Reports: New update destroying Wii consoles

Numerous Wii owners are facing the issue of a broken console due to the latest system update.

[Valay]

I was thinking about updating last night, but I decided not to. Really glad I didn't now.

[gamesR4fun]

most wii's arnt hooked up online anyways but still i hope they replace or fix the ones they busted.

bet this was to try n stop teh warez...

[UnSelf]

wii would like to pray

[2Spock]

I haven't had my WII on in so long i probably am 3 updates behind. I just unplugged it so it wouldn't even pull any juice.

[WenisWagon]

The Red Ring of Death, the Yellow Light of Death, and the Corrupt System Files of Death. The circle is complete, crappy hardware for everyone!

[mfwahwah]

@1.1

They are fixing the broken ones with a free repair.

[Roper316]

stinks for the Wii gamers. My Wii has buried in the closet for over a year so luckily this won't affect me.

[Voice_of_Reason]

90% of the people on N4G claiming to own a Wii dont actually own one..When the usage reports come out its always the PS3 back with te xbox and gamecube. not the Wii. Sadhow many people prefer to waste time on a console they know nothing about while one they claim to love fails to beat the Wii in any meaningful way that matters to gamer makers.

[SpoonyRedMage]

I updated but nothing happened luckily. phew.

[topgeareasy]

E74

[nikola987]

"I’m surprised that they took the bold move of pushing an updated boot2 — I guess all of the cool kids are doing it these days. Their boot2-updating code (ES_ImportBoot) is not well-tested; they’ve never updated boot2 on retail consoles before, and in our testing we discovered that it often fails to write out ECC data for the new version of boot2 that it writes. We should expect to see some number of bricked Wiis from this; the code is so buggy that we decided to write our own for the HackMii installer"

[The Great Melon]

Now that's funny. It shows hackers are always 2 steps ahead and 1 step behind.

[Ron_Burgundy]

there goes the wii not failing, PS3 is the best long lasting console because of excellent Sony tech and hardware

[MegaPowa]

this only happened because they had stuff like bootmii and homebrew so it's not the wii's fault its because they hacked their system

[nikola987]

actually if you install new bootmii you are safe from bricking your Wii during update :)))

[Mahr]

"PS3 is the best long lasting console because of excellent Sony tech and hardware"

Uh, you do realize that Sony had a firmware update a while back that did exactly the same thing that this article is talking about, right?

http://www.informationweek....

[Trevorthenerd]

uh no this is not nintendos fault :) nintendo always make the most reliable hardware...

[crck]

I don't know anyone that has a Wii hooked up for online. None of them even know how to do it. Good thing for Nintendo that their online is junk I guess. Less systems affected by this.

[Relientk77]

lol I just told my roommate not to update his Wii and he was glad I warned him

Yay for checking N4G

:)

[FuckinUsername]

The White Update of Chaos!

[Panthers]

Gotta have names for all these console failures now-a-days dont we.

[FuckinUsername]

Red Ring of Death
Yellow Light of Doom
White Update of Chaos

I kinda like it :3

[mfwahwah]

SONY has gotten the most beef for bricking systems with firmware updates, so I don't think Nintendo should get all the cred here.

[Mahr]

The funny part of all this is that there's a Homebrew program for fixing that very problem.

[Product]

True, although im still against HomeBrew and not paying for games in general. As much as i hate big corporations the small people at those jobs deserve my money.

[Mahr]

The problem with that line of thinking is that there are many applications for Homebrew that have absolutely nothing to do with software piracy.

Getting your Wii to play DVDs, bypassing the region lock so that one can play legally-obtained imports that Nintendo of America has no interest in bringing stateside, playing Brawl with different skins, streaming media and OS features that the 'Wii is not hardcore' crowd are always whining about the system not having, backing up your NAND so that you can recover from a routine update turning your system into a several-hundred dollar paperweight... none of these have anything remotely to do with copyright infringement, or stealing games.

I wouldn't let Homebrew *touch* my system (as console manufacturers have been quite unequivocal in establishing that they think everyone who does any sort of modification to their system is a persona non grata), but even I can appreciate the features it affords one. Most of which are completely legitimate.

If gaming corporations could -- instead of, say, trying to tear down the whole scene (good luck with that, by the way) -- do a better job of distinguishing between the Homebrew users who use it for gross things like emulators and the users using it for perfectly reasonable things, then they wouldn't have to do insane things like mess around with the console's programming and potentially pooch the Boot software.

[Product]

I completely agree with you but for the most part people have HB for reasons that are not legit.

Nintendo just needs to think of a way to make the features we want from HB a regular channel. Piracy was killing the music industry, but Apple thought of a way to correct the most irritating part of buying a cd, i only want 3 songs off this cd why do i have to buy a $15 cd for a few songs? Hence the 99 cent per song music store was created.

Now Apple's iTunes owns about 20%(almost) of all purchased music sales.

Nintendo needs to do the same with the Wii. Why do people have HB? What could we offer to stop this from happening? How can we execute those findings?

Edit: I love the person who follows me to disagree with me......i love fans.

[Mahr]

"I completely agree with you but for the most part people have HB for reasons that are not legit."

One of the issues here is that we can't actually say this sort of thing with any real degree of certainty. You think that most Homebrewers are in it for the scuzzy emulation, whereas I have the impression that, as with the modchip community, the pirates are in the minority and that most of them are in it for the imports.

I admit, I could be wrong in my assumption, and I'd honestly love to see an actual numerical breakdown of that sort of thing to know for sure. The problem is that, to my knowledge, there hasn't actually been any survey of that kind into this matter, again because the attitude of most console-makers is that modding a console has no purpose beyond piracy and that the *entire* community is criminal. With that kind of extreme stance, we'll never get anywhere and we'll never get an accurate assessment because they're not actually interested in accurately characterizing the situation.

"Nintendo just needs to think of a way to make the features we want from HB a regular channel."

It wouldn't be particularly difficult on Nintendo's part. Homebrew, and things like it, exist almost entirely because of the ease with which the internet provides for transferring information and because most of the features it provides are things which are already technically possible.

The Wii *has* all the necessary hardware for the DVD-playing and streaming media, the capacity to run an OS, and the ability to play games from other regions. You don't have to crack the Wii open, put in any chips, or replace any of the inner components because the functionality is all there; it's just lacking the programming to access them. Nintendo could probably get most of those features into the Wii via a simple system update -- if they weren't so busy using those updates to try to stamp out any and all alterations that a person made to *his/her own* console.

Of course, things like the region-lock are in there intentionally because... well, Nintendo brought it to games back in the NES/SNES days of trying to control third-parties, and SCEA advanced it to the point where by the time you breached the region-lock, you also breached the copy protection, evidently to protect us from the dangers of games with Japanese in them.

As to why they *still* insist on making anyone in the US who wants to, say, play something like Disaster: Day of Crisis without purchasing a whole new system all the way from Europe have to resort to things like Homebrew, well, beats me.

"Piracy was killing the music industry"

I rather doubt that videogame piracy is happening on even remotely the same level as was happening in the music industry. I mean, I seem to recall reading somewhere that the number of people who have their Wiis online is relatively small -- the number of *those* people who have homebrew is even smaller. Despite what Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony say to the contrary, it's unlikely that all of *those* people are using the emulator functions.

When you take all of that together, you have what I can only imagine is a miniscule fraction of Wii-owners.

As a brief aside, I don't even think *all* emulation is dubious, though here I would cede that the vast majority probably is. But let's say I wanted to play Suikoden II. I could buy it on Ebay and play it on my Playstation, but A. the going price is currently in the ballpark of two hundred dollars and B. Not one *cent* of that money would actually get to the people who made the game because it's no longer produced or sold first-hand.

All that money would go to someone of such poor character that they'd have no problem whatsoever with charging someone two hundred dollars for a game released two generations ago.

Clearly, the immoral thing to do here would be to actually pay them.

[yoshiroaka]

Well they gotta find some way to get people to buy more now that everyone in the world has one...cept me!

=p

[Shnazzyone]

no problems here... wonder if this is happening becuase of user error or genuine mistake by Big N. On the positive side nintendo will fix it if it's their fault. But part of me wonders if this is only happening to homebrew users. If so... kinda messed up.

[nikola987]

no,it could happen to anyone :) part of update(boot2v4)is bugy,and can crash during update

[Ldubbz]

Have weird updating issues with the Wii? For me, the updates work fine, but they seem to take FOREVER sometimes. The Wii will be blinking like some kinda drunk disco light for what seems like days on end (which since moving the Wii into the bedroom, woke up the gf who in turn woke me up at 3am yelling to turn off the Wii!). And my WiFi reaches speeds of 10MBit all the time, so I dont know why it would be so slow.

Anyone?

[forum_crawler]

It may be because of your wireless router. Unless you have a gigabit wireless router that actually does gigabit wifi, then you will be stuck with slow speeds.

I changed mine and saw a considerable improvement on download speeds. Same is true for my PS3.

[ChickeyCantor]

open your ports.

[SuperStrokey1123]

what happens if you are out of warranty and a mandatory update happens that ruins your wii? Is nintendo responsible for this?

[nikola987]

YES! :)

[Xander-RKoS]

My Wii works fine after the update.

[forum_crawler]

Mine worked flawlessly. As mentioned before, this could be something that only affects people with homebrew.

[Kwertie]

It's more likely something that was designed to affect those with homebrew. Nintendo did issue a warning of sorts saying it (unauthorized save files) could damage the console. Obviously the save files don't, but low and behold, Nintendo released a firmware update and now all of a sudden these save files do cause damage.

[Kwertie]

No problems here. I'm assuming it's modded consoles or consoles with hacked game saves.

[Rmagnus]

i think it only affects mod wii

[lizard81288]

one of the main reasons is because the wii isn't region free.
however after getting geckoOS i looked into other things, like DVD player and an MP3 player too. plus some of the homebrew games(granted aren't the best looking) still fun to play.
i used the HBC more than the wii its self, because of these features.
plus i can play games off my SD card...nintendo ಠ_ಠ why haven't you done this yet? it would be alot easier than picking and choosing which VC/wiiware games stays and goes

luckily i have seemed to slip through the cracks somehow and i'm still on 3.2
:D

[condorstrike]

"True, although im still against HomeBrew and not paying for games in general. As much as i hate big corporations the small people at those jobs deserve my money"

WTF: 1st Homebrew is just that H.O.M.E brew, app made by users, not pirating.

and 2nd WTF is up with this commie mentality that Big Corporations are evil, People make money, they save, open a business and become big, thus hiring your dumb ass, so that one day you might make it big.

Google anyone.
as long as they're legit of course.;)
Jeez.

[Product]

"thus hiring your dumb ass"
"WTF"
"commie mentality"
"Jeez"

I wrote one sentence and you blow up. Chill.

[foreverflame]

Now Dumbass Wii fans can upgrade to to a next gen console once there gamecube 1.5 starts bricking.