New D2C chip for Wii: Wasabi

October 24th, 2007, 14:50 Posted By: wasabichip

Wasabi is the name of a new chip for D2C... featuring 5 wires to be soldered on easy solder pads !

D2Ckey works by patching the requests that the DVD MCU issues to the DVD DSP in hardware. This is something that was done before by Team Origa on GC (project GCC) but it was never released because it was too hard to install and less flexible in comparison to BIOS-chips / drive-chips. The whole address bus, data bus and control signals must be hooked, so that means lots of wires.

Other drive-chips on Wii / GC (the easy-to-install kind) work by patching those requests in software. That leads to easier installation diagrams, and much more flexibility, most of those chips are upgradable for example.

The problem is that to create an easy-to-install chip, one must be able to patch the DVD firmware. And to know how, you must be able to read the firmware ROM. If you can't read this ROM, the only choice is designing a 31-wire mod. Or to try harder.

We did ! We belive we've been the first team with access to the firmware, and now we're clearly the first team with a working prototyp e of an easy-to-install chip for D2C !

More details, including ETA, will be announced next week. In the meantime, instead of providing the usual picture of a prototype board with lots of wires, we provide a couple of interesting bits of disassembly that only true drive hackers could appreciate... If any other team claim they have access to the firmware, we say : show the code !

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