Nintendo Wii Chipping (Wasabi V3 + Wii-Clip V5)

Hi, I’m Frank and I’ve been gaming free for 10 years.

 

It’s been a long time since I was into gaming. Back then I had a Sega Saturn (and still have it) and at some point later I purchased a Sega Dreamcast, just because I found it for $50, and it could play “free” downloaded games.

The latest addition to my consoles “collection”, was the original Xbox, which after it was chipped, it’s been serving me as a network enabled multimedia center.

I can’t be really bothered playing games anymore, but ever since I saw the Nintendo Wii, I fell in love! It has many nice little games which do not require tons of gameplay hours to learn, are truly interactive and original! This is a gadget made for me. So lately I made myself a present 🙂

Most people already know what the Nintendo Wii is all about, there is no need to go into further details. If you are not familiar with the Wii, have a look at this random youtube video review I picked. There are lots more if you search youtube.

Now into the interesting part… A mod-chip for my Wii was definitely a requirement since the beginning, to enable me playing “my” backed up games. There are way too many mod-chips for Wii in the market. Also there are several Wii hardware variations, restricting the use of some mod-chip types with some consoles. The most popular ones are the Wasabi, D2Pro, D2Ckey, Infectus etc.

After a lot of research, I finally decided to go with the Wasabi V3 mod-chip. I chose the Wasabi, because it has very good compatibility list, it is said that it’s very stable (“rock solid” is their motto), has a good pricing and most importantly it is future proof (the chip is a FPGA processor by Actel, which can be easily reprogrammed from scratch in the future, in case Nintendo’s new firmwares turn against mod-chips).

Usually mod-chip installations can be very messy. The older mod-chips required 20+ wires soldered from the chip to the Wii’s motherboard!!!!!!!! Have a look at this insane picture!

Despite the Wasabi only requiring 9 wires, I searched around and found a way to minimize the possibility of screwing up my beloved Wii. It’s called Wii-Clip and all you have to do with it is solder the chip on it and then place it on top of a DVD-ROM’s IC. Very smart and very handy thing. So I was only required to solder a single wire to the board, and take some precautions that the chip won’t short-circuit somewhere.

 

Finally!!! Everything was in place, and for some weird reason, everything worked immediately! Impressive! 🙂

I was able to play the Wii-Play game off a backed up DVD with no problem. So, occasional short-time fun gaming… here I come! 😀