Ahh, that brings me back. I can still remember the startup music.
The DS was my first console I played pirated games on and the Wii was the second, followed by the PSP, 3DS, and Switch. I remember I chose to jailbreak the Wii specifically because of Xenoblade Chronicles not getting a NA release (originally). Come to think of it, I played Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition on my Switch recently. Full circle!
Ok so, i might be late to all this as i was helping with the damage control. But let me get some facts straight out in the open. Yes this is part of the damage control im doing, but its to battle a lot of misinformation out there. So, lets get into it.
First things first, marcan is wrong. Libogc ( the library homebrew is built upon )'s threading is not rtems. As youll see later, it was inspired by it, but not even close as to a copy paste or plagiarised when it was first made. Shagkur (the one who made lwp) is known to have created some stuff by looking at other stuff and writing code from the ideas. This was asked to shagkur when we were first made aware of the allegations 2 years ago
Dkp didnt make this public as they did not feel like it was necessary.
Its only now that marcan made a fuss about it and it blew up that we have to battle this.
There is also the fact that libogc is 23 fucking years old. It was made by shagkur in 2003, before git or svn existed and before forums and social media was a thing. So you shouldnt put it up to todays standards either. On top of it, that was made for gamecube, not wii. Marcan was part of the migration to wii so he was part of it too.
I also want to point out that he shouldnt be making a fuss as his mini code, a code base what their bootmii and installer is build upon, contains code that looks very similar to ios, the nintendo code running on the security processor.
Anyway, there is more. Yes people have found similarities, but thats because of how things work, not because of copy pasta. I would like to redirect your attention to this blogpost and investigation by mardy : https://mardy.it/blog/2025/04/no-libogc-did-not-steal-rtems-code.html
Inline edit about the blog: i want to point out the lwp code also evolved over time to fit newlib better and to integrate standard c/c++ code better. But lets keep going, shall we?
Im not going to deny that parts of libogc are semi decompilations of the then leaked gamecube sdk. devkitPro didnt know this untill years after it had integrated libogc into its systems. But by then it was wildly used so there was no going back. Rewriting it would also not have been feasible to do alone. Hence the state it is in now. But as far as the new lwp allegations, its all false.
Also, and this is my personal thing, hbc archiving their repo was a pure dick move. They didnt do anything with it anymore, they didnt merge or accept improvements nor did they want to release a new version that would have fixed some stuff for wiiu/vwii. Its was considered dead by the community ages ago…
It hasn’t received an official release in almost 10 years, so who cares. It probably has been feature complete longer than that, on a console that at this point is almost twice as old with a miniscule community.
Its wild to hear it called miniscule considering Wii homebrew at its peak was as big as OG Xbox or PSP modding.
At its peak, sure. But I mean, how many people do you know who still have a Wii and actually uses it? I happen to have one and it’s actually plugged into my TV, but even I rarely play it.
I keep tabs from afar, and the only activity I can see in the homebrew scene is the revival of some online games (by bringing up custom/reverse-enginnered servers + patching the games, e.g. Mario Kart, Call of Duty Black Ops, etc.), but other than that, the homebrew scene on the Wii is mostly dead.
I see the headline and think “sooooo…?”
I read the article and I’m left continuing with the same question… They’re trying to say that it’s built on a library full of Nintendo code.
Whoop-de-fuck… Other than Nintendo, who cares? Why care? Libraries, SDKs, and drivers SHOULD be free and open source.
They also stole foss code though
Edit: The above statement is probably untrue
Not quite “steal”, but they removed license and attribution information, which is a no-no and license infringement for sure.
But yeah, this is all of no consequence.
Edit: I just read DacoTaco’s post below. Looks like there was no direct code liftup from RTEMS then, so I guess it’s even more of a fuss over nothing.
For me it was built on hopes and dreams