News Channel

From WiiLi

The News Channel provides news from the Associated Press to your Wii Console. It was launched on January 26, 2006 (a day earlier than stated).

[edit] Features

News organized by Criteria (Regional, Technology, etc...)
Globe to visually go to where the news is, the globe is zoomable and can be spun similar to the Forecast Channel globe.

[edit] Data Packages

Downloads are data packages from Nintendo servers via plain http connection.

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

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:

Read one byte
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++;
       }
     }
 }