With Nintendo’s Wii games console still dominating the market, behind the scenes they have been locked in a constant battle with the hardware hackers that just can’t resist a challenge. Here’s a quick history of this battle and an update on the current state of play.
The way all current Wii modchips operate is to patch the chipset on the DVD drive to fool the Wii into thinking there is a genuine game inserted, this exploit has been patched by Nintendo several times and in a number of different ways. First they produced a new version of the DVD controller with a new chipset, then when that was compromised, they came up with the bright idea of sawing the legs of several legs on the chip, thus stopping someone from soldering to the needed points. A Nintendo cost saving excersize that was quickly defeated by grinding away some of the plastic from the chip to reveal the soldering points. A low-tech solution to a low-tech fix 
Nintendo again responded by producing yet another board, this time with a troublesome chip known as the D2C. These new unbreakable versions began showing up everywhere, but it was only a matter of time.
The race to crack this new version was won by the D2Ckey team who managed it with a whopping 28 wire install, this looked like a daunting task to a beginner but seasoned console modders managed to pull off with some tidy looking installs like the one in the image above.
Further advancements with the D2C chipset allowed for a 13 wire install, and now that has been reduced to 9 wires for mod-chips such as wasabi, d2ckey and Infectus2.
To date there have been 5 hardware revisions, named GC2-DMS, GC2R-D2A, GC2-D2B, GC2-D2C and the new as of yet nameless revision.
This new revision that Nintendo have released defeats all current modchips. These have yet to be cracked so the bar has been raised again.
As ever hack247 do not condone piracy, everything you read here is for informational purposes :) Make sure you check out http://www.tehskeen.com/ for all the latest up to date news from the world of console modding.
Discussion
Post a comment