Wii:History on the Wii hacking scene

1 - A quick look at the beginning

The Wii hacking story started with Team Twiizers (A.K.A fail0verflow), their name came from the exploit they used... The Tweezer attack!

How it works:

Let's see how the Tweezer attack works, when the Wii switches to the GameCube mode it prepares the memory first by cleaning a specific bank of it, but the problem with that is that there is still some residual data left! The Team Twiizers used tweezers to switch between memory banks by shorting some data lines, which enabled them to access the residual data referred to earlier, which finally lead to them getting the encryption keys.

The First Homebrew-ish:

Now with the encryption keys in his hands, Bushing made the first homebrew for the Wii, which consist of a Wii Remote monitor. It was a modified version of the Lego Star Wars game released on the Wii which ran custom code made by him.

A video demonstrating that is available on the WiiDatabase YouTube channel.

2 - The Riivolution

After the discovery of an exploit with the game The Legend Of Zelda : Twilight Princess (A.K.A Twilight hack), Wii homebrew became easy to setup, which lead to the creation of the famous Homebrew Channel. This is a channel that you would install on your console to make launching homebrews way easier, just copy the files to an SD card and your homebrew will appear on the screen.

Installing the homebrew channel was done using the Hackmii Installer, an app developed by Team Twiizers, BootMii was also included in the Hackmii Installer.

BootMii is a software that's used as a brick prevention tool, you can either install it as Boot2 (The third Wii boot stage, way safer and brick preventive.) It requires an old enough Wii, or as an IOS (Specifically IOS 254) which is compatible with all Wiis (vWiis are NOT compatible), but it's less efficient for preventing bricks. The main uses of BootMii are : NAND dumping and Brick recovery, these are done using CEIL1NG_CAT (The user interface, wrongly thought as being BootMii itself).

3 - Homebrew and piracy, a long story

When hearing the word homebrew the first thing that comes in mind is piracy (Piracy being a biproduct of homebrew). The Wii didn't escape this rule, piracy started with Wanikoko and their homebrew WAD Installer, which later became WAD Uninstaller and finally changed to WAD Manager. This tool enabled sharing VC and WiiWare WADs between people on the internet.

After that came Wanikoko's cIOSes, these are customized IOSes which enable loading backups using a loader such as Neogamma (Which was the best loader at the time), and they were intended to load your own backups, but lead to sharing pirated games again.

3.1 - The Nintendo WFC and Cheating

Cheating became incredibly easy with homebrews (With GeckoLoader for example), and this made online games unplayable because of the unfairness that came with cheat codes.

2008

Wanikoko released several tools, such as his famous Wad manager, SD/USB loader?.

2009

No data (yet).

2010

No data (yet).

2011

No data (yet).

2012

No data (yet).

2013

No data (yet).

2014

2014 marks the end of the Nintendo WFC, and the beginning of Wiimmfi!

2015

D2X CIOs was released.

Sources found:https://gbatemp.net/threads/the-early-history-of-wii-modding.243461/

https://gbatemp.net/threads/part-of-the-wii-hacking-history-summer-2008-to-2009.521275/

probably check failoverflow