Entrepreneurs Mean Business

This post has been moved to our new blog. Entrepreneurs Mean Business - Wii Love To Hack (Nintendo Wii Modchip Install)

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This is a long post. Honestly, it's longer than it needs to be, and if you're not enthralled by hacker's notes then it may just not be your bag. No biggie, don't worry about it. I'm posting this at EMB because I'd like to give people a sense of what I'm about, and at my core, I'm just a big, cuddly, hardware hacker. And an entrepreneur. And some other things. Seriously, skip this if you read a few paragraphs and it just doesn't grab you. Blake is finishing school and I'm giving us both a break for a few weeks, but the business stuff will be back shortly.

Welcome, to those of you dropping in by way of FishNet Tech, or for you old-timers, Phischkneght. In the old days, this post would have gone up over at Phischkneght Extended, but...well, this just works better for me right now.

So, on with the story!

I've had my Wii for about 6 weeks now. It's a great system, and I love the new controller format and gaming possibilities with the Wiimote.

I can't have a tech toy for long without opening it up and hacking it though, so it was quickly time to find a mod chip.

I ordered the special Nintendo tri-wing screwdriver the same day I ordered the mod chip, but from a different site and with (unfortunately) slower shipping. In fact, it's been over three weeks now, and I'm still waiting on that tri-wing driver.

The chip arrived quickly, via DHL. It was dwarfed by the small DHL envelope it came in, and I'd be surprised if they don't get lost quite often. The chip was in a very small ESD bag that was heat-sealed closed.

I took it to my workbench and, not yet having the required screwdriver, let it sit for most of that day.

I was excited about the new possibilities that having the chip installed would open up. I soon found that I couldn’t wait. I decided to go in search of a tri-wing driver locally. I ended up at Sears. They don’t carry many custom drivers, and I realized there that neither would anyone else local. But after browsing their Torx drivers for a while, I realized that with some creative Dremelling, a tri-wing could be created from a Torx 10. I bought the driver and cruised home.

A Torx head is a six-pointed star. A tri-wing is a three-pointed star. If I use the Dremel to cut off every other point, then the remaining shaping of the bit’s finer characteristics should be trivial, or at least nearly so.



I clamped the driver down in my vise, put on my glasses (an absolute must for Dremelling metal), and got to work with my cutting disc.

My first two attempts yielded workable, but not ideal tri-wing replicas. They each would turn a tri-wing screw (I tested this on a Wave Bird receiver), but had one fin that didn’t grip quite right.

To reach perfection, they say, you must kill your darlings. So after the first try, I simply turned my cutting wheel horizontal and cut the business end of the driver off so that I could start fresh. Ditto for the second try.

The third try was in fact the charm, and with appropriate care and handling, I could be sure that it would turn the screws evenly and without damaging them. The whole process of modding the driver cost something like 40 minutes and five dollars, including the $3.50 that I paid for the Torx 10 at Sears.



I've done a lot of reading about installing the WiiKey, and I had already decided that I did not want to solder the chip directly to my Wii's board.

The daughterboard which the tiny chip lives on is called a quick solder package, and it's meant to be laid directly on the motherboard, lined up with certain solder points there, and soldered to them at the six corresponding points on the WiiKey board.

This seems like a foolish approach to me.

First, the above approach depends on solder blobs (albeit small ones) for making the connections from board to board. The quick solder board is advertised as being an "easy" approach, but any experienced solderer can tell you that solder blobs are far less cooperative than a properly tinned wire.

Second, solder blobs have a tendency to join one another. Melted metal conducts heat extremely well, so when it gets anywhere near other metal, it's likely that it will flow to it. This results in bridged connections, or in layman's terms (but not necessarily technically), shorted connections.

Finally, a chip or daughterboard that is soldered directly to another board is extremely difficult to service or remove altogether. What if I want to change a pinout? What if I return the unit and want to remove the chip for an install in another system? What if I just want the chip out, and quickly?

All of these concerns are easily addressed by simply putting wires between the two boards. Yes, it doubles the necessary soldered connections, but they're easier solders to do (rather than playing with molten blobs), and this solution solves all of the above issues.

It also makes installing a newer modchip easier in the future, if desired. So I chose to use a wired install, and find a place to tuck the chip during the install.



There are tutorials online on how to crack open the Wii. They're good, and it's not all obvious, so don't try this stuff without instructions the first time. If you're not sophisticated enough to Google up a tutorial, put the tools down and walk away. Your Wii will thank you.

The one disadvantage to this technique is finding a place to stash the chip, since it won't live right on the board. Space is tight inside the Wii, but fortunately there's a gap in the board that the chip is installed on, leaving the DVD drive's spindle showing. This leaves a depression that is close to the soldered connections and is the perfect size to fit the chip comfortably.

Now that I had the system open, and I could see where I'd place the chip, there was the matter of getting the wires soldered in place. I took this one wire at a time. To adapt a carpentry adage, "Compare three times, solder once." If the wire is soldered to the wrong lead, this will obviously make trouble.

This was one of the more touchy soldering jobs I've had to do. It's not as bad as some SMT chips I've repaired (in fact, my greatest hardware hacking triumph was on a chip with legs a lot like the one on the bottom right of the photo below). The point is, you definitely want to slow down on this part and do it right the first time. Wii hacking message boards are full of the woeful stories of inexperienced solderers who've botched the job, sometimes to a shocking degree. Those on the boards skillful enough to repair these botched jobs are making a killing. You can see some of the horror stories, and the subsequent repairs, here.



In the process of positioning the chip, I realized that the wires I chose for the install were on the thick side. I cut a floppy drive cable for these wires, so next time I'll cut an 80-conductor IDE cable instead. I can probably get a dozen installs per cable if I cut the wires right. The problem is that the system is very small, fits together very tightly, and the design only accounts for items raising above the level of the board itself up to, say, the width of an SMT chip like the one on the right in the photo. You can see that my wires are a little taller than it is, so I had to do some re-arranging to get them to sit flatter. Like I say, thinner wires next time.



The next image is sort of an overview. On the right, mostly cut off, is half of the Wii shell that holds the Game Cube circuitry, WiFi and Bluetooth radios, and most of the plastic that makes up the Wii's insides. Most of this photo, ie: the square shape with a black outline is the bottom side of the Wii's DVD drive, and all of the DVD drive's controller chips. You can see that I chose to put the WiiKey chip back in its original ESD bag for the install, as I don't like putting electrical tape directly on chips. It leaves gum, and I hate that.



The WiiKey modchip doesn't actually go on the Wii's motherboard, but the DVD drive's motherboard, effectively sitting between the DVD subsystem and the Wii's DVD interface, and it tells the Wii that any disc inserted into the drive is an authentic disc of that Wii's region. The Wii never suspects that the DVD drive is lying, and that's why the modchip allows you to play backup up games, homebrew, and so forth.

The modchip must be insulated in this type of install, as it has contacts on the back side that could ground out against the metal DVD drive chassis, which could be disastrous. I've seen others simply wrap the chip in black electrical tape, but that approach is far from elegant. I think that using the chip's own original ESD bag is a nice touch, and it ended up working terrifically. The two tabs of electrical tape are simply there to hold the bag (and the chip inside it) in place.



After this, the physical install was simple to wrap up as reassembling the Wii is a simple matter.

There is a glitch that lots of people have been encountering with WiiConnect 24 when installing mod chips. The "Everybody Votes Channel" seems to be related to it. Put short, in some cases when the WiiKey is installed, the Wii's wireless (called WiiConnect) stops working, even though it is turned on in the menus. Here's how I avoided this problem.

1. Before installing the chip, turn on your Wii.
2. In the Channel Management screen, delete the "Everybody Votes Channel."
3. And delete the "Internet Browser Channel" (Opera).
4. Turn off WiiConnect24, and WiiConnect. This means that your wireless is now disconnected completely and the Wii is receiving no internet service. Test to make sure.
5. Back up all game saves and channels to an SD card.
6. Install the WiiKey as normal. I had the Wii's backup battery out for less than 45 minutes, and I don't know if this made a difference.
7. Reassemble the Wii, power it on, re-set the Wii's system time.
8. Insert the modchip's configuration disc, load the Disc Channel, tell the configuration program what region your Wii is so that it can fake the output from the DVD drive to the Wii mainboard.
9. Reboot the Wii, check that your time correction stuck. If it didn't, you installed the backup battery incorrectly. Fix it.
10. Turn WiiConnect but not WiiConnect24 back on.
11. Open the News Channel, or the Weather Channel, or the Shopping Channel to verify that you're back online.
12. If you are, go ahead and turn on WiiConnect24.
13. Re-download Everybody Votes and the Browser Channel, if desired.
14. Your SD backups shouldn't be needed, but isn't it nice to have a backup just in case?

Done!

And one last thing: Sorry about the blotted out areas in the photos above. Some console manufacturers think that they have more of a right to own your console than you do, and if they can identify hacked consoles, they'll bomb them. The blotted out portions above are just numbers that might have uniquely identified my Wii, and I don't want that.