News Channel

News Channel
Version	0.7 (7)
Title ID	HAGA, HAGx
Type	General channel
Peripherals

The News Channel download data packages from Nintendo servers via plain HTTP connection. The official servers for the News Channel were discontinued on June 28, 2013; however, RiiConnect24 has since restored its functionality.

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++;
        }
      }
  }