Wii homebrew development has been increasing ever so slightly since the original twilight hack was discovered. The original hack was discovered by inputting a huge name as the name for your Zelda character; this then sent the memory into buffer over flow mode, which then enabled some clever people to run a script on it. Now once this twilight has been run you can choose to install the wii homebrew channel which will allow you to run homebrew without having to run the hack every time, the big feature I personally like about the homebrew channel is that it allows you to update it via the console, this cuts out the tediousness of having to go through the whole process every time there’s an update. There is a wide range of applications already available, which include things like emulators, games and media programs. To install these applications it’s a simple process of copying the downloaded file on to the SD card. One controversial application that was leaked by beta testers, is been developed by Waninkoko, (he now says that he has stopped any further development due to the application being leaked), the program is a wii iso loader; by the name I’m pretty sure you know what it does. The application has received a lot of criticism by the gaming community, due to the iso loader only having one real purpose, to load pirate games, the wii community is worried that the same would happen to the wii what has happened to the psp, where the quality of games has dropped to nothing due to a near 90% piracy rate. It’s advised that you do not try the application due to it been in beta, and running a high risk of bricking your console.
October 14, 2008
Wii Homebrew
October 13, 2008
Ad sense for Games?
We all know that adverts on WebPages help pay for the running costs etc, but do we really want this in a game? Ad Sense is basically an advertisement service run by the guys and gals at Google, People who own websites can sign up to this service, which will then allow Google to show text, image and video advertisements in designated areas, website owners then receive money from Google when people click on these advertisements. The same process is being beta tested for games, which will probably take off due to having the Google behind it, which has a surplus amount of money at their disposal. If I’m not mistaken there are advertisement already appearing in console games, which is not terrible, however I would like to see the consumer reap some of the benefit from the revenue the games manufacturers are seeing, by way of some reduction in the price of the game. My fear is that the games will start to suffer as a result of all the advertisements, developers might start to get greedy and then start to implement features into a games that’s sole purpose is to advertise.
October 8, 2008
Which DL media should I use?
This is the question I asked myself prior to acquiring the knowledge; at first I always thought that all disk media quality was the same and that the only difference between the more expensive ones and the cheaper ones were brand name. I soon found this to be untrue after an hour or two of googling, basically the cheaper DL media will work on your xbox360 however the quality of dye used on these disks is far lower than on more expensive disks, the consequence of putting a DL disk in your 360 is that it puts more strain on your DVD drive laser resulting in your DVD drive packing in far earlier than it should.
Top 3 are as follows;
*Verbatim (Must have the right dye)
*Datasafe
*Ridisc
For xbox360’s the problem of which DL media brand to use should not be of importance at the end of November, once Microsoft release the new dash board update which enables you to run you games from your hard drive so long as you have the game in the drive, which will cut down the demand on your DVD laser. One last thing to note when making a backup is to only burn at 2x, you will find you get the best results, and end up will less coasters, also there are some dvd burners that work better than others, Pioneers have the best success rate.
Xbox360 RROD Fix
The xbox360 rrod affects around 30% according to a report published earlier this year; this in my opinion is disgusting. Prior to receiving the rrod, I thought that it only happened due to a combination of things, for example when people were playing for multiple hours along with the xbox360 being placed in an unventilated area. I found this to be totally untrue when I receive the dreaded rrod a few weeks ago, there are many suggested methods available on the internet that claim to fix your xbox360, seen as though I have been unable to test all of these methods are can’t say for sure that they don’t work however one method I would advise you to avoid would be the towel method.
There are three methods which claim to fix your xbox:
* Microsoft 5 Stars (Despite it taking over six weeks for the fixing)
*X-Clamp fix – this is a less tricky one to evaluate given the wide range of different x-clamp methods, however given llamma.com highly reputable past in console modifications, I would suggest you follow their guide which is available on their website. I would not suggest you trying one of the other spin-of websites out there that’s sole purpose are to sell you some “custom kit” to fix your 360. Also note that these websites methods don’t involve drilling your xbox360 case which sounds great, however, these methods will only result in your motherboard becoming warped, and ultimately resulting in further damage.
*Towel method – There are a number of videos floating around the web that show this so called ‘towel method’ whereby you turn your xbox360 on, cover it with around three towels and then wait 15 minutes for it to get really hot. I’m not disputing the fact that this method may well work, what I am disputing is the length of time it will work for after doing it, many people claims it’s only a few hours.
August 31, 2008
How to Reply to Davenport Lyons
According to one member of the www.slyck.com forums, he states that he had success with Davenport Lyons, they replied saying they would not continue with any futher action. This is what he sent them:
“I recently received a letter from yourselves, acting on behalf Atari France S.A.S, regarding “Infringement of Copyright: The Witcher”. This file was never downloaded onto my personal computer, to my knowledge, and I am therefore extremely concerned by your accusation.
The brief statement from your IT consultants, Logistep, does not give sufficient evidence of any such specific download – please send me copies of the forensic evidence in relation to IP address XXXXX, including how this information was collected and attributed to myself. The IP address may have related to my wireless router and I may have become victim of hacking.
I am very willing to resolve this situation, and will promptly respond to any further information you send.”
Hope this helps!
Davenport Lyons Vs Game File Sharers
With the recent news of a polish woman getting fined 16 thousand pounds for illegally sharing a 9.99 pound pinball game I decided to see what all the fuss was about. According to various sources like slyck.com the alleged file sharer is one of around 500 that received a letter demanding a sum of 300 pounds damages & to prevent further court action, some people paid, some people replied stating that they were innocent, and of those that didn’t replay, were then narrowed down to 4 randomly, of which Davenport Lyons then proceeded with court action against them.
Davenport Lyons are working on behalf of game developers, like “Codemasters” & “Atari”, their aim according to them is to gain back a small percentage of loses that is caused by piracy. The letters arrive by standard post containing a large amount of “legal information”, they claim that IP Spoofing and your router being hacked into are not important, and regardless of all the flaws in their process, they claim the apparent game was uploaded/downloaded on your IP address and thus is your problem. Many receivers of the letters argue that it is not illegal to have an unsecured wireless router, and also even when wireless security is activated its not 100% secure, for example WEP encryption can be cracked relatively easily.
I understand that the majority of the alleged file sharers are probably guilty, but that does not mean they all are which is a worry to all internet users, and given that its highly possible that a person could accidentally click on file which linked to an illegal file and thus start downloading it, which could end up with a 16 thousand pound court bill is outrageous.
Davenport Lyons appear to be using scare tactics to get alleged filesharers to pay the initial fee demanded, and with the recent victory of an unemployed mother of two polish woman getting fined 16 thousand pounds it seems they will stop at nothing, and have even stated that they are already proceeded with court action against a further 1000+ people after the apparent victory.
For now it seems the best option is to reply, denying all knowledge of the alleged file sharing, and also stating that their method for capturing downloaders is bordering on entrapment, and is highly flawed based on the what can happen on your network hacking and IP spoofing to name a few.
Old Xbox Uses
So you have acquired an old Xbox, now what? Well there are various things you can do with an old Xbox I’m going to focus on using it as a media extender and retro console. So basically you find a way to mod your Xbox ether soft mod or hard mod i.e. a chip, personally I find soft modding the way to go due to the fact that you don’t have to open up your Xbox. I’m not going to go into any detail about how to do any of this because theirs around a thousand tutorials already available on the net anyway, so Google around find a good tutorial, once modded install Xbox media centre this allows you to do a bunch of stuff from watching movie trailers on line to streaming any movie format to your Xbox to watch on you 42″ LCD TV, ( I prefer CRT) the process is quite simple once you have studied up on it.
The next step is to install some emulators on your Xbox get the snes emulator or the Amiga emulator a few thousand roms and you’re away. I currently have media center on mine with a few thousand roms, an upgraded hard drive of 160gb since the one that comes with it is less than 8gb I use mine as a media center extender in one of the rooms, it’s a much cheaper method to stream movie than one of the official media extenders Microsoft has to offer. Theres a link at the bottom for good video tutorials on how to do all of this.
Other uses for an old xbox include:
* Installing DSL on it
* Using to watch videos online
Links
http://www.xbox-scene.com
http://www.xbox-hq.com
http://www.bsodtv.org
August 30, 2008
Leaked xbox 360 Dashboard Video
The new xbox360 dashboard has been shown off at the official Microsoft conference some months ago now, and the leaked version of the dashboard has also been floating around the web for the same amount of time if not longer, despite this it is becoming increasingly harder to find the original video of the new dashboard been installed on to an xbox, for this reason I have trawled the web to find a working video link. (leaked dashboard video)
The new dashboard includes the following feature:
Hard Drive Installs
Custom Avatars
Netflix Streaming
