Six months ago, in a quasi-simultaneous launch, the two first Wii modchips were released, one of them being CycloWiz. It was already ahead of the competition, as it was the only upgradable modchip available then. Since then, we've been working hard in order to make sure CycloWiz stays the best in terms of quality, features and support.
Within six months, many things have changed, and one of the best evolutions is the creation of open-source modchip projects. While, as of today, they currently lack many features that commercial chips support (such as audiofix, DVD upgrade support (with the notable exception of OpenWii on ATmega), compatibility with old GC Multi-Disc games), it's surely a very interesting and promising aspect of the Wii modding scene that shouldn't be ignored.
When you buy a new PC, you want it to be able to run Windows and Linux, even if you plan to use only one of the two OS at first. Why shouldn't you have this freedom with the modchip you buy? Today, we're opening up the CycloWiz platform to open-source firmwares, and we want that to be very user-friendly, with the possibility of upgrading from/to any of the firmwares using DVD upgrades. There's no need to change your firmware today, this feature only concerns a few people for now, mainly developers, but it might become very useful in the future.
There are currently two major open-source projects, Wiifree and OpenWii. Wiifree is clearly the most popular, but OpenWii gained some attention lately as it became upgradable on one architecture. We decided to start by supporting Wiifree. A beta port of version 2.45 was uploaded in our forums. It features all the Wiifree features plus DVD upgrade support and chip disable support.
Technically this is possible because CycloWiz is a fully upgradable modchip. Many other modchips said to be upgradable are only partially upgradable, meaning that the modchip's program's data can be reprogrammed, but the program itself can't. Radically changing the firmware on partially upgradable modchip is out of the question.
Now what about an official upgrade? We won't drop support for official firmwares. In fact, we're working hard on the next version. One of the main challenge is to add support for D2C chipset. We won't tell you like another team that we're "almost done". It is a real challenge. To get technical, the Gamecube drive had two backdoors that could be used to run modchip code. Those two backdoors were also found on the Wii chipsets, and a new one was even added. Unfortunately, all three were removed on the new D2C chipset. Well, kinda. There is clearly a way in, but a lot of work is still needed. Of course, we'll keep you updated in case anything exciting happens!
Thanks for reading this long post, have a nice day, and see you in our
forums for more info.
