Ghosts SSWiiT Revitalized

[ShockSlayer]

Hmm, I should probably mention; SSWiiT stood for "ShockSlayer Wii...Thing." With the unit complete, it does have a new name now. All will be revealed soon. I'm excited.

 

[ShockSlayer]

The entry is live!

The vote and the video is here:
https://www.element14.com/community...he-waverider?ICID=Mfilmfest-contestant-widget

 

[Fruity_Grebbles]

That's so awesome! I voted (and withheld my vote where appropriate as to put you ahead). Unfortunately though, the share system seems profoundly broken. It won't let me share to social media, and I don't know anyone on the e14 forums besides the BB folks. Sharing with you all doesn't seem in the spirit of the thing...

 

[ShockSlayer]

I have no idea how sharing is supposed to work either. I wanted to share it to twitter, since I saw the icon, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[ShockSlayer]

They fixed sharing, so you can tweet it now and stuff. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

 

[ShockSlayer]

Long ago, a fledgling phoenix was born into this world.

The first of its kind, it soared through green skies on electric wings, radiating mysticism and potential. As it rose, its flight was undeviating; as if it had only been born for a singular purpose. Higher and higher the nestling climbed, until it was far from the sight of mortal men.

Some claimed that the snow white songbird had flown beyond the horizon and into the sun, never to be seen again. Others believed it was still out there, and they would await its reappearance. Yet even as time passed and history became legend, the wisest remained amused by the question. For those who understand the nature of a phoenix know that the end begets only rebirth.

And so, far from sight and long forgotten, a nest of ashes begins to stir.

 

[Aurelio]

 

[thedrew]

ShockSlayer is definitely cooking up something...

 

[Stitches]

 

[ShockSlayer]

So, let's talk about the end of the WaveRider. See, back in 2018, in transit back home from MGC, something really hot happened to it - Too Hot For BitBuilt! I'll post the full pics on my OnlyHams at some point. Ultimately what once was a fully functional portable quickly became a sadness-filled bag o' parts that floated around in a few different attics over the years. So it seems only fitting (and wallet friendly) to try to reuse as many of those parts as I can.

One of those surviving parts was the GCVideo-DVI that provided me with sweet, sweet line-doubled Mega Man X Collection. Here we have it wired up to the world-famous Test Wii, and it still works! Had to fix a few traces and put the HDMI port back on; fortunately I still had that too. This board is kind of big though, so YveltalGriffin is hooking me up with a FujiFlex for when it's ready to go onto the actual Wii. These "flexes" you kids have come up with are just kawaii.

Speaking of newer tech, this little 3.5" screen was recommended to me by Ginger and is decisively killer; the panel looks great, the bezel is slick, and I've already got it snapping nicely into the 18 different case test prints I have lying around. "But Dr. Pig," you may be thinking, "why a 4:3 screen for the WaveWider?" It's simple! Anamorphic widescreen is a scam invented by Big Tech to sell you more pixels for less resolution. With this in mind, you can simply digitally frankencase off all those nasty extra pixels in order to further portablize the screen.

I have big aspirations going forward, but before they can continue, I need to locate a blowtorch. Only the real BitBuilders will remember why.

 

[subierekt]

Is that the laminated 3.5? It really does look great

 

[Stitches]

Oh lorde.............. the fucking blowtorch................

Don't forget the tinsnips too!

 

[fdraghi]

Aaahhh, such a noble fruit is the GCVideo-DVI. My gamecube still has one that I installed ages ago... I remember looking at it as a real challenge back then.

That 4:3 screen does look sexy, I have to say. I want a 4:3 ashida.

 

[ShockSlayer]

Here's a tip for anyone who decides to do an OMEGA trim on a Wii Mini - the internal voltage layers are not as forgiving as the standard Wii. These funny whatevers get marooned when you trim this far in. Fortunately the solution is simple:

Crazy thing is, even without this, I still got the Wii to boot once; but it took a few tries of nothing first and strangely it booted into Priiloader without even having a reset button wired up. After this fix, it always correctly booted into the installed app.

Things are progressing pretty well otherwise. I've obtained, flashed, and installed the FujiFlex, and also soldered up the matching FFC on my screen board. I ordered the wrong type of cable though, so I had to slice up a bigger boi in order to test things. Not something I would recommend for a final product, but in a pinch, reality can be flexible.

Currently I'm just testing with an array of PTH regs and the stock linear reg for 1.8v. The plan is to slap a Thundervolt on this thing before long. As for the other side of power management, I've got a handful of aspirations that'll take a bit of time to develop, but not so long this build won't be ready for MGC this year.

Following up on my last post, my blowtorch adventures have culminated in a pretty nice custom heatsink, which I've spent some time polishing up. Getting to do some light metalworking is easily one of my favorite parts of building a portable. That said, I haven't actually tested it yet, since I didn't have a suitably sized Wii until now. Plus none of my test prints actually have vents yet.

 

[ShockSlayer]

Most of my time towards this project lately has been spent on programming and power board design, but I recently wired up a controller port, USB and Bluetooth so I could go ahead and do some preliminary heatsink testing. This heatsink is a mix of active and passive cooling; my hope is that the combination allows the fan to generally run at quieter speeds, but for this test I simply ran the fan at max for the duration. After an hour of looking directly at pigs the highest reading I took was ~43C on the board near the CPU; everywhere else was ~37C. I'm confident in this design, and I'm looking forward to plotting out some actual thermal data in the future.

I liked how the 64AMP worked out for the TSFv3, so for the audio amp I've assembled a couple of U-AMPs, since they use the same chip. I have some ideas I'm planning to test on at least one of them, so it'll be nice to have a backup. That said, after some initial testing with the same model of speakers, I found that the acoustics of this case aren't going to be nearly as friendly as what I was able to accomplish with the N64 laptop. Luckily, I have another set of speakers to switch to - the ones from the original WaveRider! They sound much better overall, especially at max volume. Unfortunately, this means my case design is going to require some tweaks since these speakers are both larger and circular. It should be worth it, although I had a cool speaker grill design that I might not keep now.

Things are still on track for MGC 2025. I'm planning to have the power board ordered and assembled this month, which'll allow basically a month for debugging and setting up some fancy diagnostic software. Hopefully I can work this into the display.