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08/06/2007 - Wii Modchip Comparison Chart We've compiled a comparison chart between the three most popular Wii modchips: CycloWiz, WiiKey and WiiFree. Click on the thumbnail below for more info.  08/04/2007 - Wii Media Player We regularly get asked about the possibility to play DivX or Xvid movies on the Wii. Yes, it is possible thanks to GC-Linux' MFE-distro. MFE-distro is a media player for Wii/GC that allows you to play audio and movies in various formats such as DivX, Xvid, MPEG, MP3 and more. It's not new but we've just included it in our download section, together with a small PDF manual. Grab it now! 07/30/2007 - Upgrade 3.5 released Official firmware version 3.5 was just posted in the support section, with dual layer media support. CycloWiz supported dual layer media since day one, but the 3.0 upgrade partially broke it (only the first layer could be read), so only users that didn't upgrade are able to read dual layer media for now. The new firmware fixes this issue. We'll make sure it doesn't get broken in future upgrades. We've made a simple test program to help us in that task: it checks if both the first and the second layer of a dual layer disc could be read. You can also find it in the support section, burn it on a regular DVD+/-R disc The laser power may have to be tuned before beeing able to read DVD+R DL media (as with DVD-RW media). Less than 50% of test Wii we have can read those discs without any tuning. There is a variable resistor on the optical pickup head itself, that needs to be lowered. In our tests, the original value was typically around 700-800 Ohm, and we had to lower it to around 500 Ohm, but this might be different on each drive. Just make sure you don't go below 50 Ohm or so. By the way, the test tool is not CycloWiz specific and can be used to test any modchip, it'd be interesting to see which ones are DL compatible. As of today, all of the commercial Wii games are released on single-layer discs, but the drive firmware supports dual layer discs.  07/25/2007 - CycloWiz now supports unofficial firmwares 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 :) 07/25/2007 It's not really newsworthy, but we made some fine tuning to the upgrade code and have a new version of it (3.0C) in the support section. Users with 3.0 or 3.0B should not upgrade, as the firmware itself is strictly similar. Only the flasher code changes, with better error handling. Stay tuned for some much more exciting news later today! 07/23/2007 CycloWiz is now fully upgradable from PC aswell as DVD ! The PC flashing application, using standard dvdtool cable, was just released in our forums. It allows you to upgrade CycloWiz V1 to support D2B, and even to recover your chip from a bad flash in case your dog pressed the power button while you were upgrading :)  05/10/2007 Retailers should receive a new batch of CycloWiz very soon, some units have already been shipped today. The boards look slightly different than the ones from last batch but the shape, hardware and features didn't change. We hope you like our new website layout by the way ! :) Go to News Archive |
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