Episode: 3036
Title: HPR3036: WiiU is dead long live WiiU!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3036/hpr3036.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 15:31:33

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3036 for Monday 23 March 2020.
Today's show is entitled, We You Is Dead Long Live We You.
Quote,
It is hosted by Operator
and is about 24 minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summer is
How to Approach Dishmod Communities.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting
with the offer code HPR15. That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello and welcome to another Hacker Public Radio
with your host operator. This was going to be kind of a revisit
of the Wii U hacking stuff. Mainly
Jay Gecko or TCP Gecko formerly. My 5-year-old
this came back because of my 5-year-old starting to play games
and we have a Lego game that he is getting better at but
you know I don't want him to have to struggle and farm for
30,000 bricks or whatever that it takes to
get. Now I have a saved game that I downloaded
generally with some of these systems you can
mod your your system and then download saves
and there'll be repositories of different kinds of saves
for any kind of local based games you can usually find a save file
but I didn't necessarily want to do that in this case so I did keep that save file
and I'll put links and you know remind myself to put links for the
save file. I have a clicky keyboard you want to
excuse me for that. So the scene has obviously kind of
crashed with all the Wii U stuff and even about the Wii
and the Wii U are about at the same level of
involvement but I will say there is a community
for Nintendo Homebrew excuse me on Discord and they have a Wii U
Assistance channel 3DS and Switch Assistance channel.
Didn't really help me at all. I ended up finding videos which I'll put in
links to videos.
So mainly what happens with the struggles that people have today is
when you're trying to do something or figure something out is
this is basic Google Foo. You want to search within a year
and if you get no hits then good luck you can specify custom years with
advanced, excuse me advanced searches and Google
but generally I'll do filter by last year and I'll type in whatever I'm typing.
With these modding guides and all these modding videos and
999 and cheats and all that stuff you get a lot of click pay.
So my suggestion to anybody trying to mod or soft mod or anything mod
is go directly to the horse's mouth so go to webrew go to whatever
the software you know the open source or whatever source software is
available and then kind of go from there and try to figure out what they're
doing today who's using what tools today.
So when I did this years ago I soft modding my Wii using the
twilight thing because we had purchased the twilight
CD and then play around for a little while and realize that
you could do cheats and the way they do cheats is kind of interesting and I might
have mentioned this in the other podcast I did is they have a
TCP based cheat app basically. So it will pull the memory down
remotely or you can poke the memory remotely
and download like cheat files and memory files and stuff like that.
So one would think it would actually be easier to do like
Ocarna which the Wii U had. I think they just kind of
circumvented all that and said you know what since everybody's connected
we have a connected environment we can have a client that's connected and they
can update cheats and have cheats pulled down from the internet and
everything is kind of gonna kind of got to be a little bit easier where you have
a database of cheats and and all that stuff. So I think that was the
intention behind some of this as we grow more connected
but I was a little surprised to see that there was a TCP based like
memory, memory injection tool like memory tool which is kind of
kind of fascinating to me. I've never done any of that type of stuff
at least with consoles in the Windows environment sure but
it was very interesting to see how some of these worked.
Some had Python scripts that I had to run for a particular game
to get like all the items in the game or to get a certain amount of
coins or whatever or unlock a specific item and it was a lot of work and these
guys do a lot of work because it's not just a memory
address sometimes sometimes you got to trace down multiple memory addresses
to figure out how that item is actually equipped or
setup and the memory address space for any of these guys especially not on
PCs but for you know the Wii U especially for me
you can't just dump out the whole address space because you get like one
k per second or something transfer rate at least over the Wi-Fi for the Wii U.
But I'm sure there's some local dumping utilities. I didn't look into it because
I managed to finagle what I was trying to do so my five-year-olds run around
and he has to build this bridge and of course it calls 30,000 blocks which is
with him with him running around in circles and me not helping him
it would take him like at least 40 hours or more just to earn that many blocks.
So in this game and I guess newer games they have blocks and then they have
studs in the blocks hope you like build certain things and the studs help you
kind of buy certain things I feel like. So he had like you know
7,000 blocks and he had to get like 30,000 which would have
taken been very hard to do the next part of the game. So I started looking back
into the TCP Gecko stuff which is again the kind of remote memory injection
utility that they use. And first I you know got the jar files a job-of-base deal
and I got it running and what I remembered back when I first was doing all this stuff
the program that I used to kind of do some of the backups I think was called Mocha.
And Mocha was basically injected after or before kind of the with system menu comes up.
And then traditionally what you do is you run the TCP Gecko client which kind of starts a little
server in the background kind of in the kernel we're in the memory and then it allows you to
like connect remotely and inject memory directly into the game while you're playing it.
But to do that you have to of course run launch it first and I don't know if you
are old like me the game gene was kind of the thing that kind of gives me that same kind of feeling
where you put in the code before the game starts and then the game gene injects itself into
the main game. So in this instance I feel like it was giving me errors and crashing and doing
whatever and wouldn't load TCP Gecko. So what I found out is that basically I was kind of
injecting stuff into the memory for Mocha and then I was injecting stuff in the memory for TCP Gecko
and they were kind of flapping all over each other. So I pulled Mocha out which I think is only
used for if you're doing backups and maybe you know modding or installing wads or whatever.
And for guides on all this you know they're pretty standard you put in a USB USB stick and then
you run a banner bomb and you get remote code execution and you can install the home brew stuff.
And to get there it's a lot quicker the steps are a lot easier once the we use kind of depreciated
and all the exploits aren't going to be fixed. But to get there there's a lot of guides online
just Google it but I would say stay away from YouTube videos use those only for training purposes
on what to click and what to get but don't download a binary link from YouTube and start executing it
figure out what that program is called and find the get repo for it and even then you know you
want to look on the forums and find the official you know someone that's got some mod experience or
that's got some some cloud tips to post those binaries for you because we're starting to lose
staff community and these links are starting to get old so you'll have like an old google drive
link that doesn't work anymore or you know something like that. So be be wary of you know all these
YouTube videos with clickbait in them and just use the YouTube videos to help you understand how
to use the tools but don't start downloading people's YouTube video links with their binaries
and running them because you never know what kind of garbage is in there. So I know they had
changed it to this j j gecko which is I guess Java based gecko and I don't remember it mean being
that name before I think it was the dot net was when I was playing with it but anyways I used
the further the Zelda and there was basic cheat files for all those so it's a memory address
and then a push value and then it's like a title so I managed to find some some cheats for that
space for the Lego game it's called Lego City and of course I plug them in they don't work
and then I realized and I knew from the beginning that it was for the power version which is a
different region. So I'm using the US region and this was cheats for the power version. So I then
up again to start trying to do the searching myself which is extremely slow if you do the whole
range of memory. So I tried to do that a couple times and I guess Java got two full and
I tried manipulating the amount of memory and Java before for the jar file which you can do
set it like a maximum amount my wife's laptop only has like four gigs in it so I had to do like
three gigs and then it seemed to kind of kind of freeze up so I took a different approach to where
I looked at the memory addresses inside of the existing existing cheats and figured hey they're either
going to be around there or in that general vicinity within you know a few megs even so what I did
was as I without any understanding of math or how to do ranges of hex I added and subtracted some
numbers and or hex from the lowest value that I saw in the cheat file and then the highest value
that I saw. So for example if the if the cheats were you know if the range was one to a thousand
and the cheats were like five to twenty I said okay well let me do four to twenty one or even
like zero to twenty five and I picked those ranges and I got lucky and I was able to pull back the
pull back the information for the for the bricks and the studs. Now traditionally if you've ever
used any of these local cheat based programs sheet insons a big one been around forever you basically
search the memory for the value of whatever it is you're trying to mess with and then you increment
or decrement that value and then search again and you increment or decrement and then search again
and the theory is that you'll get one or two addresses that have to do with that range and if you
if you're lucky you can just change that range and and modify the the game localings and get
you know nine nine nine and this this runs true for they have Android based ones the one for
Android is called oh man defender or defend or it's it's got like a gray it's got a like a purple
got like a purple fan of course it's made in China and I wouldn't run it on any any workflow
or anything like that but anyways it works the same the same way I think in key K hunter I think
it's called hunter something hunter and it's all in Japanese or whatever Chinese but for Android
you obviously have to have a route route to the device so to modify the memory on the fly for
like local games and sometimes internet based games which is entirely different topic altogether
so I managed to find these values poke them and you can create a cheat file that's easy for people
to ingest and of course took screenshots and everything and then put that up on the the forms for
I think it's a GBA net or gba temp.net um which is kind of the the long standing we
modding community um so I put those up there I did spend a lot of time just doing other things so
I would tell it to search the memory and then run off and it would be like 33% done and it would
just crap out and fail um and a lot of things and I did a couple of tests just to make sure
that um what I what I was doing was actually like working um for like a better term
so I put some smaller memory addresses in there and then tried to observe and see that they were
moving and make sure and making sure I was getting updated and I had connectivity which I didn't
necessarily need to do but I was having issues with connectivity and I think it was just
them or the RAM running out of of space and it would you know halt at like 30% or whatever or some
kind of buffer for something where you know it only pull in so much so much memory before it kind
of grabs out but anyways um kind of a trial and error thing and I've had some background in doing
that but nothing like crazy like write my own cheat files or whatever um I'll also post a link
to my cheat engine files dot ct files links I found two big dumps of cheat engine files which I
don't know anything about um and a lot of times you've got like SSL pinning and stuff like that
in these games and they all have their security stack built into them so you got to do like more
memory stuff and you can't really do a whole lot of inline SSL stuff to decrypt and then like
edit your own values I know I'm kind of going all the place and I need to get back on topic but
the idea there is um you can you can there's several ways to kind of modify a game right
you can you can go to the server which is gonna get you in jail you can go to the server or
create your own server um get the code from the server that's been leaked or if you're lucky they
have like an open source server you can run and then you can modify the source or at least inject
stuff based on other people's work to do things like have zero gravity or whatever and then you
modify your your Xbox to connect to that that server instead of another one and there was a big
community around like granted.o and cheating and all that for a while um which they kind of
locked down or whatever but you can you can you can hack the server and create your own server
based on you know either leaked source or um open source or reverse engineering of server binary
with some point in time and you'll see that back in the old days you'll see old like old
battle net servers that um say either reverse engineered the whole protocol and made their own
ballot server or um maybe they got a whole little binary and are using that and then as the game
updates there they got geniuses to do all that stuff um and then there's kind of uh uh on the
wire which is not so common not as common anymore because a lot of people encrypt that traffic going
over the wire um and when you try to decrypt it it won't let you decrypt it and the game will just
bail a lot of your phones things like that we'll do the same kind of thing where as if they have
this thing called SSL pinning on them and applications kind of do the same thing um and you can't
really inject the traffic but if you're lucky um you can install like a root certificate on your
device and if it doesn't have SSL pinning you can do things um like modify stuff as it goes across
the wire and even in some cases they'll be using some kind of framework where all the values are
hashed so you see the plain text but the plain text is a much hash value so it'll be like a JSON
with like a blob hash and then you'll see another JSON with another blob hash and to to modify that
you can't there's nothing you can really do except replay um other hashes and if if it doesn't
match on the other end in the server either traps out or you get a four or four or whatever
the idea there is is um there's kind of replay attacks with with those type of things where you can
even if you don't know what the traffic is and you can get a general idea of what's going on
if you're smart enough which I'm not you can do things like replace um packets with with other
packets or replay packets that you know you want so for example you pick up a chest or pick up an
item you can potentially replay that packet and get the same item over and over again right which
doesn't really happen that much anymore um more often you'll see instances where you can swap out
a hash um for another thing so for example if you have as characters you know you have five
characters in your game they're sitting across um you're playing this game on your phone you're
sending across um are these hash values for each character right that are buying to something on
the server back in so for example your strongest character is really expensive and you put the money
and or time into them because you know we all pay for money premium games not um you can uh there's
been instances where you can take that hash value and assign it to the other characters to your team
for example so it'll be like you know my profile or my player you know my player group equals whatever
and it's like a JSON with a bunch of hashes well kind of with replay attacks you can put the same
hash in there five times and have your uber crazy character basically colon five times um as far
as you know either the the way they look or the way they operate but the idea there is that you can
kind of replay even if it's encrypted you can understand how the application works and add uh
and and kind of replay values or replay packets or replay instances um like for example if you get
a wheel and you spend a wheel or whatever you can potentially replay that packet back and get
whatever you wanted whatever you were going to get for that wheel if they didn't do any proper
checking on the back end so um i know this is supposed to be more about we modding stuff um but i'll
say you know use your main tutorials use youtube to help you out for um for understanding how to use
the tools um i'm i you know i'll be the first person to tell you i'd rather watch a video then
read a form post on how to use a tool because you know the problem with form post is that they don't
necessarily necessarily cater to the common common use case right they have to get all the
caveats out in in in the way to make sure that if you got some clowns running point 0.02 for
a bee of custom firmware for you know the little step pad thing that comes with the EU and they
have to do something different then they have to start off with that um and a lot of those caveats
are built into these tutorials and your common use case run of the middle person um just needs to
do the basic thing first the the basic tutorial first right and then once they get to tool working
and then you can start reverse engineering and understanding okay well this piece of the tool is
not really working i need to figure this out oh i missed a step over here because i didn't read
the documentation so you know i try to use any kind of video tutorials any kind of old you know
videos for stuff this is all this stuff is back you know kind of had a peak 2017 2016 15 for the
we use stuff um make sure i'm actually still recording um so so i'll say that use your like whatever
.nets for um you're we you modding in tutorials um don't give it you don't give anybody any money
obviously unless you want you know want them to help you learn reverse engineering and stuff um
be careful about you know downloading any binaries from weird links that aren't like official
gba uh temp links uh or you know off of a get up repo whatever and then even then if it's a
fork repo you kind of got to be careful about what you pull down from there to um there's stuff
in there about cheat engine so you can i guess potentially take in consume or use cheat engine dumps
from an in um in the the tcp gecko or the j gecko thing but just kind of interesting and i
didn't have a chance to play around with that um because cheat engine is used by a lot of folks to
do this type of stuff um i i went on the discord which i'll put a link into the thing but
i mainly just answered all my own questions um i did research and do some google food about
how to you know where do i start what memory addresses do i start at um i tried the big broad ones
and you know like i said i got to 33% or so i then grabbed up so then i said okay well if the
pal is anywhere close to the regular version i can add a few bits on either end and hopefully
if i get lucky i'll find it and i did get lucky and that's why i made that little cheat file for
the the gecko cheat engine thing so um follow the guides um doing an backup or what they call
is basically a complete backup of your system so the idea is once you get that code execution you
can kind of put in a bootloader or a bootme or a pre-boot system so so where if something happens
you can like hit the reset button on your Wii U as it's booting up and it'll boot you into like a
place where you can restore an old man backup if you manage to mangle your different ios and they
have the term ios are and we and i think we you where you have different versions of ios and if
you're trying to play a game sometimes you have to load that version up for that game um and depending
on your playstyle and how you're playing your backups you know you you don't know if it's kind of
work or maybe something freezes or you have to add support for something um there's always
limitations once you start messing around with the Wii U that if you start you know kind of
inundating it with lots of bells and whistles you start to find out that there's limitations with
you know how many songs you can import to like rock band right um you can only have like 3,000
or 6,000 at a time and i pulled down like all 10,000 or something of them and expected to be able to
like search through that list it's not possible because it only supports like only so much
memory for the Wii at runtime did you can put in you know the database of all those above those files
um just let's say um i looked at the 3ds stuff um that seems pretty complicated right now it's
like a 20 minute video on how to do 3ds um modding um but the Wii U stuff is still pretty pretty
standard stuff um so it can breathe some life back into your your Wii U or your Wii to uh mod it
play around some games um there's actually you know entire like modded add-ons you can have for
big games like Mario Kart has a bunch of add-ons where you can drive around as a giant Yoshi or
something um and do silly things in the game that weren't particularly designed to do or drive
around is something else or um custom a lot of custom stuff that you can do that wasn't really
there around back of the day um that's pretty much it um you know obviously this will break your
license agreement or whatever of course none of that stuff is supported anyways i don't think
but um you know feel free to reach out to me if you if you have a Wii or Wii U and you need
self you know soft modding or modding your Wii and you have a you know you have an old Wii lane
and you want to send it to me with some money to buy a drive and i can send it back to you
with all everything you need to go to do backups um your own backups and all that stuff so um
anyways um happy hacking and uh you know let me know if you need anything
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