To some, the word homebrew itself is enough to scare them away, to others its a great opportunity to make the most out of their gaming console. Although it does hold some risks and may in some cases be able to void warranty or cause a so called “brick”, if you know what you’re doing it can really spice things up. Many people think and argue that piracy and homebrew go hand in hand, but although homebrew in some cases might lead to piracy, this certainly isn’t the primary goal. I’ll start out by a simple and basic explanation of what homebrew actually is.
Homebrew is the term used for software that is “brewn at home”, or in other words, not designed by some fancy game designer but a do-it-yourself piece of code that was written by a hobbyist. For example, Nintendo does not want you to be able to play movie dvd’s on your Wii, this is probably due to licensing costs. The Wii is incapable of reading dvd’s because the software simply doesn’t know what to do with them. But hey…. what if some homebrew hobbyist decides to write his own software that IS capable of doing this.
This of course sounds awesome, but Nintendo just like any other company will try to prevent this. They try to prevent this by only allowing code to be run when that code holds the correct signature. This is a very complex process, but you can see it like this: Nintendo has a secret key, which they use to encrypt all of the games, channels and everything else that is ran on your system. This key is referred to as the “Private Key”. In order for these games and channels to be able to execute on your Wii, they need to be decrypted. This is done by the “Public Key”, this is a key thats known by every Wii. The public key can only be used to decrypt, not encrypt. The problem is that nobody (but Nintendo) knows the private key, so in theory you would not be able to run your own software because when the Wii checks for the right signature, and it isn’t there. Well, an arguably wise man once said “every security system can be compromised”. This has also happened with the Wii’s security system. Some pretty nifty hobbyist programmers found a bug in the check that the Wii does for the right...
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