4 ms·

It's a really interesting approach, considering how rampant Wii hacking was. Maybe instead of hacking the consoles, pirates will just buy dev kits, paying Ninte

It's a really interesting approach, considering how rampant Wii hacking was. Maybe instead of hacking the consoles, pirates will just buy dev kits, paying Nintendo a bit of a premium for the privilege? Maybe they're hoping to make a little money on the pirates...

monocasa 10y ago
Modern dev consoles use the same DRM scheme as the retail consoles, they simply use a different (most of the time per developer) certificate, and won't boot retail signed titles.
- derefr 10y ago
  But there's nothing stopping someone who wants to play a game "for free" from finding a torrent of a retail copy, downloading it, stripping the retail signature off it, using the SDK tooling to apply their own developer cert's signature, and then booting that on their console. It's certainly possible—and already done—with iOS. Likewise, "homebrew" on such a system would probably be like iOS homebrew is currently: an ecosystem of open-source projects where users are expected to download, compile, and sign the binaries themselves using their personal developer certs.
  - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
    > But there's nothing stopping someone who wants to play a game "for free" from finding a torrent of a retail copy, downloading it, stripping the retail signature off it, using the SDK tooling to apply their own developer cert's signature, and then booting that on their console. The way this has been impeded on previous consoles is to encrypt retail executables and lock the key in some "secure" coprocessor. These obviously do eventually get cracked, but at that point the system is probably so thoroughly exploited that you can do everything with a retail console anyway.
    - sjtgraham 10y ago
      You're exactly describing how iOS AppStore apps work, i.e. Encrypted binary segment that is decrypted when paged in.
  - monocasa 10y ago
    I've seen systems that don't allow you to have direct access to the signing tools; it's an online encryption oracle. With this setup, it could easily blacklist known retail binaries and refuse to sign them.

monocasa 10y ago

Modern dev consoles use the same DRM scheme as the retail consoles, they simply use a different (most of the time per developer) certificate, and won't boot retail signed titles.

derefr 10y ago
But there's nothing stopping someone who wants to play a game "for free" from finding a torrent of a retail copy, downloading it, stripping the retail signature off it, using the SDK tooling to apply their own developer cert's signature, and then booting that on their console. It's certainly possible—and already done—with iOS. Likewise, "homebrew" on such a system would probably be like iOS homebrew is currently: an ecosystem of open-source projects where users are expected to download, compile, and sign the binaries themselves using their personal developer certs.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  > But there's nothing stopping someone who wants to play a game "for free" from finding a torrent of a retail copy, downloading it, stripping the retail signature off it, using the SDK tooling to apply their own developer cert's signature, and then booting that on their console. The way this has been impeded on previous consoles is to encrypt retail executables and lock the key in some "secure" coprocessor. These obviously do eventually get cracked, but at that point the system is probably so thoroughly exploited that you can do everything with a retail console anyway.
  - sjtgraham 10y ago
    You're exactly describing how iOS AppStore apps work, i.e. Encrypted binary segment that is decrypted when paged in.
- monocasa 10y ago
  I've seen systems that don't allow you to have direct access to the signing tools; it's an online encryption oracle. With this setup, it could easily blacklist known retail binaries and refuse to sign them.