How much do we impact the design process of a Wii game?

[Panda On Smack]

I was wondering if games companies visit these forums and take into consideration what is possible via a USB Gecko.

The USB Gecko has been around for a while now and it seems what we do generally goes unnoticed. This is probably a good thing :)

Do they try to develop their games to make it harder to be hacked?
Do they know we even exist?
Do they care?
Are we such a small community they ignore the little impact we make?

What do you think?

[dcx2]

Most game developers probably don't even know we exist, and those that do probably don't care, with the exception of online cheating (which every game company cares about).  I don't see why anyone would care if we hacked single player games.

I don't even think they could make their games harder to hack.  That burden rests on Nintendo.  Once you can see and touch the memory and registers in the CPU, we win.  The most they can do is obfuscation and subterfuge, and they probably wouldn't consider it worth the effort.

[Romaap]

wouldn't it be as easy as:

Code Select Expand

if( checkmemory(SOMEWHERE_IN_CODEHANDLER) == A_VALUE )
   show_anti_hack_screen();

or doesn't the game have access to that memory?

[dcx2]

Something simple like that could be worked around in about 30 seconds with a recompile of Gecko OS.

[Romaap]

but what if they would fill Gecko's codehandler with random values when it detects something in that area?

[dcx2]

Aren't there config options that can move the code handler around in memory?  We just use that portion because it's generally unused memory.

And I don't think that would stop debuggers from reading/writing to memory.  I'm sure we could find the anti-code-handler ASM, and then we could write a patch that Gecko OS would apply to remove the anti-code-handler stuff.

[Skiller]

Aren't there config options that can move the code handler around in memory?  We just use that portion because it's generally unused memory.

And I don't think that would stop debuggers from reading/writing to memory.  I'm sure we could find the anti-code-handler ASM, and then we could write a patch that Gecko OS would apply to remove the anti-code-handler stuff.

i know in PS2 they can Put something in that Stops memory from being BP.. im betting that the Gecko also slows down the Games Speed as well adding in the extra handles would do that they could check that but this could throw off a few things not just do to codes ..

[ultrafoxus]

this is very good informattion

[jfmherokiller]

yea it is but the only places i have seen obfuscation is in flash mostly from high ranking game devs.