Hacking the Nintendo Wii Mini | MVG

[Music] the nintendo wii mini would be an interesting footnote in nintendo history it first appeared exclusively in canada in december of 2012 and would eventually arrive in the us almost a year later and it was the third and final revision of the we family retailing for 99 the wii mini was a stripped-down wii to the bare bones with only the ability to load physical wii games from disk removed would be the sd card slot its internet capabilities gamecube controller and memory card ports not only that it would contain a modified version of the wii channel and only supported composite video signals and there was no option to run component cables at 480p there was also no way to play gamecube games the idea behind the wii mini was to just play wii games without the fuss just connect up to any television and play but as a byproduct of the hardware while the wii has had its security defeated for many years the wii mini was considered unhackable simply because it has features removed that the existing wii exploits rely on if we take a close look at the ui mini's expansion ports you only get one a simple usb port on the back now the obvious choice might be to somehow take advantage of this and use a usb to lan adapter but this is something nintendo had clearly considered when developing the wii mini and even the official nintendo land adapter developed for the wii is not supported if we take a look at the current 2021 guide for wii hacks there are three that can be used str2 hacks letterbomb and flash hacks on the wii mini the absence of any internet connection renders the str2 hacks unusable the popular letterbomb exploit requires an sd card slot which is not available and flash hacks also requires an internet connection without these methods that work easily on the wii for years there would be no easy way to hack the wii mini and the hackers mostly gave up perhaps the motivation wasn't there as it was just easier to buy a wii and hack it to your heart's content but as always when there is a will there is a way every wee from the first model out of the production line to the final revision of the wii mini has one common feature the controller known as the wiimote this was the primary game controller for the wii that features an accelerometer eight digital buttons a d-pad and a gyroscope its connectivity to the wii console is via bluetooth and a sync button on both the console and wiimote can pair up up to four controllers bluetooth then would be the obvious target to exploit and in 2019 security researcher known as full metal 5 announced that an exploit to the bluetooth stack was discovered found in the nintendo wii known as blue bomb the exploit takes advantage of a bug discovered in the broadcom bluetooth stack it intercepts bluetooth data between two devices and uploads a payload to the hardware which then allows for unsigned code execution for a full technical write up on how the exploit works full metal 5 has a guide on the exploit how it was discovered and how it was defeated and i'll leave a link to that in the description below but let's of course test this out for ourselves the website we hacks.guide will walk you through what you need to do to perform the blue bump exploit on a wii mini and it's surprisingly easy there is no opening up of the hardware no soldering and no fuss but you do need a few things namely a usb bluetooth adapter and any cheap one on amazon or ebay should work and a machine capable of running linux that supports this adapter you could easily install a linux virtual machine on windows or similar but something like a raspberry pi with ubuntu also works and this was my preferred method so to set all this up first we download the hackme installer and copy it to a usb flash drive and then insert that into the back of the wii mini this installer contains the homebrew channel and boot me which is our entry point for running homebrew on any wii console and the wii mini is no different then on the raspberry pi simply download the script that will set up the blue bomb exploit run it and enter the information it's asking about your wii mini in my case it's usa and ntsc once you've entered everything the script will then idle with the message waiting to accept and this is where we're waiting on the wii mini now let's power up the wii mini but we don't want to enable any wiimotes now by pressing the sync button on the way mini which is the small red button on the left hand side this will pair the console with the bluetooth adapter on the linux machine and with any luck the message will change to got connection handle and then push its payload to the wii mini via bluetooth which will then launch into boot me at this point we have successfully hacked the wii mini [Music] and now the hack me loader will run and bring up a familiar screen and from here we can install the homebrew channel on a regular wii we would also install bootme but this needs sd card support and that's obviously not included on the wii mini so we must skip over this so what can you do with a hacked nintendo wii mini well it turns out quite a lot the first and obvious step is to install the homebrew channel and this of course will allow for all unsigned homebrew apps and games and from here i recommend installing preloader and following the guide to protect from any bricking of the system which of course is very important and from here well it's up to you but i recommend installing d2x and installing cios to allow games to run from usb either via using weflow or the usb loader now one of the more interesting apps that i recommend you take a look at once you've homebrew modded your nintendo wii mini is the clean rip and this is something that i would recommend on any wii system and that offers the ability to take your physical media and insert it into the disk drive and then allows you to rip your games directly onto your usb stick now remember we don't have access to the sd card slot on the wii mini but we still have access to the re-usb now it does take about 25 minutes or so to rip one of the games to disk but you can essentially back up your entire wii game collection onto usb and if you have access to a large usb drive then you can take your external usb drive and the wii mini with you on the road and have access to all those amazing wii games without having to bring your collection with you the wii mini frustratingly has no ethernet support as we mentioned but this can also be enabled with the ethernet enabler app by 4 metal 5 and this allows the wii mini to connect to the internet via ethernet cable it's meant to run once and injects an ethernet configuration into the system settings something that can normally not be done with the wii mini system menu and this is pretty awesome stuff but perhaps the final omission on the wii mini that can be enabled and i think is the coolest feature is the back compat with gamecube games the tool known as nintendon't will handle this for us now technically nintendo's isn't an emulator rather it takes advantage of the wii's hardware which is effectively an overclocked gamecube while nintendo removed the ability to read and load gamecube disks there is no way that they could remove gamecube support and this is a reason why you can use nintendo on the wii u in any case nintendo works really well obviously you lose the ability to use gamecube controllers as the hardware doesn't support them but gamecube games run fine from usb and you can still use your wii controllers i mentioned that the wii has a really great and established homebrew scene and the choices are really there with what you want to play for me i recommend loading up on emulators such as the excellent genesis gx plus a fantastic sega mega drive genesis sega cd and master system emulator you'll have an absolutely wonderful time with this [Music] but at the end of the day the wii mini still has its limitations there's simply no way to re-add an sd card or enable 480p progressive scan support or add gamecube controllers or memory cards to the hardware at least without some major modifications to the hardware itself but that really shouldn't be the point it's just great to see that almost after a 7 year wait the wii mini can finally be hacked and i think that's awesome the device which was considered mostly a collector's piece to some and worthless to many others finally has some value and purpose thanks to the homebrew and modding community now if you want to hack your own wii mini i will leave links to everything in the description below but for now we are going to leave it here for this episode thank you so much for watching don't forget to like and subscribe and thank you for all the support on the channel and i'll catch you guys in the next video bye for now [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 475,257

Keywords: nintendo wii, wii, homebrew, wii mini, mvg, modern vintage gamer, bluebomb, bluetooth, exploit, hacking, hack, nintendo wii u, linux

Id: rleF4f1dBVo

Length: 10min 8sec (608 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mennydrives]

It's pretty crazy what homebrew developers have managed on older Nintendo hardware, using newer Nintendo hardware.

Now network connectivity? That's fine, we'll use the one i/o USB port to re-add networking support and GameCube ports.

Oh, no GameCube mode? That's fine, we'll force it back in.

[u/DrBrogbo]

I honestly had no idea that machine even existed! That's really cool.

The Wii is such a fantastic homebrew machine, though. I've had one hooked up to my TV since the day I bought it, and I play co-op NES games all the time on it.

[u/MrkJulio]

Is the lone usb powered enough to load wii games no problem? I always tried that on my old wii and always needed the Y cable to load things up

[u/[deleted]]

I follow gaming news pretty closely, and pretty much always have.

Somehow, today is the first day I’m learning of the Wii Mini.