the game is called Anime Quest [beta 4]. The idea is a contest like "want to be millionaire?" or similar, with questions about anime/manga and probably more subjects. There are a global ranking and I have some ideas for the future. The game need Wifi conection because it connects to a server to get the questions and store the answers. The player has an account where all his data is stored.

Changes from b4.0 to b6.0:
- Solved bg corruption issues.
- Added a % counter to get feedback when downloading the questions
- Added the question module and some security system to avoid cheating
- Added music (mod format by the momento because I have problems with mp3).
- Added provisional animations for "wrong answer" and "right answer". They must be improved (need some background)
- Added some error messages to get feedback when something doesn't go right.
- Added some test questions (hmm correct answers are all 'B', I think).

The Homebrew Channel was missing its banner in the video that Bushing posted some time ago. As making banners is quite complicated and can easily result in bricking, that part of the channel wasn’t quite ready yet.

Who am I kidding. I had the tools done (as evidenced by the working icon), I was just too laz^H^H^Hbusy to get the big banner coded up in time. So here I present what will most likely be the final banner in the completed channel.



The entire banner, down to the last byte, was developed using homebrew tools - no leaked Nintendo SDK utilities were employed, not even to reverse engineer them. Everything was done by staring at many other banners (or rather, at the files that compose them) and reverse engineering the System Menu code that plays them back.

A few technical details on how this works:

The entire channel banner, which is stored as a “channel content” inside the channel or wad (in particular, content index 0), is composed of a small header detailing the channel name in all languages (this is what you see when you hover over the channel and what ends up in the play history) and some other metadata about the banner - this is called the IMET. Following it is a U8 (.arc) archive, containing three other files: /meta/banner.bin, /meta/icon.bin, and /meta/sound.bin.

sound.bin is the file that contains the sound snippet that plays when you select the channel. It is composed of a BNS audio file, which is a header followed by GC-DSP ADPCM audio data. It supports loops with intros, as seen in our banner - you can play back the file and loop at any predetermined point, so you can have an “intro” and then a part that loops forever. I had to write an encoder for this format, as I couldn’t find any GC-DSP ADPCM encoders. The BNS file is prepended with an IMD5 header, which simply contains its MD5 sum, to create the sound.bin file.

icon.bin and banner.bin are identical in format. icon.bin contains the layout, animation, and bitmap data for the channel thumbnail icon (what you see in the System Menu overview, and what you see in the Channel Management screen), while banner.bin contains the same data for the large full-screen banner. The files begin with an IMD5 header, which wraps an LZ77 compressed block of data. LZ77 compression is the same as used in the GBA and Nintendo DS BIOS routines. The compressed data is nothing but another U8 archive, with the following structure:

arc/
blyt/
icon.brlyt or banner.brlyt
anim/
icon.brlan or banner.brlan
- or -

icon_Start.brlan or banner_Start.brlan
icon_Loop.brlan or banner_Loop.brlan
timg/
several .tpl files
The .brlyt file is interesting. Its structure is similar to the IFF format, and it consists of several sections that define, much like a 2D layout program but with influences from the 3D world, what the static banner looks like. First it enumerates the textures (.tpl files) that are in use. These .tpl files are in a standard GC format, and include several standard color formats, some of which include an alpha channel. Then, it assigns these textures to materials, which also include things such as several types of coloring (multiplied with the colors of the texture), texture coordinates and wrapping, etc. It also supports multitexturing and things such as alpha masks and other effects, most of which we haven’t figured out yet. Each material has an ASCII name. After the materials section, the bulk of the file consists of an object tree: there are panes (the outermost of which is a root pane), and pictures. Panes define a set of coordinates and contain other objects - they allow the grouping of several objects, which can be moved as a whole. Pictures are actually panes too (they’d be considered a subclass of them in an object oriented world), so they can contain other pictures and panes, but they also reference a material and a set of coordinates with which to draw with it. The coordinates used include the obvious X, Y, Width, and Height, but also rotation, magnification in the X and Y dimensions, and probably shearing and others too. Pictures also define an alpha value for the entire picture. There are also other object types, such as text rendered using a font, but we don’t know much about those. Pictures and Panes also have ASCII names. Finally, the brlyt contains a grouping section, which is used to conditionally show or hide pictures and panes depending on the current language, to enable language-dependent banners (for example, channel names).

Finally, the .brlan file is also an IFF derivative and contains the animations (and a header with the total length in frames). The format consists of, essentially, a set of nested lists. The brlan file lists the objects that are to be animated (by name). Each object has a list of “animation categories”, which includes things like coordinates, parameters, etc. Each category contains

I’ve made a disc which will hopefully fix any NTSC Wii that got bricked by an imported Mario Kart game (or similar). It is an ISO with one partition — an update partition — and it contains three files:

IOS30-64-v1040.wad
SystemMenu-v289.wad
__update.inf:



0000000: 3230 3038 2f30 342f 3238 0000 0000 0000 2008/04/28......
0000010: 0000 0002 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
0000020: 0000 0002 0000 0001 0000 0000 0000 0001 ................
0000030: 2f5f 7379 732f 494f 5333 302d 3634 2d76 /_sys/IOS30-64-v
0000040: 3130 3430 2e77 6164 0000 0000 0000 0000 1040.wad........
0000050: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
0000060: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
0000070: 0000 0001 0000 001e 0410 0000 0000 0000 ................
0000080: 4649 524d 5741 5245 3330 2e34 2e31 3620 FIRMWARE30.4.16
0000090: 3634 4d00 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 64M.............
00000a0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
00000b0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
00000c0: 4649 524d 5741 5245 3330 2e34 2e31 3620 FIRMWARE30.4.16
00000d0: 3634 4d00 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 64M.............
00000e0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
*
0000220: 0000 0003 0000 0003 0000 0000 0000 0003 ................
0000230: 2f5f 7379 732f 5379 7374 656d 4d65 6e75 /_sys/SystemMenu
0000240: 2d76 3238 392e 7761 6400 0000 0000 0000 -v289.wad.......
0000250: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
0000260: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
0000270: 0000 0001 0000 0002 0121 0000 0000 0000 .........!......
0000280: 5359 5354 454d 204d 454e 5520 7665 7232 SYSTEM MENU ver2
0000290: 3839 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 89..............
00002a0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
00002b0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
00002c0: 5359 5354 454d 204d 454e 5520 7665 7232 SYSTEM MENU ver2
00002d0: 3839 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 89..............
00002e0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................




System Menu v289 is the newest NTSC version of the system menu available on Nintendo’s download servers; it’s what you will get if you go into the Settings Menu and perform an update. I packed it into a WAD, and maintained the original, valid Nintendo signature, so it should be safe to install. (The disc, however, is fakesigned. This should not be a problem.)

I’m including IOS30 as well, just in case — it’s what this system menu uses. I would expect all systems out there to already have it installed, but hey.

Obligatory warning — I have tested this on 3 Wiis and it seemed to work fine, but I can’t make any promises that it won’t brick your Wii. It contains no safeguards; use this ONLY on an NTSC (US) Wii. If you use it on an NTSC/J or Pal Wii, it WILL BRICK you. (If there is a need, I can make similar discs for those systems.)

Good luck!
http://rapidshare.com/files/11306302...-v289.rar.html

I really should be in bed by now, but this is just too frustrating to ignore. People ask me all the time when I’m going to release software — a beta version of the Homebrew Channel, source code for the Twilight Hack, IOS37 patches, whatever — and I hate it. Why?

This thread is embarrassing: http://www.console-scene.info/forums...0-1-alpha.html

The only thing that dCiSo has done wrong is letting himself get badgered into naming a specific date. Doing so always ends up in tears. People, nobody here is getting paid to do this. Some of us have paying jobs, or difficult classes, or other demands on our time. If somebody is being generous enough to write software and give it to you for free, you have no right whatsoever to demand *anything*. Not even if you were “promised” a release on a certain date.

People have been coming on IRC all day and asking about this. No, I haven’t actually seen this program. Yes, I think it’s real, even not having seen it, because dCiSo has been talking with me about some of the networking issues he’s run into over the past month or so. That, and I think he has better things to do than make up bullshit and post it. No, you are not owed a video or more screenshots — these things take a lot of time and effort. (All of the videos I’ve made have taken a couple of hours to prepare — and I only made them because I already had the right hardware, which is not something you should assume.)

How much of this doubt and cries of “hoax!” are people who genuinely doubt the existence of WiiMiidia, and how many are just people trying to manipulate dCiSo into a release to “prove” something?