CAT-DEV

The CAT-DEV (Cafe Tool for Development; Product Code: WUT-001) was the main development system for the Wii-U. It can come in black, white, or beige/tan/gold colors in a rectangular box. Most CAT-DEV's will be 'beige' which is most commonly used for the later and final revisions of the CAT-DEV.

Each CAT-DEV includes the normal Wii-U hardware (minus the disc drive) with an additional 2Gbs of Ram (bringing the system to 4 Gbs total), as well as a Debugger, Optical Disc Emulation, and Host I/O Hardware. Any CAT-DEV that is a MION model will have an internal HDD, it is not currently known if previous models called "TOUCANs" have internal HDDs. "TOUCAN" models of CAT-DEV will feature a physical serial port, while "MIONs" opt instead to use serial through a USB adapter. MIONs will also have a three additional Wired RF serial ports, and a port for the LAN.

CAT-DEV's can come configured in multiple boot modes. Although the boot modes are slightly different based on the revision the modes effectively fall into three categories: the default mode where loading is controlled from a connected host pc, a 'reader' mode where data is loaded from internal memory/hard drives, and a mode where it can request from the host but fallback. See more info on the boot modes below.

The typical development flow for a MION CAT-DEV is to plug it into the network, and run "cafeon", or "caferun" from the Cafe SDK to emulate a full filesystem on the host PC. Developers could add, and remove directories dynamically to add titles and directories. Debug output is usually streamed over the network connection, but can also be gathered over a USB-Serial connection.

Known Versions

Use the tabs to navigate through the full list of versions, sorted by ODE type.

TOUCAN CAT-DEVs are the names of the host-bridge, and devkits for the early models of Wii-U development. Although one of these was sold on eBay, and we have log messages from various components much is not known about them. It is currently believed that TOUCAN's acted a lot like NDEV's (the development kit for the Wii). Featuring a very similar USB ports for debugging, lack of LAN, and behavior from the SDK.

It is believed all TOUCANs are black in color, and it is known that both do not have a LAN port on the front.

(~late 2010 internal, early 2011 external, Latte A11/A12?) No photos available (unknown SDK support), documentation mentions it was not bundled with the DRC (gamepad).

(~early-mid 2011, Latte A2X?)

first unit to come bundled with a DRC, one known system sold on ebay, where the below pictures from from, last system without an ethernet port. (unknown SDK support)

MIONs are the most well known type of host-bridge, and DEVKIT version as MIONs are in the final revision which is the revision most folks who have a CAT-DEV end up having. MIONs introduced an extra board called the MION which had an internal HDD, firmware, FPGA firmware, and contained the LAN port for communicating with a Host PC over the network.MIONs also introduced numerous network protocols to communicate with the host pc and load files from the host pc over the network. The only confirmed board variant that we have pictures of is: "CATHDD-X5" (present in MP2 units).

You can find more information about the host bridge MION board down below.

(July 2011, Latte A3X?)

White-cased unit that was only supported for a very short time (CafeSDK 2.0.0-2.0.4). Appears to share a case with V4, but can be distinguished from it by the acceptance dates listed on the top sticker.

(?, Latte A4X?)

Supported from CafeSDK 2.0.0.0-??? (Most likely latest)

While pictures exist of the V4 unit (sometimes mislabeled as a "v3" unit as it was miscommunicated to various sites), not much is known about them. Besides some notes from a changelog that was part of the SDK:

- "Increased Operating frequency of the CPU by 25%" - "The speed for writing to memory when using locked-cache DMA is the same as final." - "Speed of transfer from MEM1 to MEM2 is final." - "L2 Cache Fetch doubled when using lock-cached DMA"

(?, Latte A5X?) Not much is known about the MP1 Units.

(?-Final, Latte A5X)

Final revision supported from CafeSDK 2.0.0-Latest.

The following boards are known to be present in a CAT-DEV MP2:

- WUP-DEV-X8 - WUP-DEV-X9 - WUP-DEV-X10

The following consoles don't fit into one of the above categories, and very little is known about them.

IOSU has support for talking to a CAT-DEV that has a Latte B1X chip inside of it. It's not clear if they were ever distributed externally, or used internally.

The CAT-DEV EV (also known as the CAFE EV, EV board or just EV) was a variant of the CAT-DEV used internally at Nintendo. It probably had additional debug features similar to the NDEV1; socketed chips, JTAG connectors, external clock connectors, etc. There's also an "EV_Y" variant which was introduced with Latte A5X/CAT-DEV MP2.

Serial Port Settings

Although later CAT-DEV models do not have a dedicated serial port, they do have support for accessing a serial like console through a Telnet connection on the TCP port 6008, or by using a USB Serial Adapter. The only ones called out as specifically supported in the Cafe SDK docs were:

- US232B/LC

- VSCOM / USB to RS-232 Cable / FTDI FT232B

- QVS / USB to RS-232 Cable / FTDI FT232B

If you connected through this serial USB connection, you would need to configure your application (such as tera term) to read with the following settings:

 - Baud Rate: 57600
 - Line Endings: CR/LF

MION Board

The CAT-DEV's from V3 onwards started featuring a "MION" board as the 'host bridge' (short for "Multi I/O Network") that contained the internal hdd, as well as is the device that managed the LAN port connection. It is the real brains of driving the power, serial output, and filesystem (in certain boot modes) for the CAT-DEV. When developers are interacting with the CAT-DEV through tools in the SDK like "cafeon", "findbridges", etc. They're actually interacting with the MION board directly. There are three boot modes available on MION CAT-DEVs: "PCFS", "DUAL", and "HDD Reader Mode". HDD Reader Mode is the only mode that allows the actual Cafe OS, and "wii-u" portion to boot when first receiving power. In "PCFS", or "DUAL" mode the MION will not power on the actual Cafe OS until a HTTP Request is received to power on the underlying OS. In many cases you must also spin up several TCP, and UDP services for the device to interact with, but every known MION has a series of flags you can set to force booting when 'PCFS' is turned on. MIONs are also how developers would 'find' the cat-dev on a network since there was no visual indicators when first powering them on. They did this through UDP Broadcast packets on port 7974. They also have support for fetching the internal memory, and disk state (although only 512 bytes at a time).

One of the services exposed by the MION is telnet, which requires a username, and password. The username is "mion", and the password is: "/Multi_I/O_Network/" (this username/password can also be used on the web interface). Although the telnet doesn't seem to expose anything incredibly useful, it is possible to get logs from the MION board itself, as opposed to the logs coming from CafeOS. This username/password is consistent across all known versions of MION Firmwares, and seems to be added on every boot even if it's removed.

The MION boards have the following known firmware versions:


MION FW Version	SDK Release	Notes
0.00.13.58
0.00.13.74
0.00.14.70
0.00.14.77		Introduced "power_on_v2" HTTP API, and the ability to take control over someone else's MION, and added proper support for overriding booting out of PCFS when PCFS is enabled.
0.00.14.80	2.12.13

DRC2 (second GamePad port)

At least one of the earlier versions (either v3 or v4) of the CAT-DEV is known to have had a second DRC port covered up with semi-transparent plastic. This could indicate a feature which was only included on internal/special order units and was being covered up for mass release, similarly to wired WiFi on the NDEV, or that they were undecided about supporting 2 GamePads.