News Channel

News Channel
Version	0.7 (7)
Description	News informations
Type	General channel
Peripherals
Requires WiiConnect24

The News Channel download data packages from Nintendo servers via plain HTTP connection. Since the official servers for this were discontinued on June 28, 2013, RiiConnect24 is in the works.

Some examples:

http://news.wapp.wii.com/1/076/news.bin.08

Nowadays, it seems the news file has moved:

http://news.wapp.wii.com/v2/1/076/news.bin.00

...

http://news.wapp.wii.com/v2/1/076/news.bin.23

http://news.wapp.wii.com/ displays a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Test Page. File structure:

$0000 - $003F: padding (00)
$0040 - $013F: rsa encrypted sha-1 signature of rest of the file
$0140 - $0143: header
$0144 - .....: compressed data

The compression is very simple:

1. Read one byte
2. For each bit of the byte, msb-to-lsb,
   • if 0, copy one byte to the output
   • if 1, read 16 bits msb first in v, copy n bytes at offset m from the end of the output, n=3+(v>>12), m=v & fff

Quick and very dirty C code:

  i = 0x144;
  j = 0;
  while(i < size) {
    int k;
    int v = data[i++];
    for(k=0; k<8; k++)
      if(!(v & (1 << (7-k)))) {
        result_data[j++] = data[i++];
      } else {
        int vv = (data[i] << 8) | data[i+1];
        int nb = 3+(vv >> 12);
        int off = (vv & 0xfff);
        int l;
        i+=2;
        for(l=0; l<nb; l++) {
          result_data[j] = result_data[j-off-1];
          j++;
        }
      }
  }