I readed a lot off what the modchips do with the Nintendo Wii. If i'm correct, a wii modchip of the moment hacks the drive of the wii and let the wii think a orginal game is inserted.
If that's true, it's the same concept of how the Xbox 360 is hacked. And if so, isn't there a way a firmware can be written so that we can flash the wii just like you can flash a 360, without a modchip?
Is it possible, would it probably come? Or am i mixing 2 different things here?
I have heard rumors of people working on that. I think the thing is you will still need to open the Wii up and solder some points together like on the old XboX mods.
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Ah, like a TSOP flash? But why is it still needed to solder in that case. For stealth maybe? It's a pitty, i find it more handy with the 360. All you need to do is hook up the 360 dvd drive to your computer with a SATA cable, no need for soldering. So that can't be done with a wii? Soldering is needed?
[EDIT]Do you maybe have a link to that project or something?[/EDIT]
If I remember correctly, the Wii drive does not have a firmware chip. It's firmware is stored in Wii's controller chip (DMS, D2B, etc) and at start up time the controller will copy the firmware code to the drive's memory and the drive will run its firmware from the drive's memory. So to modify the drive's firmware we need to update the controller. My understanding is the controller is not writable, thus we cannot update the drive's firmware from within the controller.
By soldering a mod chip we can use the debug port of the drive to modify the firmware after it has been uploaded. However I don't understand why some newer mod chip claims to be able to load games from different region. Maybe the drive is also responsible for verifying the game's region? It is also possible the new mod chip is changing other parts of the Wii (not just the drive).
Please note that this is what I read from the internet (forums). Reality could be totally different.
What intrigues me the most is:
if they can update the modchips via a GC executable (I don't know if the lines they're using to program the chips are the sames used to inject the code to the firmware) wouldn't it be possible to inject the modchip firmware codes directly without the GC?
(oops, now that I said it out loud, I realize you would need a mod to run the GC homebrew code in the first place.
But, would that be feasible? If the firmware stays intact when "soft-booting" back into Wii mode, that would theoretically work.
Then, we would just need an exploit to run GC homebrew code without a physical mod chip.
But it definitely opens up the possibility for an "original" GC boot loader that would patch the DVD firmware, doesn't it? Could that be what the recently announced Wii ActionReplay is all about?