Wii:Modchips

While largely a lost art, between modern (and early) softmods providing adequate backup loading, many hardware revisions ultimately winning the war against drivechips, and the fact they actually cost money unlike the games they are used to run, Wii modchips used to be a prominent part of the Wii scene in the 2007 and 2008 with an absolute barrage of competing products.

Traditional chips

These work, like GCN drivechips, by interacting directly with the drive's controller and patching its firmware.

The first Wii drive modchip was the Wiinja in February 2007 (a full year before the Twilight Hack provided the first public Wii-mode homebrew entrypoint!), based on the 12F629 PIC; it only supports the contemporary D2A and DMS drives, but the Wiinja V2 was made to also support the D2B model.

Many competitors were quickly released:

• D2A/DMS/D2B chips
  • Cyclowiz (v2), DuoWii, WiiD, Wiifree, WiiFree Easyconnect, WiiMagic 3.0, Wiinja (v2), Wiinja Deluxe, WiiKey, Wiikit, Wiirez, Wiisuper
• The indie chips, many of which open source: the Chiip, OpenWii, WiiFree, yaosm
• and likely more...

Matsushita and Nintendo fought back by launching new chipsets with different firmware (the D2C in May 2007, the D2C-2, the D2E by 2008) as well as petty measures (removing a testpoint, clipping pins, coating them in epoxy).

• D2C/D2C2 chips, some of which updated for D2E
  • Argon, D2ckey, D2cpro, D2lite, D2pro (V2), D2sun, Infectus, W4pro, Wasabi, Wasp, Wiizardmod, WiiTop
• D2E chips also according to XavBoxWii: Argon 2, D2lite, D2pro v4, DriveKey, Wasabi Zero, Wasp, Wiikey 2 (9 and 6 wire versions)
• and likely more...

A companion product called the Wii-Clip or W•Clip, consisting of a flat cable to which a socket for the D2x chip is attached, promised modchip installations without soldering to the drive (using a QSB or a dedicated connector to attach to the chip), but offered mixed results due to the summing tolerances on both sides of the clip.

The Infectus chip by the Origa Bros. (Rimini, Italy) was also significant for being multipurpose: with different firmwares it could not only be used for modding different consoles (the PS2, the 360, the Wii with the Wiiktus one) but also as a parallel NAND programmer, for e.g the early PS3s and the Wii: indeed it is in this latter application that it's best known in the Wii scene.