Federal Angents Serve 32 Search Warrants Aimed at Modchip Retailers

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from 22 offices assisted by representatives of the electronic industry today executed 32 federal search warrants in 16 states as part of an investigation into the alleged sale and distribution of illegal modification chips and disc copyright circumvention devices. This investigation represents the largest national enforcement action of its kind targeting this type of illegal activity.

The search warrants were executed at businesses, storefronts, and residences located in California, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin at locations associated with subjects who are allegedly involved in the direct importation, installation, sale, and distribution of the devices that are of foreign manufacture and smuggled into the United States.

The modification chips and circumvention devices allow users to play illegally obtained, pirated and/or counterfeit software on video game consoles including Sony's Playstation 2, Microsoft's XBOX and XBOX 360, and Nintendo's Wii. Modification chips and swap discs for gaming consoles violate laws under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the makers of the gaming consoles, game developers, and others in the industry have incurred billions of dollars in losses worldwide due to sales lost to those selling counterfeit and pirated video games.

Full story can be found here.

Examples of chips siezed (including Wiinja, Wiikey, and Cyclowiz) can be found here.

WiiBoss Releases August 3rd

Another modchip supporting open source code will be releasing soon. This set also includes a programmer for those of you who also want programmed PICs on hand. From the WiiBoss site :

Wii-BOSS! The world first fully upgradeable internal modchip for the Nintendo Wii.

“Almost all other conventional and homebrew modchips consist of two parts where the code is held, of which only the smaller EEPROM section of the chip can be changed easily. This EEPROM part of the code is very useful for small pre defined simple on or off selectable 1’s and 0’s and possibly a very small “additional feature” section. For example: Speed setting your chip or enabling multi-zone. However, if you want to update the entire chip, you need to physically remove the chip from the Wii, put it on a programmer, reprogram it, and then reinstall the chip into the Wii. This is not something you want to be doing constantly keep up with new optimized modchip codes for the Nintendo Wii.”

• The Wii-Boss is designed as a ‘quick solder’ chip with an external ribbon cable that can be left inside the machine, taped down on the back of the Wii, or even hidden inside the memory card bay. This chip can be fully programmed inside the machine with any code that supports the 12f629 PIC Microchip.

• The Wii-Boss is also designed to allow external booting off the ribbon cable, therefore protecting the user against ever having to pull the Wii apart ever again if their requirements for a particular style of modchip change. External adapters to make competitor modchips and PC applications like DVD-Tool boot externally have already been designed and will be produced soon after the initial release of the premier product for a very minimal charge. These will likely be included in future kits at no extra charge.

• The Wii-boss even comes packaged with its own RS-232 port external programmer. Software for the programmer is open source and therefore also provided free. The programmer is based on an open source project and therefore could be ‘modded’, theoretically, to be used as a standard RS-232 PIC programmer.

• R.R.P. for the entire packed is USD$25 including the Wii-SP JDM programmer. The cost will obviously much cheaper in bulk quantities. Wholesale quantities start from just 2 kits.

At the time of writing the wii-boss supported the following codes (in no particular order):

Wii-Free - last stable release ver2.45

YOASM - last stable release ver1.7

Winja – last stable release ver2.0 (deluxe currently not available)

Open-Wii - last stable release ver1.3

Wii-skas - last stable release unknown

MaxBoot - last stable release ver1.0 (redirection code for external booting)

Cyclowiz v 3.5 Official Firmware Released

The Cyclowiz chip always supported dual layer media, that is up until version 3.0 of their firmware. The 3.0 version of their firmware broke this compatability, but 3.5 is here to put it back! There will be some slight tweaking required to fully support DL media. You can find more information at the official site.

Download here:

NTSC-U

NTSC-J

PAL

Lego Indiana Jones Video Game Coming Soon

One of the best masterpieces throughout the history is finally

returning in Lego Form. Brought to you by LucasArts who made

the humerous game Lego Star Wars. No news or announcements

on which platforms, but the possibilities for the Wii still stays

strong.

The long wait is over! AhMan almighty and StoneCut have given us a new update to the very popular homebrew application IRShell. This version of IRShell is usable at full functionality on all custom firmwares released to date. Take a look at the v3.6 changelog…

- Added support for Team M33's newest custom firmware (See note 1). If you don't want to update to M33, you will still be able to use this new release with older OE firmwares.
- Launch and multi-task with PS1 games from within iR Shell (works also via USBhostFS and NetHostFS) (see note 2).
- Backup ISO plugins now integrated into iR Shell 1.5 EBOOT and 3.5x EBOOT (also supports USBhostFS and NetHostFS).
- Backup UMD Video ISO support (also supports USBhostFS and NetHostFS).
- Direct switching between 1.5 EBOOT and 3.5x EBOOT via new shortcut combo.
- System-wide "Quick Exit" function to quickly shutdown games, homebrew etc and return to iR Shell.
- Improved Autoboot to iR Shell plugin.
- New Comic Reader plugin based on PSPComic for CBZ and CBR files by suloku.  Original version by Archaemic.
- Added the ability to flash/blink the menu highlighting cursor.
- Added support for adhoc PC nethostfs connection under 3.xx CFWs (some additional firmware files required)
- Added a new config item in configurator to turn on/off the Music button for screen capture.
- Other bugfixes and tiny improvements.

Note:
1) CFW 3.51 M33 Original version, 3.51 M33-2 (patch 2 with WLAN fix) and 3.52 M33 are supported.  3.51 M33-3 to 7 (patch 3 to 7) are not supported due to a sceKernelLoadExecVSH bug which had been fixed in 3.52 M33.
2) The launching of PS1 games via USBHostFS & NetHostFS works on all OE firmwares and also 3.51 M33 Original & Patch 2.  The latest 3.52 M33 firmware currently has issues when launching user converted PS1 games via USBHostFS & NetHostFS, but PSN store purchased games works fine.  Team M33 is currently looking into the issue.

As always, make sure to follow the instructions that come with this package and take notice to its warnings as neither I or any members of pspbrew.com will take responsibility for your misfortunes.

AhMan and StoneCut would like to send their special thanks to…

- Dark_AleX for his previous contributions & help in iR Shell development.  We hope you had enjoyed hacking the PSP.  Happy retirement and wish you best of luck in your future endeavors.
- Team M33 for continuing DA's work and their help in fixing M33 firmware compatibility issues with iR Shell.
- All iR Shell private forum members for their contributions, including donations, testing, skin making, plugins, etc.  Without their support, especially StoneCut, you won't see this special public release.

- Download

- Now uses 3.52!!!

Cyclowiz Now Supporting Unofficial Firmwares

Straight from the horse's mouth…

"Six months ago, in a quasi-simultaneous launch, the two first Wii modchips were released, one of them being CycloWiz. It was already ahead of the competition, as it was the only upgradable modchip available then. Since then, we've been working hard in order to make sure CycloWiz stays the best in terms of quality, features and support.

Within six months, many things have changed, and one of the best evolutions is the creation of open-source modchip projects. While, as of today, they currently lack many features that commercial chips support (such as audiofix, DVD upgrade support (with the notable exception of OpenWii on ATmega), compatibility with old GC Multi-Disc games), it's surely a very interesting and promising aspect of the Wii modding scene that shouldn't be ignored.

When you buy a new PC, you want it to be able to run Windows and Linux, even if you plan to use only one of the two OS at first. Why shouldn't you have this freedom with the modchip you buy? Today, we're opening up the CycloWiz platform to open-source firmwares, and we want that to be very user-friendly, with the possibility of upgrading from/to any of the firmwares using DVD upgrades. There's no need to change your firmware today, this feature only concerns a few people for now, mainly developers, but it might become very useful in the future.

There are currently two major open-source projects, Wiifree and OpenWii. Wiifree is clearly the most popular, but OpenWii gained some attention lately as it became upgradable on one architecture. We decided to start by supporting Wiifree. A beta port of version 2.45 was uploaded in our forums. It features all the Wiifree features plus DVD upgrade support and chip disable support.

Technically this is possible because CycloWiz is a fully upgradable modchip. Many other modchips said to be upgradable are only partially upgradable, meaning that the modchip's program's data can be reprogrammed, but the program itself can't. Radically changing the firmware on partially upgradable modchip is out of the question.

Now what about an official upgrade? We won't drop support for official firmwares. In fact, we're working hard on the next version. One of the main challenge is to add support for D2C chipset. We won't tell you like another team that we're "almost done". It is a real challenge. To get technical, the Gamecube drive had two backdoors that could be used to run modchip code. Those two backdoors were also found on the Wii chipsets, and a new one was even added. Unfortunately, all three were removed on the new D2C chipset. Well, kinda There is clearly a way in, but a lot of work is still needed. Of course, we'll keep you updated in case anything exciting happens!"

Download it here: Cyclowiz Wiifree v2.45beta

New iR Shell public release coming SOON …

It's been more than six months since the last public release but … today AhMan, god of iR Shell, has confirmed that he will be briefly returning from his psp-scene retirement to drop "the bomb" on us all: A special new iR Shell version compatible with the newest Custom Firmware by Team M33 !

The new release will include all the excellent features which were already shown in the leaked video for a previous internal beta build of iR Shell from a couple of weeks ago. If you missed that video here's the link again: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Bfk3phJ84VU – please note that this video was made using an older beta version of iR Shell made for FW3.40 OE.

New features added since the last public release:

• Added support Team M33's newest custom firmware. If you don't want to update to M33, you will still be able to use this new release with older OE firmwares
• Launch and multi-task with PS1 games from within iR Shell (works also via USBhostFS and NetHostFS)
• Backup ISO plugins now integrated into iR Shell 1.5 EBOOT and 3.5x EBOOT (also supports USBhostFS and NetHostFS)
• Backup UMD Video ISO support (some additional 1.5 firmware files required)
• Direct switching between 1.5 EBOOT and 3.5x EBOOT via new shortcut combo
• System-wide "Quick Exit" function to quickly shutdown games, homebrew etc and return to iR Shell
• Improved Autoboot plugin
• New Comic Reader plugin based on PSPComic for CBZ and CBR files by suloku
• Added the ability to flash/blink the menu highlighting cursor
• Added support for adhoc PC nethostfs connection under 3.51 EBOOT (some additional firmware files required)
• Added a new config item in configurator to turn on/off the Music button for screen capture
• Other bugfixes and tiny improvements

This special public release will not come with any support from AhMan but the iR Shell beta testers will be happy to help you in all the various forums out there.

Please be a little more patient while the final testing is taking place and the installation package is being prepared. We cannot give you an estimate of how long it will be until you can get the new release. All we can say is: SOON!

Stay tuned.

Diehard335 dropped by our forums to notify us that he has released HCPortal v1.2. This application uses the psp's web browser to bring flash games, movies, music, and more right to your finger tips. No need for custom firmware either as it works on any firmware. Anyways, here's what you can expect from this application…

- over 20 games

- 4 applications

- Direct links

- Music

- Videos

- Pictures

And a lot more! all for any flash enabled psp!

To install this application all you need to do is unzip the folder you downloaded. Take the hcportal folder that's inside the unzipped folder, and copy/drag it into the root of your memory stick. Then you go to your browser and type in: file:/hcportal/index.html

- Download

CycloWiz PC Flasher v1.0 beta Released

Team Cyclops has released a new tool to upgrade your Cyclowiz chips. If you don't want to use a DVD, or can't because of a bad flash, you can now use this new tool and a homemade cable to wire up your Wii to reflash/upgrade your Cyclowiz. This cable is the same cable used for the WABmodcheap mod, except things might be different on the Wii end. For support visit the Team Cyclops forums .

From their forums:

"We've been asked several times about the possibility of flashing the CycloWiz from PC. Mainly for two reason: to recover from a bad flash, or to use CycloWiz V1 on a D2B console. It is now possible!
The application requires a dvdtool parallel port cable that is very easy to build, but soldering skills are needed anyway.
It is currently in beta stage but has been successfully tested on different drives and with Windows Vista and XP."

Download the tool and manual here: CycloWiz PC Flasher v1.0 beta