Who made the Homebrew Channel music?

picture this you were 10 and you played every single wii something title up to that point you spent hours on virtual console stuff you even spent money to use the lackluster web browser and you are bored you feel empty and just like that a thought starts creeping into your brain you try to resist it you try to fight the urge but it's too late you're already too deep you can't go back so you just accept your fate and start wondering can i commit treason on my way [Applause] [Music] this is the homebrew channel it's a channel made by hackers for you with the homebrew channel you can do pretty much anything you can play all sorts of ram hacks you can emulate any console the poor wii hardware can handle you can customize your wii menu which sometimes leads to disasters and uh yeah you can also pirate get when i was 10 the home real channel was the coolest ever and it's actually the reason why as a kid i got interested in console hacking in the first place but there's one thing about the home real channel that has been stuck with me for 14 years now and that's the banner music this is earth radio and now here's human music [Music] it's short it's catchy you listen to this song over and over and over again every time you open the hombre channel so it slowly becomes a part of you it's a stealth earworm recently i was listening to this again and i was wondering who made this music on the surface this seems like a very simple question you just go on google and google tells you yo go on reddit because someone already made this question and he got an answer and you're like great let's see what deleted has to tell us about this guy it is dark wars by dreamer here's the link to the competition that was held to decide the channel music okay so there was a contest i feel like i'm missing keylor elements here but whatever let's click here and it brings us to the contest page and we have a link to the original version of the music no matter how hard you try to search for this guy it seems impossible to find any sort of information which is weird because most people who own a wii also know about the home real channel the closest thing that i found was this video on youtube by himself my name is dreamer and i feel like i have a little bit of clarifying to do here is that you who did that masterpiece of a music that i can listen on my friend's wii i am not that dreamer that is someone else a producer that randomly happens to have the same name that i do another guy with the same nickname that also makes music he's basically the false shepherd from bioshock dreamer is basically a ghost but fellas today we're gonna be hunting i'm gonna go super deep into the wii hacking history connect the dots and find this guy because i like the 15 seconds of music that he made 14 years ago [Music] the nintendo wii came out in november of 2006 and since it says the greatest minds of an entire generation work together on a very precise goal not paying for games wait my legal team here says i can't say that they wanted to play illegal copies of their own games in case their whispers dis caught fire or something have you ever heard of panasonic they were the company responsible for manufacturing the we drives and before that the game killed ones hardware wise every single wii distributing manufacturer was the same but some of them had a special purpose diva consoles which were destined to journalists and programmers to test games before lists and for this reason create these fancy writable rvtr disks which are just nintendo made kind of dvds that legally don't count as dvds to avoid paying any royalties so if the hardware is identical between the retail and evac drives how does panasonic make them read different stuff well after the physical drive like the piece of metal is made they activate a software factory mode and using that they can flash either a retail firmware or a debug one cool but what if hackers found a way to enable that factory mode at home they could then just flash their own custom firmware and make the drive play backup copies of games oh no guess what happened next and it wasn't even something unprecedented because the gamecube drives were hacked two years prior in 2004 using the same exact factory mode but it wasn't all smooth sailing because to actually access the factory mode you need a password and while the game q1 was widely known panasonic didn't want hackers to mess with their new shiny we drive so they changed the factory mode password to lower case [Applause] three months after the weirdest people could already run back up copies of games on their wheels by using mod chips such as the windja okay so i absolutely need to show you something this is a review of the winja from january of 2007 okay and if you want to know how simple it was to hack with rice this is a picture of the chip and it's literally a ready-made peak microcontroller that's been programmed and they glued this label on it um and these chips were the same ones used to hack playstation drives 10 years prior okay so it's now january of 2007 and you can run copies of existing games using this technique using mod chips but that's pretty much all you can do if you want to run your own software you can't because you need to sign it and you need to trick your way into thinking that nintendo definitely improved what you're running so while mod shifts are the first step we need to go deeper [Music] this is the chaos communication congress a hacking conference that takes place every year in germany since 1984. so just like the orwell book but instead of having people living in a dystopia you have them hacking stuff and using commodore 64s anyway 23 years later is 2007 and well if you give some virgin teenage boys a wii they're gonna play smash on it they're gonna have a tournament but if you give the same wii to some hackers some interesting stuff is going to happen this is bushing he was a legendary hacker and you might have already heard of him here on the channel since he's the protagonist of the we stirred up this video at the time he was 27 and he decided to give a talk about we security at the ccc also known as the 24th c3 did you see okay sorry this talk called the state of the wii is the big bang for we hacking it's the point when everything starts so here's a very quick totally serious abridged version of it when humanity was created on september 14 2001 there was the gamecube but then after five years the wii came out they are the same console good night no okay seriously the wii and the gamecube share the same hardware they don't just have the same dvd drive they have the same cpu and gpu just clock faster and the wii has some more memory thank you nintendo this is definitely the revolution you were talking about before changing the name because it was embarrassing there were some new features like wi-fi bluetooth and sd card slot which are connected to the old parts using what nintendo calls an io bridge you see old parts new parts and the bridge that was easy bushing was very interested in this since the gamecube had already been hacked for years and this similarity could be a good starting point to hack the wii except nintendo lied to their own developers because the bridge is not a bridge this is what experts refer to as a naked wii and we can see every single part here cpu gpu ram wi-fi also shout out to the gamecube ports occupying the top half of the motherboard anyway let's focus on the gpu hollywood is the graphics processor if you see mario on screen jumping that's because hollywood is drawing it but there's something weird going on with hollywood because if we take a look inside this ship we find another ship basically a parasite and this cpu living inside your gpu is what nintendo calls the bridge but why the secrecy why is it hidden inside the gpu what what is it doing here well apart from working as a bridge so effectively connecting the gamecube parts to the wii ones it's a dedicated security processor that controls everything that happens inside your way it's the first thing that turns on when you boot up your wii it's very important for them and they didn't want people to discover it but we are talking about it so it happened this security processor which is more powerful than a nintendo ds cpu lives inside hollywood so hackers decided to nickname it the starlet and we are getting into some deep technical here we are losing the focus so i have a plan to explain this to anyone even people who don't get how this works let's imagine stallet this cold calculating security chip as an anime girl i actually have a point trust me starlet is an anime girl and we is her classroom okay starlet controls every piece of it locking the console down with sha1 and aes security kills which would take some time to crack the only time starlet turns off metaphorically leaving the classroom unattended is when she has to let gamecube games in because gamecube games don't understand this new fancy security so it needs to be off she needs to go outside and touch grass but she's not stupid so before leaving the classroom before leaving it unattended she disables every single we feature hi super smash bros melee i have no issues with you staying here and playing but only one small thing before you do that you can only touch the gamecube hardware not the wii one and you're also only getting one fourth of the memory okay that's that's all you need to play with those versions the idea behind this was that if hacker somehow found a way to play gamecube homebrew on a wii like panasonic being lazy they would only have access to the gamecube hardware and one fourth of the ram essentially being confined in a very secure sandbox nintendo's plan was brilliant and honestly worth having a dedicated security processor so it really sucked when they completely this up do you wonder what happens to the remaining three-fourths of memory when a gamecube game is on starlet forgets to clean them which means that they still have weak data on them unencrypted because storage is not there and by wii data i mean 75 of the super secret keys that's a dumb mistake nintendo now 75 is a lot but it isn't a hundred and the team still had to somehow obtain the missing 25 percent or all of this would be useless so how do you do that well you have to employ the most secret anime weapon of all which is called a pair of eyebrow tweezers yeah they connected some solder points on the motherboard and by doing that the memory bank switched and they got the remaining kiss i wonder what the name of the team is oh so team tweezers now had the keys to the wii classroom but they still had to prove everyone that they could run code in wii mode so they took the image of an existing game lego star wars modified its content to include a small demo fake signed it burned it and ran it it's not really lego star wars but uh right now we're still basically patching other codes we found all i can show is that we do have code running it is running in wii mode not gamecube because if you actually have access to uh all the hardware this is what happens if you don't have encrypted memory on december 28 2007 wii hacking was finally real this was awesome but you still needed a mod chip to buy pasty hardware protection and run a fake sign disk what if you wanted to run homebrew on a wii that wasn't modified well [Music] this is the legend of zelda twilight princess it was a launch title for the wii which is convenient so when you first create a save the game lets you choose your heroes name and your horse's name for a maximum of let me check uh okay eight characters so if you try and go over eight characters the game wouldn't simply allow you to input more letters but it only checks for this when you're first creating the save not when the save file is actually already created and you can probably see where i'm going with this so among the other kids team tweezers dumped from the previous attack they also got the ones needed to sign save data and this means they could now around with sales however they wanted so they took a twilight princess save file and they replaced the horse's name with a very very very long one so long that it wasn't even a name anymore it was a small program that by using a buffer overflow exploit was able to run any home rule from your sd card as long as it was called boot.elf and placed on the route this modified save file was released in february as the twilight hack and everyone was now able to run homeview on their wii without having a mudship it was just a matter of owning zelda and owning an sd card this was awesome and groundbreaking but it still wasn't quite convenient because every time you wanted to run another home view you had to connect the sd card to the computer and change the file and then run zelda wait wait i have an idea write this down you know what would be cool like a hub some sort of channel where you could run different home views from oh so do you remember when a few months prior bushing showcased the very first demo of we homebeer running by using a modified version of lego star wars that could be done because the hardware check on the physical disk was disabled by using a mod chip and while the wii on the software side tries to check if that software you're running is legit by verifying its signature which is like a password it basically tells the wii if what you're running is approved by nintendo or not nintendo this up so bad you could just use zero as a signature and it would work so you know what nintendo was also using this system for channels you know those applications that stay on your wii menu and don't require any sort of hardware check to run yeah those ones i wonder what's going to happen last [Music] okay so during the tried hack development a new guy joined the tweezers team marcan he was only 17 but he definitely knew what he was doing he was the entire reason why the pride hack was able to put humvee from the front sd card slot this guy just like bushing is a legend so he and all the other guys on the team started working on a channel an actual channel that you would run from your wii menu and that would boot humbly you from there if you have a mod chip you just burn an installer disk and install the channel using that if you don't have a mod chip you can just use zelda and the twilight hack to install this new channel technology wise everything was ready but there was still one key thing one very important detail that was missing something not sacrificable for a channel that has to stay on your wii menu and that you get to experience every time you boot up your console so you can't escape this thing if it looks bad you're gonna be like why did i install this in the first place so yeah uh you want we channels to look and sound good so team tweezers hosted two contests on webrew.org one for the banner graphics and one for the banner music the first contest the banner graphics one is held on march 26 and some very detailed specifications about the wii banner format are given by the team explaining how the banu should be made and the winner will work with marcan and create a final animated version of the graphics 28 and raiser sent each one with its own distinct style but the winning one is this water film one by sully i tried looking at this guy and it's very easy to find him and not only that but he's now working full time as a graphics designer and this is in his portfolio so that's very very cool but now we need to talk about the second contest the banner music the contest for the banner music was held one week after the graphics won with three simple requests the music has to fit in with the other wii channels but it also has to automatically fit in with the banner graphics made by soli and finally it needs to have a completely copyright free license so that it can be used anywhere needed without having to pay for royalties each time 20 pieces of music are sent and some of them are still online [Music] this could have been the home real channel music in a different timeline or something and you know it's 2008 because someone left a rude comment under it but the actual final winner was this unnamed piece of music by dreamer that we know and love [Applause] [Music] okay so let's take a second take a breath we just explained basically the entire history of the home real channel and mostly hacking in 15 minutes and i swear to god i didn't just do that because i wanted to dunk on panasonic i actually have a point with this okay so dreamer is a very elusive person with a super generic nickname but we can use all the information we just gathered from learning about the home real channel history to identify him if you remember at the beginning of this video we talked about another guy named dreamer which made a youtube video saying he was not the homebrew channel dreamer but just another guy that also made music that had the same nickname okay this is not the dreamer we are looking for but this completely unrelated guy which in the comments people call young john is actually the key to finding the real dreamer so let me explain this very calmly if we check the comments of this video between all of them we find two very interesting comments which are made by another person named dreamer talking about the pronunciation of the nickname and in the second comment he makes is actually saying that he's a part of fail overflow fail overflow is the current name for team tweezers they changed it because they didn't want to be only associated with we hacking they also worked on some ps4 stuff if i remember correctly but what this guy is saying essentially is hey i'm the dreamer you're looking for i'm the guy that was in that hacker team he's saying this very subtly but he's saying it and i was like okay if this is the real dreamer we just need to go to his youtube profile page and from there we go to the about page and bang we instantly get access to his social media contacts we can ask him how he's doing his social security number everything okay so uh like i tried doing that but he has nothing on his profile it's completely anonymous so i was basically out of luck unless i actually used the power of correlation if we go back to his second comment here he said one key thing that actually could open the door to finding this guy someone linked this video to him on twitter so if he's not lying and if he's actually the real dreamer we should be able to find him on twitter problem is twitter has like a thousand dreamers and i'm not going to check them all because it's one very time consuming two very creepy so i have another way which is smarter and faster and stronger sorry i had to say it was stronger than me okay so let's suppose this guy's legit and he's actually the real dreamer twitter is a social network so he will probably be using it to interact with people he knows what we need to do is find one of these people with a public profile check who they are following and bang we instantly get access to the real dreamer profile however to do this we need a list of people who are or were involved with him at some point of his life and we do we just spent half of the video talking about his people bushing and marcon which were the main figures behind the home real channel creation now as many of you know bushing unfortunately passed away in 2016 so i'm not going to check his profile we are going to see what markham is doing instead merkin is very active on twitter mostly working on apple serial related projects such as azah linux for example and his profile is public we can see every single person that he's following all 501 of them this is going to take a while but using control and f and scrolling further we should be able to scan through all of them and see if he's following dreamer the real dreamer one tweeter later on dreamer this is dreamer he's followed by marcan the profile pictures matching and he's outright stating to be a member of failed overflow we got him where do we go from here well the first thing i did was feeding google the link to his twitter profile so that hopefully by the time you're watching this video just googling dreamer wii twitter should give you some results without having to social engineer like i did and second i find it criminal that this guy made a beloved piece of music that people have listened to millions of times and nobody knows anything about him so why don't we interview this guy i mean the internet knows nothing about him so i prepared a message with my non-existing credentials and i just asked him if he wanted to give me an interview and he accepted not only that but he actually said he likes my videos so i'm officially homebrew channel music guy approved i guess so today we're going to be interviewing this guy for the first time ever on the internet but there's one small problem he only agreed to a written anonymous interview and this is a video so i can just like show you the text that wouldn't work so i invited a fellow youtuber i'm not a casualty and he's going to be voicing dreamer for the interview so you can still keep watching like normal or in case you're a zoomer i know you're going to put this in the background while playing minecraft and doing like three things the first real question i would like to ask you is how do we read your nickname is it dreamer or doctor mister it's dreamer the nickname i went by for years before entering the wii scene i believe i left out the vowels when that nickname was not available to register at some we related website and it stuck for my involvement in the scene recently and amazingly some people are taking great pains and pronouncing it as is all consonants and i really appreciate their effort where are you from and how old are you i'm currently living in germany and i'm in my 40s now although i don't look like it lack of sunlight exposure has its benefits i suppose what do you do in your life for a living i've been professionally programming and designing websites for more than 25 years what are your hobbies i like playing with all sorts of small electronics embedded systems microcontrollers old console systems of the 80s i still make music from time to time at the moment i really enjoy the techniques and aesthetics of chiptune music and i'm trying to improve my japanese although i feel i've actually gotten worse in the last few years okay so let's just dive straight into the wii related questions since that's what you're here for how did you get in contact with the tweezers team can you give us more information about that after demoing what would eventually become the homebrew channel with a silent banner team tweezers made a public call for banner music submissions on webrew.org one would upload the audio file to a server and make the entry on the wiki after my submission was chosen in an internal vote i became a member of the team i've also been working on graphics for the channel and other related projects boot me for example and much more than music i became the graphics guy of the group in the process we all became very good friends and to this day we hang out both virtually and in real life what software do you use or did you use to produce music i've been using trackers to make music since the very early 90s and i still do on 8-bit machines like the game boy or the commodore 64. i very much enjoy creating music within their limitations and figuring out how to bend those boundaries in the late 90s i became aware of a project called jessicola buzz a hybrid of trackers and virtual synthesizers for some time i used it extensively to create music and during that time i used it to create the homebrew channel music all in all i have not been entirely unsuccessful making music i have a release on vinyl and actual radio airplay to show for myself but for the time being that 15 second loop from 15 years ago is the best known music i've ever made how long did it take for you to work on the banner jingle the sketch i submitted probably just took an evening or two but the final version was a process that took several iterations over a few weeks not only for musical tweets the bass line for example changed quite significantly but also for very specific mastering we wanted to have good music but we also wanted to match the wii's other channel's aesthetics as closely as possible including volume and equalization and i believe we achieved that to this day some people think it's made by nintendo themselves are there any extended or alternate versions of the theme because when i was researching for this video i stumbled upon the homebrew channel installer disk and that one has a slightly different version of the music [Music] the music you know is all that exists it was very much tailor made to fit the purpose of the banner with an intro [Music] and a looped section [Music] you have to keep in mind that we were in very much uncharted territory at the time we just began to understand how channel banners work and where the limits are for example the install this version you mentioned is a much shorter version because disk banners are much more limited in size than channel banners in the end i'm very happy that the banner music worked out as well as it did for a short time we thought about having background music in the channel itself but that never went anywhere technically it would have been not too difficult i seem to remember that we eventually simply decided against a permanent noise background that being said i have a good idea on how to make a full track from the banner loop and maybe someday i will get around to actually making it sometimes i joke about making a concept album based on the homebrew channel music do you still have the project file for the theme or is it lost to time because it would be cool to actually have on high quality version published to bandcamp or soundcloud or whatever i get asked that a lot and yes i still have the project files the problem is the software just scola buzz fell in and out of development over the last 20 years and changed a lot under the hood with some of the generator and effects plugins not working anymore on more recent versions while i can get the basics of the track working it's almost impossible to completely recreate the environment i used 15 years ago so for now there's no higher quality version than the one in our public repository would you ever consider receiving external help to make the project work again the sentiment is appreciated but i'm not very fond of the idea of giving out my music to strangers but i'm also sure it's not necessary if i manage to sit my procrastinating ass down and put in some effort i can certainly get the essential parts working in a more modern setup people on reddit have spread the rumor that the official song title is dark waters but according to my research that's actually the name of the graphics theme that you made can you confirm or deny this that is correct the song never had a proper title just homebrew channel music dark waters was the name of the second darker graphics theme that came with the hombre channel when we made it themeable alright so you're german as you just told me and this is kind of an obvious question but have you ever attended the ccc and are you still in contact with the other members of the team do you still talk with them of course i've visited the congress for a good 15 years it had been the yearly occasion for all of us to meet up in person we've made a few appearances as a group recently many of our members appear in public individually with their own projects now but we still are a very tight-knit group we keep close in contact with each other and also meet in person if circumstances allow it which considering we're all spread around the globe happens more often than you'd think are you currently working on any projects because i would really like to plug them here if that's the case nothing worth mentioning at the moment you can follow me at underscore dreamer underscore on twitter and if there's something new i would announce it there but for now my twitter feed is remarkably empty alright this has been awesome thank you for accepting the interview you finally shed light on who you are and how this was made and yeah just thank you for participating in this video and accepting this interview anytime you're very welcome so we did it no wait i need to say this in the same tone piracy nicole did in that video so guys we did it so guys we did it we actually got every single element in our bucket list and most importantly i got to tell you how nintendo failed and how team tweezers won and that's satisfying there's some people i need to thank for making this video possible in the first place of course dreamer for actually accepting the interview and not blocking me i'm not a casualty for voicing dreamer rodrigo copetti of copacity.org because that website is just mwah it has all sorts of informations and pictures about the wii hardware and it saved me from having to disassemble a we myself actually bought a wii for this video and yeah i haven't opened it it's still whole like milk and finally aurora right because she somehow got me in contact with marcan i didn't get to interview him like dreamer but i managed to ask him a few questions about we hacking and i hope i got everything right but in case i didn't let me know in the comments or just tell me whatever you want in the comments about the video about your life about the meaning of life so yeah leave a comment if you want and i'm definitely not saying this just because comments boost the video in the algorithm speaking of which this video has been [Music] you

Channel: f4mi

Views: 608,530

Keywords: homebrew channel, music, wii, hacking, drmr, team twiizers, fami, f4mi, twilight hack

Id: EZV0cJnIZTY

Length: 32min 33sec (1953 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2022