Nintendo Wii hacked

The Nintendo Wii has been hacked by a group of security researchers, raising the possibility of homebrew games being made available for the console.

Addressing an audience at the 24th Annual Chaos Communication Congress, the group - lead by Michael Steil and Felix Domke - announced they had cracked the security encryptions on the console, theoretically allowing them to run their own code on the platform.

This was followed by an announcement of plans to create a Linux distribution of the crack.

Explaining the development John Leydon, of gaming site theregister.co.uk, said: "The hack advances the possibility of running homebrew code with access to full system resources on the device, not just programs Nintendo has sanctioned.

"Such games might be developed to run from a DVD drive, at least in theory.

"No such games are available as yet and Nintendo may respond by attempting to revoke compromised encryption keys. However history shows such countermeasures are likely to ultimately prove futile."

Previously it was only possible to develop homebrew titles for the Gamecube.

Nintendo is notoriously secretive regarding its hardware and is expected to watch these developments with great interest.