BootMii Configuration Editor llows you to change the values in the /bootmii/bootmii.ini file without having to take out the SD card and edit it on a PC.

Changes:

Resolved a bug that caused a code dump if the bootmii directory did not exist. The bootmii directory is checked for existence on startup and the user is prevent from making changes if the directory does not exist
Improved Look & Feel.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/BootMii_Configuration_Editor

GuitarsOnFire is a GuitarHero clone, like Guitarfun and FretsOnFire. It uses FretsOnFire compatible songs, which can be found all over the internet. Everything will be released under GPL.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/GuitarsOnFire

FMyLife application! Downloads content from FMyLife.com and shows them on your Wii! Press 1 to view the latest 15 FML’s. Press it more times to get the next 15, etc, etc.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/FMyLife

This application allows you to extract/install savegames on your Wii. (data.bin files not supported). It allows savegames to be copied from the Wii to an SD card, including savegames that cannot normally be copied from the system menu. It is a combination of the two apps Savegame Extractor and Savegame Installer.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Savegame_Manager

Here comes a rather unbelieveable story…

Usually we are not the type of site getting the whole article of someone else, but in this case it might be good to have a full copy as it’s really interesting and important! The official blog post is here at http://sev-notes.blogspot.com/2009/06/gpl-scummvm-and-violations.html which is also linked again below. So if you want to discuss about it, you know where to go (go to the source!).

Quote:

Disclaimer
Fingolfin and cyx are bound by the agreement signed by the lawyers. They are not allowed to talk about the case. Other developers are not, and there is pretty handful of them who know at least beginning of the situation. We are not happy about the outcome, cyx and Fingolfin included.

Short story
As you may imagine, we are closely watching the market for ScummVM-supported games. One of the main reasons is provide an up to date information on our Where to buy games list. Thus, we were pretty glad and interested to hear that there are upcoming Humongous Entertainment titles on Wii. Thus, as soon as the games were on sale, couple of developers bought them.

Suddenly something quite unexpected happened. I got 2 independent reports from 2 completely different sources, even from different countries that apparently there is ScummVM inside. I was not surprised by the fact of ScummVM usage, as there are already Revolution games and GOG.com who sell ScummVM as part of their distributions, still a surprise was that there were the SCUMM-based games. Thus, I quickly requested to inspect the box for copyright statements, and as such, there came a surprise.

Clearly, it was a violation. Further inspection showed that it was even a blatant violation. I addressed to my friend, google.com search engine, and I found following facts:

Apparently Atari contracted porting work to their long time partner, Majesco Entertainment.

Majesco Entertainment in turn subcontracted the work to Mistic Software, a Canadian-based game shop

Mistic Software has its development office in Chernigov, Ukraine, locally presented as Mistic Soft LLC who did the actual work

These Mistic Soft guys got the game assets and sources (this is obvious from the fact that they were able to insert their names into game credits seamlessly), but instead of performing actual work they went a cheap way.

Inspection of the game binary (we dumped it on SD Card on Wii with homebrew channel, it’s pretty small) showed that they based their work on ScummVM 0.9.0, inside there were full credits to ScummVM Team (with couple placeholders for their names, though they left them empty), as well as such goodness as “This might be broken — please report where you encountered this to Fingolfin” or “Tell sev how to reproduce it”. Judging from the symbol names they rolled out their own backend, and used Nintendo tools for that.

Then we performed some playtesting on the real thing in order to find clues that ScummVM is inside. Pretty fast we found a 0.9.0-era bug in Freddi Fish. Let me demonstrate it:

Note that gfx glitch on Freddi’s left eye. It is right at the beginning of the game, when Freddi reads a letter from the bottle, and is easy to spot on the console. There could be other bugs, but that was enough. Now this bug is fixed in ScummVM.

The development
We were quite shocked. It looks like Mistic Soft took money for all the porting efforts but instead of that just stacked together a ScummVM build! Of course, it was easier (my estimate, that it requires about 2 full time weeks to port ScummVM to new platform), since as I suspect, original interpreter is not very alignment-safe and is not endianness-agnostic as ScummVM is.

Thus, we started to discuss what should we do with the case, and decided to approach gpl-violations.org. We got a lawyer which specializes on such violations, and pretty soon we sent a letter to Atari in Germany (the fact that the games being sold in Germany eased the work considerably).

First they started to deny everything. This is a pretty common thing among the lawyers, and also as I understand, they were not aware of the issue. Consider this: These programmers from Mistic Soft just provided the binaries to their Quality Assurance department, and the games worked well (as ScummVM does). They found no bugs, passed the work to Majesco, and those reported about successful project completion to Atari. Of course nobody except the developers (and perhaps their immediate managers) knew whose code is in there.

So, first Atari lawyers thought that we are going to sue them for zillions of Euros, and they prepared well for the fight. Once they got to know that only thing we are demanding is stick to GPL, they relaxed and the negotiations went much better.

We discussed that they could put stickers on those games which are being sold, and put ScummVM copyrights on new prints, mention us on their site. And it was really nice at first, but pretty soon the lawyers found that Nintendo explicitely prohibits use of open source software together with their Wii SDK, and as such it was a big fault from Atari side.

Thus, instead of being nice they decided to go and hit us badly.

At this very point let me go a bit astray and explain some things about ScummVM. ScummVM is a collection of game engines. There are two major categories of them. Part of the engines is based on original source codes provided by the IP right holders, and another part is partially produced with reverse engineering. Reverse engineering, and particularly disassembling is legal in majority of countries, Germany included. Another approach for reverse engineering is so called Chinese Wall technique is legal in all countries, US included.

SCUMM engine, later versions of which is used in Humongous Entertainment games is one of the engines which was reverse engineered, and that is what the lawyers tried to blackmail us for. In result this all turned into a completely different, much more complicated case.

Thus, there were two routes: 1. Go to court. Defend ScummVM, defend our techniques, spend a lot of time, money. 2. Arrange some kind of settlement agreement.

The finals
Thus, the facts were:
* There is a GPL violation (their denial has to be proven in a court, strings in executables and the bug above clearly show it)
* Atari could not release source codes because of Nintendo NDA
* Atari could not put GPL clause because of Nintendo NDA
* Atari could not “buy out” ScummVM from us
* There is no possibility to double license ScummVM, at least SCUMM engine
* We do not need any money as a “bribe to keep silent”

And we started to discuss. The rough details of the final settlement were: Fingolfin and cyx can post an agreed “press release.” They are not allowed to talk more about it. There is a period of time in which all current copies have to be sold. Any copies beyond this period or any reprints get fined with quite high fine for each new/remaining copy. The remaining stock has to be destoryed. There will be no single usage of ScummVM for any of upcoming games without our knowledge. Atari makes a significant donation to Free Software Foundation. Atari covers all expenses on gpl-violations.org lawyers.

Of course, we are not happy about this, as GPL is being violated, but it was better than to dive into many months long trial case.

So, when you will see Pajama Sam, Freddi Fish or SPY Fox games for Wii now in stores, know, that ScummVM is in there. And when you hear about ScummVM, remember, it is a commercial grade software which even Atari is not ashamed to put their label on.

Thanks to http://www.dcemu.co.uk and http://www.tehskeen.com for the news.

http://sev-notes.blogspot.com/2009/06/gpl-scummvm-and-violations.html

Seiken released WiiSPACE for Nintendo Wii.

Quote:

WiiSPACE is an original retro-themed spaceship shoot-’em-up supporting up to 4 simultaneous players for co-operative play. Features include powerups, bosses, high scores, and an aiming system allowing independent movement and targeting.

Version 1.0 was released on 22 June 2009. I’d like to wait a little while before putting this on the homebrew browser (to fix any bugs that might have slipped through the cracks)

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/WiiSPACE

A version of SDL Paradroid compiled for the Wii to fill the void in the U.S., where the virtual console lacks C64 games. This version is created from the GPL’ed source code from SDL Paradroid and uses the same data files.

You start off as a ‘Influence device’, your task is to clear the ship of all the rogue robots. Movement is by the arrow keys, Left control is the action key. Press it while you are moving and you will shoot your lasers, hold it down while not moving and you will go into transfer mode. This allows you to take over other droids. Pressing it down while over a terminal will take you into the ships computers, where you can view information about droid, ship view and a map of your current level.

Changes:

Thanks to Teknecal for his help tracking down this issue. The problem did not affect my Wii, but some Wii’s or SD cards apparently do not work with the old libfat path style the lacks the sd: prefix. Full sd: paths have been added to all files. That is the only change in this release and should fix compatibility.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Paradroid

crazygoth updated his Wii game “Pacline”. Collect dots and avoid the ghosts!

Changes:

– Added 3 lives
– Several colors for the ghosts and they’re also a little more beautiful
– Image on sd (preparation theme)
– Removal of the splashscreen
– New splashscreen

http://www.nintendomax.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10112

The MLlib (or Minishlink’s Library) is a simple library to develop on Nintendo Wii. Technically, it’s a wrapper of libogc and others librairies. Coding with this lib on Wii should be way easier and faster now!

Features:

Proper code so that it’s nice to see;
Easy for all;
Friendly functions;
Handles drawing (lol);
Sprite system;
Handles PNG images;
Special effects;
Write graphically text;
MP3 system;
MOD system;
Input (Wiimote, Nunchuk, and extensions…) system;
And much more…

Changes:

New method of programming. It uses seriously very less memory now. ML_Image, ML_Sprite, ML_Background.
added : ML_Screenshot(filename)
added : ML_IsSpriteVisible(sprite)
added : ML_AnimateSpriteEx(sprite, enabled, waitForXRefreshBetweenFrames, from, to)
added : ML_TextBox(ML_Sprite *sprite, x, y, x2, y2, const char *text, …)
added : ML_DrawRect(int x, int y, u16 width, u16 height, u32 rgba)
added : ML_Debug(text)
added : ML_CloneImage(image1, image2)
added : ML_DrawSpriteTextLimit(sprite, x, y, text, limit)
added : ML_FlipImageX(image)
added : ML_FlipImageY(image)
added : ML_InvertImageColors(image)
added : ML_ApplyGrayscaleToImage(image)
added : ML_FlushImage(image)
modified : Input is now finished
modified : ML_GetPixelColor
modified : ML_SetPixelColor
modified : ML_SplashScreen
modified : ML_Cursor, so that it draws your cursor/sprite with the center of the image, and then modifies the sprite.x and sprite.y so that if you point to the left-up edge of the screen it gives you 0, 0.
fixes and optimizations

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/MLlib

BootMii Configuration Editor llows you to change the values in the /bootmii/bootmii.ini file without having to take out the SD card and edit it on a PC.

Release notes:

Added OFF option to autoboot. Setting Autoboot to off will disable the delay timer setting in the configuration editor, as this serves no purpose with autoboot disabled. Setting of OFF has the effect of making the Wii sit in the bootmii menu screen until you select the system menu or homebrew channel option from the bootmii menu using either a gamecube controller, or the power/reset buttons on the front of the console.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/BootMii_Configuration_Editor