Current Projects

19 07 2009

Well right now, I have my hands full in Wii Projects. I’ve got ERS, WiiConnect, WiiBrowse, HBPCii, and some memory patches to create for the system menu.

First of all, WiiConnect is going great! I’ve got a working/feature-limited email client made for the Wii. Right now, it is able to correctly send mail over the SMTP protocol and recieve mail over the POP3 protocol. I still need to implement more features, especially on the SMTP side. Because of spammers, there’s a whole lot more security required on the SMTP side of things as opposed to the POP3 side of things. The AUTH LOGIN command may be working, but I haven’t tested it yet. The biggest feature that is missing is the ability to save settings, and save messages to your SD card. So I’ve been doin a lot with this program lately.

WiiBrowse is a new project, that me and a fellow developer, scanff, are working on together. As the name suggests, it is a web browser for the wii, with planned HTML, CSS,  JavaScript, and Flash support. You can visit the wiibrew page, or go to the google code page. Scanff pretty much wrote all of the HTML rendering and parsing. I’m working on the CSS parser for it. I am really enjoying this project, especially since I can easily test/debug it on a PC. You can expect this project to go far, and you just might find it in WiiConnect to render HTML mail.

ERS isn’t doing so hot. After the ball got rolling on WiiConnect, I kind of pushed ERS aside, since WiiConnect is more important to me (and pretty much anyone else). I will eventually get around to finishing it, it will just be a little while.

HBPCii stands for HomeBrew Parental Controls for wII. It is really just an answer to someone’s request for an app that will password-protect the Homebrew Channel. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to “delete” the homebrew channel from the system menu while keeping it in the NAND. My options are to either make a custom Hombrew Channel WAD (and patch out the middle finger which will display using this method), simply use this as the autoboot dol in PreLoader (password-protecting the entire Wii, provided that other people don’t know how to use Preloader), or create my own PreLoader that is password-protected. Easy option would be to use the autoboot, but I want to re-create the PreLoader eventually, so that your Wii is comepletely password protected. I would just have to figure out how to implement a “forgot my password” thing so that forgetting your password doesn’t result in a bricked Wii.

Last, I am trying to find out how to patch the video mode in the system menu for someone on the Wiibrew Forums. I need to make an entry for the hacks.ini file for Preloader. Either this or solve the person’s problem another way.

As you can see, I am doing a lot of dev’ing right now. I am really excited about what will come from all this work. Be looking forward to some great homebrew!





WiiConnect

21 05 2009

Well, thanks to JussiPik, I now have a really slick gui concept for WiiConnect. I never pictured the gui looking as good as this concept does. I now need to implement the gui so that I can start working on the more fun things. An image of the concept is below.

concept