According to a post over at WiiNewz, there is a new Nintendo Wii drive revision on some current Wii models that renders all current modchips useless. The posts says that the entire drive controller chip has been removed.
The full post reads:
"What they have done is combine the old D1A and drive controller chip in to one which is now called the GC2-D3, as you can see from the photo there is a big blank space on the PCB where the controller chip used to be.
One of these drives will be on its way to the WiiKey team next week and they will of course do their best to work it out, but from what we can tell it could possibly be a few months or longer before it could be figured out as it’s a totally new way of handling drive function, that's just our guess and maybe they will work it out faster. This is all speculation of course for now, but we can see the first generation of chips for these drives being a high wire count such as the D2CKey when they were first released. When we know more from the WiiKey team after they have received the drive and had time to access it, we will make a post in this thread to update everyone on the situation.
There is one good bit of news that we were able to confirm, the console that had this new D3 drive was able to have a D2B drive connected to it and functioned as normal, so they did not make changes to the cable system or anything else. This means that even though there will be no chips for these consoles for a little while, it will still be possible to buy a replacement drive or even a replacement drive board and do something with these consoles.
So far we have not heard any other reports of these drives found anywhere else in the world, what was also interesting is it was found in an Australian console with the serial LAH1098xxxxx, there are already consoles out here that are LAH11xxxxxx and are still epoxy D2E, so from what we can gather they have not started rolling these new drives out in the masses yet and maybe these few just slipped out early. I guess we will know for sure in the coming weeks, if we don’t start to see them in the masses it might still be a little while before the rest of the world sees them."
"What they have done is combine the old D1A and drive controller chip in to one which is now called the GC2-D3, as you can see from the photo there is a big blank space on the PCB where the controller chip used to be.
One of these drives will be on its way to the WiiKey team next week and they will of course do their best to work it out, but from what we can tell it could possibly be a few months or longer before it could be figured out as it’s a totally new way of handling drive function, that's just our guess and maybe they will work it out faster. This is all speculation of course for now, but we can see the first generation of chips for these drives being a high wire count such as the D2CKey when they were first released. When we know more from the WiiKey team after they have received the drive and had time to access it, we will make a post in this thread to update everyone on the situation.
There is one good bit of news that we were able to confirm, the console that had this new D3 drive was able to have a D2B drive connected to it and functioned as normal, so they did not make changes to the cable system or anything else. This means that even though there will be no chips for these consoles for a little while, it will still be possible to buy a replacement drive or even a replacement drive board and do something with these consoles.
So far we have not heard any other reports of these drives found anywhere else in the world, what was also interesting is it was found in an Australian console with the serial LAH1098xxxxx, there are already consoles out here that are LAH11xxxxxx and are still epoxy D2E, so from what we can gather they have not started rolling these new drives out in the masses yet and maybe these few just slipped out early. I guess we will know for sure in the coming weeks, if we don’t start to see them in the masses it might still be a little while before the rest of the world sees them."
