Posted:
8/14/2020 11:09am
#9

1) Is it legal? I'd like to use it in City Folk, but I don't think I would be comfortable using something that wasn't legal.
If you bought the game in any way (in the store, eBay, used market, etc.) then it's perfectly legal. There's nothing Nintendo can do about you playing a game you legit bought. And your Wii is your Wii. Nintendo can complain about soft-modding or the hacking scene, but they can't do anything to you about you doing whatever you want with your console. Besides, Nintendo has dropped any and all support for the Wii a long time ago anyway, so why should they care? If you're not selling boot-legs of their games, there's nothing they can do to you.
2) How does it work and how do you use it?
Wiimmfi is a custom server set up by fans of these old Nintendo consoles and the great games that were released for it as a way to continue to play on-line using the "Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection" features built into some of those games. All of the connections had to be reverse-engineered from captured data packets both coming and going from peoples' game systems. This was done for a few years before Nintendo actually shut down the Wi-Fi services because GameSpy, the company that actually ran the servers, went out of business.
The PROBLEM with Wiimmfi - or ANY 3rd party replacement service for on-line play on the Wii, is that they do not and cannot have the security encryption keys that Nintendo's original servers had, so games on the Wii all attempt to authenticate Nintendo using their half of the security key built into the games. And since Wiimmfi and all others cannot respond with the proper hash (because we don't know it), the games will refuse to connect to any on-line service.
So, how does Wiimmfi get around this? To be perfectly honest, they hacked the game code. They either use a run-time patch ran before you execute the game that steps in an disables the security hash check so the game will be able to play on their network or they let you patch the actual game image file if you rip your games to a thumb drive or USB hard drive and play from there using a USB boot loader - which requires you to soft-mod your Wii to even be able to do ANY of that.
Having said ALL of the above - we can talk about it, but we can't tell you how to do any of it, as the mods on this website have deemed all of this "hacking" (which for the Wii, actually kind of IS) and is against the rules. We can tell you it needs to be hacked, but we can't tell you how to do it. Like, ANY of it. Any posts like that will be deleted and repeated attempts to post how-tos for it will get you banned.
3) Is it safe? Meaning, would it corrupt anything?
There's always a chance you could brick your Wii doing the soft-modding and patching of the internal IOS of the Wii's firmware, but if you actually follow the steps exactly (using guides you can find online, just not here), I've modded 2 Wiis successfully so far with no issues. In fact, YESTERDAY I got to visit my first Animal Crossing: City Folk friend as she had a turnip price over 100 and I had a ton to sell. I had to dump my Wii's IP address into a DMZ on my router for it to connect because I don't know exactly which ports to open directly to it on my router, but I was able to connect and sell my turnips and drop some tools and bells for her. And we both use a game image I patched myself and run off of a USB stick in the back of the console to play the game. We enjoy quicker load times than the original game disc had and we don't have to deal with patches ever again to play this game on-line. Once the Wii has been successfully modded, you shouldn't have to deal with any of it ever again.
And as a side note, there's also RiiConnect24, which is a replacement for the old "WiiConnect24" services. Doing THAT to your console will get your NEWS, WEATHER, Everybody Votes, and other original channels working again. I mean, I don't really use the NEWS app because of where they get their news from, but it's a cool feature. The weather app is easy enough to check before going to work in the morning. And sometimes it's fun to derp around with the Everybody Votes channel from time to time.
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RetroGuy
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