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, YoWii
• 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, D2all, D2pro (V2), D2SUN, D2D, Infectus, W4pro, Wasabi, Wasp, Wiizardmod, WiiTop/WiiDual
• 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.

Inline chips

The D3 drive was launched in December 2008, at the time also known as D2Nothing as it removed the D2x merging it into the larger controller chip, and removing the traditional debug interface used by the above products.

However, all drives up to then supported special commands giving them the ability to read industry standard DVD discs (albeit limited to 3× instead of 6× speed) likely due to the canned official DVD-Video support, which was reused (and well received) for unofficial DVD-Video support but also for copied disc loaders (WiiGator's Backup Loader Gamma, SoftChip, and NeoGamma).

Additionally, at this time (end of 2008) the Wii had just become mainstream after almost two years of shortages, while softmods – at least outside the original Xbox scene – were still not well established; they also have a learning curve even for day to day operation, and could be wiped out by someone (invariably the modder's brother, cousin, or dog) "accidentally" installing then-frequent updates.

The modchip market recognised this lingering demand and produced compatible "flat" chips (the DriveKey, Wasp 2, Wasabi DX, D-Right, Flatmod, XenoWii 2): they connect in series with the drive's data cable and effectively simulate Wii and GC discs by translating reads to DVD-Video commands.

Compared to traditional chips, they are easy to install (being solderless on all supported models – though some alternatively support traditional operation, avoiding the following downsides), but limit read speed and never support GC audio streaming.

Hardware ODEs

In August 2009 the eighth generation drive popularly called the D3-2 had been released, resembling the D3 but with the main chip completely unlabeled: these completely remove generic DVD support, thus sunsetting the modchip market that was already fading (Waninkoko & Kwiirk's SD/USB Loader 1.5 was by then a couple months old).

While all drives up to and including the D3-2 have interchangeable PCBs, allowing someone wanting to chip their console at any cost to do so, the demand for this mod was negligible compared to the 360 scene where it had the significant advantage of being compatible with online gaming.

Just in case (but mainly to reduce cost, as whole drives are still interchangeable), two further models (the D4 aka D3S, and the D4-2 with one less driver chip) reduced the PCB's size, moving the spindle motor cable in an incompatible location for previous models. The Wii Mini completely redesigned the drive and its connection to the motherboard, although its interface at the electrical and logical levels is the same.

The last effort by inline chip manufacturers resulted in them being upgraded and converted to fully discless drive emulators (though possibly with a passthrough mode for original discs and backups on older drives), such as the Flatmii (tethered to a PC with its proprietary server software), the WiiKey Fusion, Wasp Fusion, Flatmii Fusion, WODE Jukebox (using SD and/or USB drives), and the Sundriver (a kit to replace the internal drive with an IDE or SATA HDD). These, too, had a limited audience (and a higher price than regular modchips), making them become rare and expensive novelties in the late 2010s as they became en vogue again with both Wii collectors and GameCube modders (to which they can be tediously adapted).