opponents, as well as a free online setting, allowing the player to join a public table or create a private one to play with friends. I still can’t see the other people at the table, but it’s a great way to learn the game or just play for fun!

My only complaint so far is that the minimum window size is too big for the Eee 701. It’s easy to get around by moving the window every so often, but it would be nice to have the ability to scale the window down for smaller screens.

Download PokerTH (Currently version 0.62)

PokerTH version 0.60 is currently available in the Ubuntu 8.04 repositories.

The hardware support is pretty good “out of the box”, but there are still a number of issues with the initial installation. Thankfully eee.ricey.co.uk have made a shell script available to take care of almost everything automatically. After running the script most of the hotkeys (Volume, screen brightness, sleep) work correctly, but the WiFi one does not.

To enable the WiFi hotkey functionality (Fn + F2) add the following line to /etc/modules

pciehp pciehp_debug=1 pciehp_force=1

Then create the file /etc/acpi/actions/wireless-toggle.sh containing the following

#!/bin/sh

wlan_control=/proc/acpi/asus/wlan
WLANSTATE=$(cat $wlan_control)

case $WLANSTATE in
  1)
    ifconfig ath0 down
    modprobe -r ath_pci
    echo 0 > $wlan_control
    modprobe -r pciehp
  ;;

  0)
    modprobe pciehp pciehp_force=1 pciehp_debug=1
    echo 1 > $wlan_control
    modprobe ath_pci
    echo 0 > $wlan_control
    echo 1 > $wlan_control
  ;;
esac
 

Make the file executable chmod a+x /etc/acpi/actions/wireless-toggle.sh

After a reboot you should be able to toggle the internal wireless card by using the hotkey.