How does the SaveMii Dongle work?

I know that we now have the option of savemii through the controller port without the use of the dongle, but how exactly does the dongle work.

You (Team Twiizers) said, if I remember correctly, that you didn't know about the button combination until after you started making the dongle, so it cant be emulating the button presses.

I would just like to know some information on how the dongle works, as there is very little to no documentation on it.

Even if I cam't understand most of your technical mumbo-jumbo I enjoy reading it and learning from it.

All I'm asking for is a little documentation, even a little hackmii post would be nice.

Thanks!

I think the info released is probably all your going to get: While reverse engineering the System Menu, one of TT (or maybe several of them) noticed that there was a check for some sort of dongle, and if present, the Wii would boot differently. So they reverse engineered the checks, found what it was checking for, and built the SaveMii.

It is believed that Ninty have a similar device internally, hence the functionality existing, SaveMii is merely a clone of that, only not cloned from hardware, but built by reverse engineering software.

Basically how it works is: Its plugged in, and when the System Menu boots, it checks for a certain type of device, which SaveMii appears to be, and if its found, boots in recovery mode.

ok, I guess that's all the info I'm going to get... Thanks SifJar

I don't really think there IS much more info...bushing and marcan just designed a device which fits what the SM looks for.

I'm not sure how true the story is but i heard a rumor that both a recovery dongel and disk were left in a wii when it was returned from repair by nintendo in america (again i say i dont know how true this is) and basically the boot sequese on the wii identified the dongel and booted from the dongle which had the recoverymode onboard. Then this recovery disk had a copy of the appropriate system menu installer that could be booted by the dongle.

like i say, this may not be true but seams plausable. And no i am not sugesting this is how TT found it, i belive that they put a LOT of work into reverseenginiering the wii. However i think it was this story that got them thinking and trying to emulate the dongel and its effects.

There is a disc called the recovery disc (aka the "gay fish" disc because it has two fish kissing on it), but that doesn't install System Menus. And the disc was sent out in a wii by mistake and leaked on the internet. But I don't think that happened till after the SaveMii was made, and I don't think there was a dongle sent with it.

"That" Wii had the recovery disc and an SD card left in it, no dongle. The "Wii Backup Disc" does nothing special other than let you back up saves and delete stuff. I'm not sure if that happened before or after the SaveMii, but it isn't related.

The dongle stuff was reverse engineered from the system menu. It's just an EXI device with ID 0x070200xx. There's nothing more to it, the system menu only checks the ID.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2010 06:36AM by marcan.