Worklog Gman's Wii portable

[Gman]

The case turned out delicious. My best paint job ever.

 

[cheese]

*back on topic, gman's portable* Daaaaaaammnnn son, nice case you got there! Can't wait to see the finished product!

 

[ShockSlayer]

I enhanced and enlarged the image and I see one tiny imperfection. Throw it away and start over.

 

[Gman]

Yeah I should just melt this down into cement

 

[ShockSlayer]

A liquid plan.

 

[LOCtroviser]

Looking promising guys! I noticed when I rewired the wifi module I needed to keep the wires around the same length. Also the voltage lines needed to be thicker and I needed multiple ground lines wired to the original locations on the wifi board.

 

[Gman]

Looking promising guys! I noticed when I rewired the wifi module I needed to keep the wires around the same length. Also the voltage lines needed to be thicker and I needed multiple ground lines wired to the original locations on the wifi board.

Thank you Loc! The WiFi relocation has been very finicky for me, nice to hear I may not be just horrible at soldering.

 

[ShockSlayer]

Mega says we should test out running star fox (gamecube) on the Wii witha removed MX chip. He says if it can't load the fonts the game will crash.

 

[Shank]

Looking promising guys! I noticed when I rewired the wifi module I needed to keep the wires around the same length. Also the voltage lines needed to be thicker and I needed multiple ground lines wired to the original locations on the wifi board.

Interesting. Is it because they are some form of high speed traces sensitive to impedance matching? Could the ground lines be attached to the ground shielding instead of the tiny pads? I don't see why you wouldn't be able to.
Also, you owe me some pictures

 

[LOCtroviser]

Interesting. Is it because they are some form of high speed traces sensitive to impedance matching? Could the ground lines be attached to the ground shielding instead of the tiny pads? I don't see why you wouldn't be able to.
Also, you owe me some pictures

For some reason when I used different wire lengths it didn't always get recognized. I haven't tested it enough though to say for certain. Just like the n64 cartridge relocation is finicky with not enough ground wires so is the wifi on the wii. All I know is that it works the way I have it wired. Maybe a good idea to dissect the wifi chip and find out what signals need to be replicated to fake a connection. Even if you fry the wifi pins if the wii thinks something is connected and continues to load the homebrew loader it will be a success.

Just need someone to sacrifice a few wii boards I can't be of much help as I am working abroad for a long period without any equipment.

Foto's will be uploaded soon enough

 

[Gman]

I've sacrificed 11 Wiis now to testing relocations and trims. Will be ordering more once spring break is over I'm positive my wifi relocations were correct pinout and it was very finicky and only booted a few times. Hopefully we can bypass the daughter board somehow but if not I will be doing more testing on the wifi relocation.

 

[cheese]

I know that it won't be easy to fake the wifi data to/from the console, there's quite a bit of data sent back/forth between the console and the wifi chip to initialize the different parts of the board. It would be much better if there was a cIOS. Also, you can just connect a thick ground wire to the shielding of the wifi board, there is continuity between all the ground pins and the shielding. I will also test star fox with no MX chip (it's this one, right?), however, WiiFlow and Nintendont have been kinda finicky without it. I am looking through the code of both to see if they rely on any of the MX chip's functions, and if I can potentially trick the console into thinking it's connected.
More work to come...

 

[Aurelio]

I know that it won't be easy to fake the wifi data to/from the console, there's quite a bit of data sent back/forth between the console and the wifi chip to initialize the different parts of the board. It would be much better if there was a cIOS. Also, you can just connect a thick ground wire to the shielding of the wifi board, there is continuity between all the ground pins and the shielding. I will also test star fox with no MX chip (it's this one, right?), however, WiiFlow and Nintendont have been kinda finicky without it. I am looking through the code of both to see if they rely on any of the MX chip's functions, and if I can potentially trick the console into thinking it's connected.
More work to come...

I took a look at cIOS for the same reason, but there are no public informations about the low level wifi module interface so it might be quite hard to disable the wifi in this way. I will also look at my NAND dump and see if I can find anything in there. Also, even if it was possible to disable the wifi just through a cIOS, it would be dangerous since it would have to replace a system IOS and not one in an unused slot.

I've also looked at the disc drive and it is most likely easy to completely disable.

 

[Noah]

I've also looked at the disc drive and it is most likely easy to completely disable.

wat

 

[Aurelio]

wat

Sorry, I was still half asleep when I wrote that post
Anyway I took a look at current cIOSs and they make different calls to the disc drive. I will try to remove those and I'll see whether or not the disc drive interface is used in some other ways.

 

[Noah]

I was saying "wat" to the fact that it seems to be easy.

Sounds awesome, keep us updated!

 

[Aurelio]

I was saying "wat" to the fact that it seems to be easy.

Sounds awesome, keep us updated!

Whoops, my bad

 

[Shank]

Anyway I took a look at current cIOSs and they make different calls to the disc drive. I will try to remove those and I'll see whether or not the disc drive interface is used in some other ways.

If you did that you would be amazing.
Also how did you look at current cIOSs and how did you figure out they make disc drive calls?

 

[Aurelio]

The d2x cIOS is open source: https://github.com/davebaol/d2x-cios, same holds for the waninkoko ones

 

[Shank]

Interesting.
So it isn't a specific IOS that handles disc drive communication: any IOS can make calls. Is this correct?
Are multiple IOSs running on starlet simultaneously? How many would we need to edit?