A lot of people say it's hard. I have concluded that those people are stupid. This was extremely easy.
1: Details
---
Okay, so here's how it went. I have a Wii with a DMS board, which is great because I didn't need to do a 30 point job like those unfortunate enough to have a D2C board. Also, the pins on one of the IC chips weren't cut, which is also super awesome. Everybody in every tutorial suggests using a long wire solder method (basically, solder long bits of wire to the contacts and then to the WiiKey, and then tape the WiiKey to some other part of the drive). Those people obviously suck. I did a direct solder of my chip strait to my DVD drive, and it was easy. Here's what I used
1. 30W soldering iron with a 0.5mm "pencil" tip
2. 60/40 0.032 diameter 0.5oz Rosin-Core solder (RadioShack 64-017E)
3. A plate to hold my soldering iron.
4. A wire toolkit pokey-thingy.
That's it. I didn't need even flux. I had some solder remover braid (RadioShack 64-2090E) handy just in case, but I didn't need that either.
First I put beads on each of the contact points on the drive, and then I did the same for the WiiKey. I used the pokey-thingy to keep the solder bits in place when I melted them.
After that I put my WiiKey down on the drive and just melted the solder on the WiiKey contacts and drew (drawed?) it down to the solder on the drive.
Finally, I closed up my drive and ran the Setup 1.3 and then Update 1.9g.
At first I had some trouble, mostly my test disc didn't load (Naruto Gekitou Ninja Taisen 4, GameCube), but that, I found out was due to a jerk. I got my "setup 1.3" disc from some forum, but as it turns out, it wasn't an official setup 1.3 disc, it was a hacked 1.2 disc. After I found the REAL 1.3 disc, I had no problems.
On to pictures!
2: Pcitures!
Those are the contact points on the drive to the WiiKey chip. You can see in the bottom right an IC labeled "IC3001". On the upper side of that are a bunch of pins. On a lot of drives, the first 3 are cut off (a move made by Nintendo to try to block modchips). If they were cut, I would have had to Dremeled off part of the black coating and then made direct connections to the internals of the IC, where the pin roots still were. Lucky for me, my pins were NOT cut.
Each small one links to a bigger one. The closeup shots suck, unfortunately, because my camera sucks.
First up, the WiiKey itself. You can see how small it is because it's on my finger.
There it is again, but after I put some solder on each contact point.
There's the underside of my DVD drive
In this picture, my WiiKey has been soldered on to my drive. It's hard to see, but here's sort of what it looked like, only without those bits of wire:
There I've put my drive back on and I'm testing it out. Sadly, I somehow managed to bend some pins on one of the drive connectors, which had to be fixed, so I performed a little surgery. I had to cut off part of the connector housing to bend one of the pins back. No damage or performance lost, so whatever. Also, the slots on the connector got closed up when I tried to reconnect, so I just took my pokey-thingy and opened them up a little. Sadly, no pictures, as these were FAR too small to get a decent shot of (I did try, though). Specifically, if you look in the image above (of the underside), you can see 2 brown connectors. The top one was the one that got fudged, so I cut off part of the upper right corner of it.
There it is, NGNT4, my test disc. By this point I'd already turned on region free from the config disc and flashed the 1.9g WiiKey firmware to the chip. Being an import, this normally wouldn't be recognized at all.
And here I go....to put it into my Wii, which is now in my room.
Huzzah! The Wii accepts that it is in fact a real GC game.
And just to make sure it actually worked, there are shots of the title screen and main menu, respectively.
1: Details
---
Okay, so here's how it went. I have a Wii with a DMS board, which is great because I didn't need to do a 30 point job like those unfortunate enough to have a D2C board. Also, the pins on one of the IC chips weren't cut, which is also super awesome. Everybody in every tutorial suggests using a long wire solder method (basically, solder long bits of wire to the contacts and then to the WiiKey, and then tape the WiiKey to some other part of the drive). Those people obviously suck. I did a direct solder of my chip strait to my DVD drive, and it was easy. Here's what I used
1. 30W soldering iron with a 0.5mm "pencil" tip
2. 60/40 0.032 diameter 0.5oz Rosin-Core solder (RadioShack 64-017E)
3. A plate to hold my soldering iron.
4. A wire toolkit pokey-thingy.
That's it. I didn't need even flux. I had some solder remover braid (RadioShack 64-2090E) handy just in case, but I didn't need that either.
First I put beads on each of the contact points on the drive, and then I did the same for the WiiKey. I used the pokey-thingy to keep the solder bits in place when I melted them.
After that I put my WiiKey down on the drive and just melted the solder on the WiiKey contacts and drew (drawed?) it down to the solder on the drive.
Finally, I closed up my drive and ran the Setup 1.3 and then Update 1.9g.
At first I had some trouble, mostly my test disc didn't load (Naruto Gekitou Ninja Taisen 4, GameCube), but that, I found out was due to a jerk. I got my "setup 1.3" disc from some forum, but as it turns out, it wasn't an official setup 1.3 disc, it was a hacked 1.2 disc. After I found the REAL 1.3 disc, I had no problems.
On to pictures!
2: Pcitures!
Those are the contact points on the drive to the WiiKey chip. You can see in the bottom right an IC labeled "IC3001". On the upper side of that are a bunch of pins. On a lot of drives, the first 3 are cut off (a move made by Nintendo to try to block modchips). If they were cut, I would have had to Dremeled off part of the black coating and then made direct connections to the internals of the IC, where the pin roots still were. Lucky for me, my pins were NOT cut.
Each small one links to a bigger one. The closeup shots suck, unfortunately, because my camera sucks.
First up, the WiiKey itself. You can see how small it is because it's on my finger.
There it is again, but after I put some solder on each contact point.
There's the underside of my DVD drive
In this picture, my WiiKey has been soldered on to my drive. It's hard to see, but here's sort of what it looked like, only without those bits of wire:
There I've put my drive back on and I'm testing it out. Sadly, I somehow managed to bend some pins on one of the drive connectors, which had to be fixed, so I performed a little surgery. I had to cut off part of the connector housing to bend one of the pins back. No damage or performance lost, so whatever. Also, the slots on the connector got closed up when I tried to reconnect, so I just took my pokey-thingy and opened them up a little. Sadly, no pictures, as these were FAR too small to get a decent shot of (I did try, though). Specifically, if you look in the image above (of the underside), you can see 2 brown connectors. The top one was the one that got fudged, so I cut off part of the upper right corner of it.
There it is, NGNT4, my test disc. By this point I'd already turned on region free from the config disc and flashed the 1.9g WiiKey firmware to the chip. Being an import, this normally wouldn't be recognized at all.
And here I go....to put it into my Wii, which is now in my room.
Huzzah! The Wii accepts that it is in fact a real GC game.
And just to make sure it actually worked, there are shots of the title screen and main menu, respectively.
