Hackmii News - Wii Hardware: a history

August 31st, 2009, 18:35 Posted By: wraggster

Nice Article from Hackmii member Bushing:

Manufacturers of consumer electronics are constantly revising their designs over the lifetime of each product, generally for four reasons:

Yield improvements — fix flaws that caused lots of warranty returns
Cost reduction — use cheaper or fewer parts, so that profit margin increases or the retail cost can be lowered (or both)
Part refresh — sometimes manufacturers stop making parts (for example, 64MB memory chips), so they’ll start using “better” chips because they are the only ones now available
Security — anti-modchip modifications
Most people only think about the last one, but the first three are far more common. I think Sony has most actively revised their designs — aren’t there something like 30+ revs of the PS1, 15+ revs of the PS2, and several of the PSP and PS3? Microsoft had 5 or 6 revs of the Xbox1, and 3 of the Xbox360. Nintendo has had relatively few — perhaps this is because they have never sold their consoles at a loss, so they have less incentive to retool their factories to bring their costs down. (It’s rather expensive to redesign a PCB and then retool your factories to make new ones, and you add some risk of creating new hardware problems and increasing your failure rate.)

Focussing back on our Wii, we can consider the following things as being more or less independent:

Updates to the disc drive
Updates to the “big chips” (Hollywood, Broadway)
Updates to the main PCB
We’ve seen several updates to the disc drive; these are so well-known that people even put up entire websites that track them! Off the top of my head, there was DMS/D2A, D2B (like D2A, but changed mask ROM on one of the chips — probably for reason #1), D2B with cut legs (reason #4), D2C (reason #4), D2C2 (reason #4), D2E (unknown — reason #1?), D2E + epoxy (reason #4), “D2nothing” (perhaps reason #2, but most likely reason #4). Clearly, these were mostly motivated by anti-piracy concerns.

We have also seen a few revisions to the Broadway and Hollywood chips. The oldest photo I can find online of these chips is this one, dated November 17, 2006:

Full article --> http://hackmii.com/2009/08/wii-hardware-a-history/

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