Wii chipset change renders modchips useless February 6, 2007
Engadget reports that Nintendo has made some recent manufacturing modifications that render the Wiinja, Cyclowiz and Wiikey chips all useless. A change in the Panasonic chipset for the DVD drive has been made in most of the Wiis purchased in late January to early February.
Currently the only way to check the chipset of your Wii is to open it up and look. The version shown to the left, “GC2-D2B” is the incompatible drive model.
Both the Cyclowiz and Wiinja teams have recognized the issue and are working on their next work around. My question is if this was intentional or if the change in the chipset has to do with something else like production costs or future updates. It is interesting to see the Cyclowiz team state that Nintendo won’t be able to lock their chip out with a firmware update and only a week later having Nintendo switch around the hardware.
Source: Engadget & gbatemp.net
Image borrowed from the Engadget post.
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Yeah, but i have a launch Wii
Of course, I still don’t want a mod chip.
hmm, very interesting development here - i wonder if it was just a coincidence with the new chip?
I also wonder about the chip name, GC2 … GameCube 2?
well i got a launch wii, in the future ill mod, imagine the homebrew wii possiblities
with the ease of rentals nowadays why mod anyway
daggerpaw
Surely the developers saw the similarity between the GC and the Wii chips xD
I’ll be getting a Wii with this chip. I have an earlier Wii, but I’m sending it back for replacement because it developed a problem where it showed a lot of artifacts on the screen. You can find a huge thread about that in the Nintendo forums. I don’t really plan on getting any mod chip though.
sunman: I rent most my games, but nonetheless I want to mod so I can play imports. For some reason some NTSC Wii titles have 480p, while the later released PAL titles don’t (CoD3 for example). And I have yet to find a PAL GC game that supports 480p. For GC there’s a whole list.
That’s why I want a chip. Possibly to play emulators until the VC releases the game and at some point that 512mb(?) of space will be filled up… Nintendo has to find a solution for that, or there is one and I missed it…
There is a solution for that. Insert an external SD card if you run out of space, and start using that.
Seems that sales took over the tech folks. So with all the broken chips, non players, sales hype, etc. I’m not buying for a year or more. Why throw good money after bad/handicapped gear. I’m gone!