Post #1796630

Happy to say I have acquired the first CAT-DEV v4 (one of the prototype Wii-U devkits), and even happier to say that the tools I’ve been developing for these devices mostly “just worked”. This is not as useful as the “v2” cat-dev (aka “Toucan”) would’ve been, but is just as rare (there only ever being one that publicly was known to be sold). It is running firmware and has stickers from early 2012. I was able to dump the usual suspects from the “MION” board (the board that holds the internal hard drive, and drives the debugger, power, etc. for the Wii-U board also in the case). The hard drive was empty unfortunately. Unfortunately the device is in PCFS boot mode (meaning it requires a Pc to get its filesystem), and the older firmware does not support bypassing this like the newer firmware does. So we cannot power it on, or dump the internal NAND yet. I’ve already been working on a dumper to remotely dump CAT-DEVs using PCFS. So the current plan will be, finish the remote dumper and test it on a modern cat-dev, then boot the v4 with PCFS using a modern CafeOS (hoping our PCFS implementation is compatible and the older FW doesn’t have any tricks up its sleeve), and then use the remote dumper to dump the internal NAND. The remote dumper should do this without any writes to the underlying NAND so we shouldn’t lose anything. Although to be clear there will almost assuredly be no game data on the NAND, but we may get some earlier OS binaries. Incase anyone was super curious about what didn’t work with Sprig, it’s really only the fact the MION does not support “extended” information queries, and does not use the MIONs internal parameter space. What this means is I have to go parse some incorrectly formed HTML (which I already had implemented but was not using), in order to determine what version this thing is, what boot type it’s in, etc. everything else, including the dumping of MION just worked. We’ll see if PCFS does though.