AfterDawn: News

Wii firmware 4.2 kills 'Homebrew Channel'

Nintendo has updated the Wii console firmware to version 4.2 this week, promising the new menu “provides behind-the-scene fixes that will not affect features but will improve the overall system performance.”

Unfortunately for gamers currently using the Homebrew Channel, the update “will also check for and automatically remove such save data (unauthorized modifications to save data or program files) or program files.”

Nintendo's meaning here is clear. Firmware 4.2 will completely delete the Homebrew Channel, and any file related to it, most notably the DVD Player, USB loader and the ability to make your Wii region-free.



If you are running the Homebrew Channel, it is safe to say you do not want to update to 4.2 just yet, as Nintendo seems to be tackling piracy head-on.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 29 Sep 2009 15:06

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• 27 comments

• Pittfan

  I thought something was up!! I woke up this morning with the Wii blue light on, Guess was trying to say there was an Update. thanks for the info . I will not be updating thanks to this

  29.9.2009 16:31 #1

• stuntman_

  thanks for putting this on the main page its really important for people to know this

  29.9.2009 17:21 #2

• bigfamei

  You can't stop us, never have and you never will!!!!!!

  29.9.2009 18:34 #3

• Tristan_2

  Thats pretty messed up, I would understand not being able to play roms but to delete the homebrew channel to stop your wii from being region free? Um...I question this one, the DS is region free right? I always thought the wii was too, This will hurt even the legit players for those who import Japanese games and use the hombrew channel for that purpose, Nintendo is acting like idiots I smell a lot of complaints in the future

  29.9.2009 20:14 #4

• bomber991

  Well that sucks. I do have the homebrew channel, and thus far I have not bothered to figure out how to download and play burnt wii games. Mainly because there's not any games I want to play.
  
  What I've been using the homebrew channel for so far is just playing video files off of the memory stick.

  29.9.2009 22:11 #5

• XdjxedxdX

  Well shit was just gonna update my god brothers Wii to 4.1 with the guide for how to update to 4.1 with home brew installed already. Well glad i did mine 3 weeks ago.LMAO Guess we wait for the Tech Gods to wack this one once again mwahahaha!

  29.9.2009 23:08 #6

• DXR88

  What the hell is wrong with Nintendo there becoming more and more like Sony and MS every day.

  29.9.2009 23:18 #7

• theturbo

  I am so glad i updated mine 3 days ago.

  30.9.2009 03:58 #8

• kyo28

  This is indeed a blow for gamers (like myself), but I put the blame not with Nintendo but with the pirates. It's because Wii piracy has become so rampant, especially in Asian countries outside Japan, that Nintendo needs to take such drastic steps to try and prevent pirates from exploiting the system.
  
  Thanks a lot pirates, you're ruining gaming little by little for the legitimate players.

  30.9.2009 04:09 #9

• canuckerz

  Originally posted by Tristan_2: Thats pretty messed up, I would understand not being able to play roms but to delete the homebrew channel to stop your wii from being region free? Um...I question this one, the DS is region free right? I always thought the wii was too, This will hurt even the legit players for those who import Japanese games and use the hombrew channel for that purpose, Nintendo is acting like idiots I smell a lot of complaints in the futureThe wii was kinda drifting into psp territory where it was hackable to the point where it was scaring off all the 3rd party developers so nintendo could only rely on their in house games to sell their console. They had to do something to win favor in the developers eyes or they'd be shooting themselves in the foot even more so than now.

  30.9.2009 04:31 #10

• Amak

  Originally posted by kyo28: This is indeed a blow for gamers (like myself), but I put the blame not with Nintendo but with the pirates. It's because Wii piracy has become so rampant, especially in Asian countries outside Japan, that Nintendo needs to take such drastic steps to try and prevent pirates from exploiting the system.
  
  Thanks a lot pirates, you're ruining gaming little by little for the legitimate players.ROFL! Try and prevent pirates? All is does is slow them down...barely, though. It is not the pirates' fault that the Wii is just an expensive dust magnet. Place the blame where it belongs: Nintendo.

  30.9.2009 07:24 #11

• embo22000

  Quote:Originally posted by kyo28: This is indeed a blow for gamers (like myself), but I put the blame not with Nintendo but with the pirates. It's because Wii piracy has become so rampant, especially in Asian countries outside Japan, that Nintendo needs to take such drastic steps to try and prevent pirates from exploiting the system.
  
  Thanks a lot pirates, you're ruining gaming little by little for the legitimate players.ROFL! Try and prevent pirates? All is does is slow them down...barely, though. It is not the pirates' fault that the Wii is just an expensive dust magnet. Place the blame where it belongs: Nintendo.I would not blame Nintendo. I would blame people like most of us. My friend has every system he has onwned since the ps2 and xbox to the 360, ds, wii hacked and he has probably over 300 games none bought all free of the net. But the he onws 7 retail copies for the ps3 because its unhackable thus far. So u tell me who's fault is it that companies like sony and now nintendo are so notorious even as far as to stop peoples rights to copy their own legit stuff. It's our fault.

  30.9.2009 19:32 #12

• Amak

  Quote:Quote:Originally posted by kyo28: This is indeed a blow for gamers (like myself), but I put the blame not with Nintendo but with the pirates. It's because Wii piracy has become so rampant, especially in Asian countries outside Japan, that Nintendo needs to take such drastic steps to try and prevent pirates from exploiting the system.
  
  Thanks a lot pirates, you're ruining gaming little by little for the legitimate players.ROFL! Try and prevent pirates? All is does is slow them down...barely, though. It is not the pirates' fault that the Wii is just an expensive dust magnet. Place the blame where it belongs: Nintendo.I would not blame Nintendo. I would blame people like most of us. My friend has every system he has onwned since the ps2 and xbox to the 360, ds, wii hacked and he has probably over 300 games none bought all free of the net. But the he onws 7 retail copies for the ps3 because its unhackable thus far. So u tell me who's fault is it that companies like sony and now nintendo are so notorious even as far as to stop peoples rights to copy their own legit stuff. It's our fault.Not necessarily. Piracy is still not too bad on consoles because it is still scary for some people to mod them.
  
  They stop legit copies because they want control. More money for them (especially true of Sony, who is more than willing to screw consumers over).
  
  If they TRULY cared to stop pirates, they would spend a lot of time reverse engineering their own code and hacking it to look for holes. This is simply to please investors etc.

  1.10.2009 01:57 #13

• MrFawlty

  Why shouldn't Nintendo try and prevent piracy? I know real pirates will always be one step ahead of them, but you can't blame them for trying.
  
  Whenever there's a story like this, loads of people come out and moan about how evil the company is and it's always the people who've downloaded games FOR FREE off the net and don't want to lose them. Get real people and just buy stuff like you're supposed to!
  
  And all those moaning that they now can't play DVDs and movies on their WII. FFS, DVD players are only £20. o_O

  1.10.2009 12:00 #14

• jackl1495

  I know that console companies are often concerned that the same exploits that are used to enable homebrew applications can also be used to enable piracy. It seems to me that the smart thing for them to do would be to "legitimately" enable homebrew applications. I believe that they would see a good increase in the demand for the consuls themselves. And that the impacts on their software sales would be relatively small.

  1.10.2009 13:49 #15

• MrFawlty

  Possibly, but the majority of people who used the 'homebrew' channel was to enable to copied games. To be honest, I don't get why anyone would want to expand what the wii does (Watching DVds/movies etc) as it's video quality is sub par anyway. A £20 DVD player will have a much better quality video output and for £30-£40 you can get one which plays divx and has a usb slot for downloaded stuff as well. Far better. :)

  1.10.2009 13:56 #16

• YukMouth7

  Oh well,
  Wont be long till 4.2 gets hacked also!
  4.0 was suppose to be the end of "homebrew"!
  We got "bombbaner" that fixed that!
  If looking to just play backups then chip the dam thing!
  CHEAP FIX WITH OUT THE MESS!

  1.10.2009 14:37 #17

• branbran

  homebrew works on wii 4.2u.i promise i just got it today.google search hackmii installer v0.5 download.and theirs a new aad6a_v or something like that.drag the private to your sd card and the boot.elf from the hackmii installer.good luck.oh yeah you have to load boot.dol/elf for homebrew from the sd card menu.some how it works now from there.it just freezes when you go 2 data management,channels,sd card.

  1.10.2009 21:01 #18

• akoli

  Well another update i wont be doing ... I have updated all system files to 4.1 even though its stil 3.2U .... Have emulators on memory stick for all snes and megadrive , gb , GBA, SP ,GBC, Gamegear , Master System. Plus all my games loaded on a 320gb hard disc .. (mainly as the laser is a bit flakey being an original release day Wii and a cutscenes it stutters HD fixes this) .. Homebrew channel wont stop nothing ... people will update to 4.2 with the file provided by the hackers.. so as not to remove the ability of homebrew....
  
  Any news on games that will have this update on the disc...

  1.10.2009 23:54 #19

• inagasake

  I'm going to have to get a Wii eventually. The easy piracy sounds awesome. Who cares if the Wii has less high-rated games. You're still getting a good chunk of solid software (63 games are rated 80+) for the price of $200 + SD Card + whatever you use to play copies. So basically you can get the hardware AND play whatever you want (unless it requires extra accessories) for the price of 3-4 new PS3 games.
  
  I experimented a bit with Wii emulation (Dolphin) recently on my computer and got Muramasa to run great on my laptop (not a consistent perfect 60 fps but you don't need 60 fps for a game to run well without any hiccups. I don't even notice the difference between the 40-50 fps I'm getting and 60 fps) but the vast majority of Wii games aren't playable yet on Dolphin. I saw a youtube video of some guy with similar specs to mine emulating No More Heroes and he had like single digit fps, sometimes 10-18 fps if he was lucky. lol. It's still amazing how far Wii emulation has gone though. I guess when you're dealing with old SD tech it's not so hard to achieve with modern computers. But I'll definitely need to get the actual Wii hardware.

  3.10.2009 16:03 #20

• MrFawlty

  Well, it's people like you who are killing off the gaming industry, Buying a console purely because it's easy to get pirate copies? FFS, actually spend money on something that has had a lot of work to produce. This isn't like downloading music which doesn't actually cost that much to produce and where the artists don't see much of the profits anyway, these games cost the developers a huge amount of money to produce and if a game doesn't sell well enough, people lose their jobs.
  
  And before anyone asks, I'm not advocating downloading music either, it's just that the argument against music piracy is a little more muddied.

  3.10.2009 17:34 #21

• inagasake

  It's human nature to want to get something for less (corporations have the same philosophy as well) and if people can so as long as it's not too much trouble for them then they will. Especially in this economy, it makes sense to save money anywhere you can because you never know when you'll need it for a rainy day. Just one moment (getting hit by a drunk driver for eg) you can go from having a comfortable living to seeing your life ruined (losing months worth of income, losing your house, etc.) if you don't have savings to fall back on. I suppose gamers are also ruining the industry for buying used games or waiting until a price drop? Please.
  
  As for the job losses most of the time this is tied to corporate greed. When companies go in the red or even lose profits, they lay off the little worker ants while still paying out a fortune to the big wig executives who mismanaged company finances in the first place. And when a big wig gets fired for doing a bad job, he's rewarded with a very large severance package. We're in the middle of a recession caused by mismanagement and whose paying for that? Not the CEOs. They're salaries are still obscenely large even though they were responsible for their company's poor financial performance. The everyman and everywoman are the ones who take the fall. They're the ones getting laid off and having to sell off their homes. You think when Midway is finally finished it's the top executives who are going to be in deep financial trouble? No, the game programmers, designers, artists, etc. are going to absorb most of the damage.

  4.10.2009 14:19 #22

• MrFawlty

  Regardless of how we view corporate greed (And I actually agree with you on that one), it's all just a numbers game with these people. If game x developed by developer y doesn't sell z number of copies, then that contract is just dropped meaning y lose a shed load of income and could end up going bust.
  
  I hate the way this world is run by greedy fat cats just like the next man, but I also get really annoyed when people try to justify stealing/piracy/whatever_term_you_want_to_give_it in the name of "Oh but I'm poor". Well boo hoo, if something costs £30, IT COSTS £30, if that's too much, DON'T BUY IT. It doesn't mean just because you feel you can't afford something it gives you the right to rip it off. If you can't afford it full price, just wait for it to go budget price, or maybe do something else, hell, why not buy a board game instead!
  
  I feel these comments have drifted off topic a tad! ;)

  4.10.2009 19:32 #23

• XdjxedxdX

  I gotta chime in here .Your all missing the big picture.We as pirates were never going to buy the damn thing in the first place even if there was no such thing as modding or cams for movies !!! So guess how much they lost on me ZERO cause i wouldve never bout it in the first place.Think about it they say they loose Millions Billions a year on sales they would have never gotten in the first place!!!

  5.10.2009 17:43 #24

• MrFawlty

  Now that is talking sense! I get so mad when the RIAA et al chime in with their 'oh but we lost £$£$£$ on lost sales last year' which is utter crap! It's only a lost sale if someone chooses to buy it from a market stall/dodgy online store instead of the store. For those who download stuff, they would never have bought it in the first place.
  
  However.... Please don't use that argument as a justification for downloading stuff. Whatever you think of the greedy corporations, you are still stealing. Yes, it is different from stealing a handbag or a car (I hate those ads) but it is still stealing. You are obtaining something for nothing that has a value - that is stealing in anyone's book. I don't think it should be criminalised but it is still wrong.

  5.10.2009 17:53 #25

• theantonkid (unverified)

  most wii games are crap no wonder people wnt buy them.the games are so bad the should be free.except a notable few, of course. On the other hand games like mw2 and halo reach(coming out fall YEAH) are worth every penny as long as the dont stretch past £40-£50.if nintendo dnt want pirates then make some BLOODY good games for christs sake/.

  17.4.2010 04:45 #26

• anonymous1221 (unverified)

  Piracy will always occur so long as paying the cost of the games, music, movies, and software involves more effort than downloading a torrent or a zip file.
  
  Were in a digital age, we no longer need to cart around huge objects like casettes, CDs, and DVDs to enjoy most forms of media - in fact, its illogical to do so. Its much more efficient to transfer the data onto a high-capacity storage medium such as an HDD or SD card. (Remember Walkman? Me neither.) So this is exactly what people do. A side effect is that this same data can be duplicated into seemingly infinite copies, thus rendering the concept of "supply" meaningless. Without a finite supply, there is really no way to reasonably demand $40-$60 per movie/game, or $15-$20 per CD. When youre putting multiple million dollars into somethings production, that can be kind of a scary prospect.
  
  This is why companies have been slow to adopt digital downloads. Their old business model is now obsolete, and their pricing schemes are even more so. It really isnt the pirates fault that companies are coming up with crippling DRM schemes and asserting unjustified amounts of power over the hardware weve paid for - it *is* the companies fault for refusing to evolve with the times.
  
  And yes, that entails the possibility that the industrys artistic mediums (at least temporarily) wont enjoy the level of quality that they enjoy now, due to constrained budgets caused by the slashed prices. Limitations breed innovation - theyll need to work harder to catch your eye within a minimal budget, just like they had to do back in the entire "golden age" of gaming on 8, 16, and 32-bit processors. The less innovative companies/musicians (the ones dealing out the same old thing time and time again to make grabs at your wallet with minimal effort) will likely fall behind and die. This is a good thing. All mediums will be better off because of it.
  
  But theres another possibility - these slashed prices open up doors for people on *more limited budgets* to *buy* the games. After all, how successful was this generations cheapest console, the Wii? It came out on top, if you recall. Just as Valve has found on multiple occasions thanks to their Steam service, lower prices substantially *increases* the gross amount of profits (contrary to what intuition might expect) - and when taking into account how easy and convenient a digital distribution platform is as opposed to going out to a store and picking up a physical CD containing the same data, its no surprise. Did I mention its also cheaper to implement than producing millions upon millions of CDs and DVDs? And immensely more environmentally friendly? And a lot less likely to be left out and get damaged (assuming you can just redownload products youve paid for, like on Steam)?
  
  My point is, the pirates are the ones that are ahead of the curve. Theyre doing things the right way - the companies are doing things the wrong way. If the companies dont want to cater to their customers needs - if theyd rather implement governance than convenience and affordability like our generation demand - then let them die. Its their own damn fault for lagging behind, not the pirates fault for evolving with the rest of the world.
  
  /rant

  1.4.2012 09:58 #27