Ohneschwanzenegger Wii

ohneschwanzenegger
General
Author	giantpune
Type	PC utilities
Version	r118
License	Mixed
Last Updated	2022/03/23
Links
Download
Source

Ohneschwanzenegger'is a program for creating, formatting, & writing to a nand.bin. It allows you to create a nand.bin on your PC that you can then install with BootMii or a flash programmer.

It accepts system WADs or can download titles and full updates from NUS. It is still recommended that you check the contents of a nand.bin before installing it to a Wii. It can be compiled on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X using Qt.

The download link is for the Windows version. You also need these DLL files.

Here is a Mac OS X version. You will need to install the Qt SDK from here in order to run it.

User guide

ReadMii

This is a tool to build a nand.bin suitable for installing on a Nintendo Wii via BootMii. It cannot build one from scratch - you must provide some data from the Wii. It needs to have a copy of the first 8 blocks of nand, a list of bad blocks, and AES & hmac keys. All of this data can be obtained from a BootMii NAND dump, even if it is bricked.

Creating a blank NAND

• Select File > New Nand (ctrl+N).
• select the destination for the new file in the "destination" field. Make sure you have 528MiB of free space.
• If you have an existing nand.bin from the Wii, you can select it by clicking the "Existing Nand" button. This will fill in the rest of the necessary information.
• If you dont have an existing dump to read from, you can enter the path of "keys.bin", the first 8 blocks of nand (including spare data), and the bad blocks using the rest of the dialog window. Bad blocks may be entered manually, or read from a plaintext file with 1 number on each line.
• When you click the "Ok" button, the GUI will hang a bit as it writes the entire 528MiB file to your PC.

Opening an existing NAND

• Enter a path of an existing nand.bin in the "nand.bin" field, or press the "search" button to browse for it on your PC.
• Once you have selected one, click "Init NAND" to tell the program you are ready.

Note: Do not use this program on your only copy of a Nand. Make a copy and use that.

Downloading titles and installing them

• Before you do anything, set a path for the NUS cache. This is where the program will cache downloaded files for later use. This should be a location that has decent reading & writing speeds (dont use an SD card).
• The upper fields accept a TID and/or version to download and install a specific title. Leave the version field empty to get the latest version.
• It also accepts a string such as "3.2u", 4.3e", or "3.5k". This will attempt to get all of the titles that were in the given update. I have used wiimpersonator logs when available, and game update partitions where the wiimpersonator logs were missing. There are some discrepancies as to which titles should be in a given update based on update partitions, but I believe I've gotten it pretty close.
• Press the "get it" button.
• When all the titles are done downloading, it will check for a setting.txt. If there is a system menu, but no setting.txt, it will prompt you to create one.

Creating & editing setting.txt

• Select Content > setting.txt. If there is already one, it will be read from the current NAND. A dialog window will pop up and you can enter values such as region & serial number.
• Clicking "Ok" will have the program try to write the setting.txt to the NAND.

Content > Write meta entries

This will write the garbage in "/meta" on the NAND FS.

These serve no purpose other than to take up space. The wii appears to run perfectly fine without them. If I had to guess, I would say they are created during the initial installation of titles in the factory and simply never deleted.

There are discrepencies as to which entries are in the /meta folder based on which wii you look at. This program will only write the bare minimum ones: the system menu, IOS4, and IOS9. However, I have seen entries for bc, mios, all the 10002 channels, and the stock hidden channels.

Error handling

There is a log window in the gui. Any time there is an error, it should show up bold. Due to the huge size of a NAND, there is no "undo". When a mistake/error/bug happens, there is no turning back. If you see an error dealing with writing to a file, it is recommended that you delete that file and start over.

Note: Do not install anything this program writes without first verifying its contents.

Credits

This tool is made possible by the open-source efforts from others - including, but not limited to:

• bushing
• segher
• comex
• marcan
• trap15
• grey
• parannoyed
• everybody behind the Qt framework

External Links

• GitHub - https://github.com/trapexit/wiiqt
• WiiBrew - https://wiibrew.org/wiki/Ohneschwanzenegger