Post Wed Jan 31, 2007 11:25 am

Wiinja & CycloWiz

Well... anyone following the modding scene must know about both these chips.
Less than a week after news of the Wiinja came out, word of preorders and the soon to be released CycloWiz creeped out. There's also word of a third chip which name I do not recall will be coming around soon.

Wiinja (site currently not working for me)
CycloWiz (no info on the chip on the official site, only preorders)
For a quick side-by-side on the two chips, go to http://gh3.ellequadro.net/cyclowiz-vs-wiinja/.

The Wiinja will be retailing from probably $50-$60 with the CycloWiz from $40-$50 with prices subject to change obviously.
There's also word about the Wiinja code being leaked and the possibility of free, if not dirt cheap modding solutions to come.

At any rate it is only a matter of time before a more reliable chip at possibly a cheaper price is released. The real problem isn't chipping the Wii, it is making backups. From my reading, the LG 8164B is the only DVD drive that can reliably read a Wii disc to produce a raw dump onto the computer. To make things harder, even with this drive, it takes a utility to make the dump (Rawdump v0.4, must register to DL) that sometimes doesn't work, and sounds like it takes an incredibly long time to do so. After the dump is completed the user is left with 2 files... an .iso and a .wod that needs unscrambling. The burning process after that I'm not familiar with... and I doubt many others are either considering no one is yet able to test backups!