Wii DVD/Wiikey Fusion/WODE + GC Portable Discussion

[randomguy737]

These are $50, might be a better price point.

Although you don't get the workmanship of a Saleae.

[mikog]

this sounds like a cool project. if u ever finish it, u should make copies and sell it on the internet!

[Ashen]

Heya all. Sorry for the lack of updates lately and I hope everyone had a good holiday. Been a bit busy and haven't had much time. Finally got around to unboxing my 2 new sundrivers and hooking them up to my Wii. I'm not sure if its fortunately or unfortunately that I get the same results with my new ones as I did with my old ones. Fortunately I figure because this leads me to believe that none of them are actually fried. Unfortunately because divineo was out of stock when I reordered and the 2 new ones cost me around 90 bucks with shipping ><. Anyway I can only figure that the sundrivers are not working on my Wii at this point because it is softmod'd already, just a few CIOS's and bootmii installed as boot 2. Going to try and get my hands on an unmod'd Wii to test I guess, not really in the mood to wipe my Wii and start fresh just to test this as my kids and wife do use the crap out of it. Since I figure they're not fried though I'm going to commence testing on the GC again and see what I can figure out for now. Though I did read somewhere that the Wii uses a different encryption which worries me a bit, but I cant understand how it can be different and still run gamecube games? which are supposedly entirely encrypted on the GC discs themselves. Meh, like I said not an electronics engineer

[gtmtnbiker]

I don't think it has anything to do with your Wii being softmodded. From a hardware perspective, the SunDriver makes it looks like it's a dvd drive to the Wii.

I suggest poking/asking in a Sundriver forum to see if anyone has any thoughts on this. I'll see if I can dig up some info for you myself.

Are you following the Sundriver installation manual such as this one?

http://www.wiihacks.com/sundriver/50520 ... anual.html

[gtmtnbiker]

Also, what version is your Wii running? Is it 4.3?

There are issues with using SunDriver with Wii 4.3. See this thread:
http://www.wiihacks.com/sundriver/67847 ... -disc.html

[Ashen]

Doy!! Thats probably it then. Upgraded to 4.3 so I could get the netflix channel. Just assumed sundriver worked with it cause on their website it says it does. They forget to mention game selection needs to be done on PC... Thx man. Try again after work i suppose.

Edit: nvm... It does say 4.2x on d2sun site. Guess i should pay more attention.

[emu_kidid]

4.3 should work too with raw isos and not shrunk games. No point trying on GC if you can't get it working on the Wii... I'm tempted to go buy a wiikey fusion and try that in a GC...

[Ashen]

Got one working I've got a good feeling now... more in the morning.

[emu_kidid]

Info when you get it done

[Ashen]

Alright! got all 4 sundrivers setup and working on my Wii! First off, thx much gtmtnbiker for steering me in the right direction. Apparently the problem was that the cpld firmware programmed to the chip is an older version and requires the use of an older PC programming tool, doh! (ISO's stored differently I guess). I used this version since there is no discernable way I can tell to see what firmware version is flashed to the chip when they ship them. This combo worked on all 4 of my sundrivers. Links here: http://www.d2sun.com/download/SunDriver ... _V2.04.rar http://www.d2sun.com/download/SunDiskMenu01.rar Everything works as it should, but instead of booting the sunmenu I have set the sundriver I intend to test with to just boot twilight princess automatically since its an actual GC game and I know there wont be any discrepancies.

I guess I'm happy about all of this because none of my sundrivers are actually fried. But I'm a tad bummed that this also means all the mucking around so far has been in vain (since the sundriver was never booting correctly in the first place). So I'm back to square one I suppose. Progress! Wooo! More as I make it.

The moral of the story is I suppose, Always look before you leap. ><

[gtmtnbiker]

Nothing wrong with making mistakes as long as you learn from them. It sometimes help to bounce ideas off others when you get stuck.

As a developer, I'm always having to trouble shoot so it definitely helps to verify that something works in its original application before trying to use it in a different way.

I suggest keeping one SunDriver attached to the Wii so you can have something to compare with on the GC. That is, checking/testing for voltages, signals, etc.

[emu_kidid]

nice work you guys. I had thought about updating the CPLD on the SunDriver incase it was outdated but gave up when I had to build/buy a programmer.

Ashen, your connections, how did you make them to the flex cable? I don't want to destroy another Sundriver this time :p

[Ashen]

I soldered directly to the leads on one side of the flex ribbon cable. It was super tedious work to get done. On my second go around i slit the flex cable between each lead with a razorblade and folded every other pin back to make soldering without bridging easier. I'll post some close up pics when i get home tonight.

[emu_kidid]

Ah ok, I get it, still super-tedious. I'll have a go when I get home.

[Ashen]

Well... folding every other lead back did make it considerably easier. I would rather solder to the cable than those tiny cpld legs anyday. Just be careful not to hold your iron to the ribbon cable for to long, it melts right through the leads and plastic coating easily. Don't forget to check continuity also. Good luck man.

[Ashen]

Emu, at the bottom of page 6 of this discussion you said when you boot your cube it had black screen but sundriver would turn on blue led for 5 secs or so then shut off. This is actually what is supposed to happen at boot on the sundriver side. Do you remember exactly how you had it wired at that point?

[emu_kidid]

I was following your most recent diagram up to that point.

[Ashen]

ok thx. I didn't know if you had hooked up 3.3v power to pins 30 and 32 going to sundriver and I know you said you hadn't hooked up 12v to sundriver power at that point so I was just checking. I'm in the process of setting up a new workspace for my project in a unfinished room up in my attic and cleaning up things a bit to make working on this easier.

[Ashen]

Finally got my new workspace all setup and my project area all cleaned up and better arranged for testing. yay! Figured since I'm being thorough now and testing everything to make sure its working correctly I hooked up a regular GC disc drive to my project motherboard and voila:



Now that I knew everything was working I proceeded to hook up the sundriver again and unfortunately I still get the same results as before. I'm pretty sure now that I've seen the sundriver actually working in the Wii that when its hooked to my cube its just not initializing properly (not getting some data signals it expects or the right data signals). When hooked to the Wii on boot the blue LED comes on for 3-4 seconds then flashes red for a split second and then shuts off completely. The only time I saw the LED light after that point was when it was reading from the disc while playing a game and then it flashes/flickers red.

At this point there could be many different reasons this is not working and I'll explain where I'm going to go with this from here.

Firstly I will point out that this guy: http://forums.benheck.com/viewtopic.php ... c&start=15 EntertheHatrix (even though seemingly coming across as a douchebag) claims to have hooked up a Wii DVD drive to the gamecube and had it working but supplied no proof of the matter. I will also point out that he was well informed enough to know that the pinouts of both consoles closely match each other (also note that the wii pinout is difficult if not impossible to find, if not for emukidid supplying it to me I would still be in the dark). Is he lying? I'm not sure. But it does give me a little bit of hope.

I'm wondering emu, if the guy that supplied you the first Wii pinout or even the WODE guys would be willing to share a bit more information with us? Namely what data certain pins are expecting when the Wii boots up (mostly the pins we are leaving unhooked 32-29 and 23 on the Wii side). We already know exactly what the GC expects when it boots up because it is detailed here: http://wiki.nintendo-scene.com/Gamecube_DVD_Protocol This tells us exactly what the GC is looking for before it can start reading data from the disc. I wouldn't ask and I will be very willing to do the work myself if it comes to it but its gonna be a while before I can invest in even a cheap logic analyzer. Possibly a month or more.

For now I think what I'm going to do is try to get ahold of a 2nd Wii for testing purposes so I dont have to keep taking mine apart and pissing off my kids and wife. Then I'm going to try hooking up the Wii DVD drive to the GC and see if I get any different results (hopefully the Wii DVD drive is as forgiving of error as the sundriver has been). There is always the possibility that our problem lies in the way in which the sundriver emulates the Wii DVD drive.

Also I will be mucking around a bit with the the 8 bidirectional lines (DID0-7) as I stated before it occurred to me that these data lines while labeled the same in our pinouts might not exactly correspond to each other perfectly between the systems, i.e. DID0 on the GC may actually be DID7 on the Wii. There are literally thousands of combinations in which this could work... hopefully I'll know a bit more after I acquire another Wii to test on (hoping my parents wont object to me stealing theirs for a while as they rarely use it).

[gtmtnbiker]

Wow, impressive workspace. Very neat.

You might want to contact twbinc over at http://debugmo.de/ He might be able to help answer your question as he seems to have a lot of hardware/software experience.

What is your background? What you're doing is pretty impressive for someone who doesn't have hardware experience if I recall correctly.

[liquitt]

first i'd like to point out that EnterTheHatrix is not a douchebag. he's a really nice guy. no idea what he posted on benheck though

on topic:
nice workspace there mate. i wish it looked that nice when i'm doing stuff

[Ashen]

first i'd like to point out that EnterTheHatrix is not a douchebag. he's a really nice guy. no idea what he posted on benheck though

I didn't mean for that statement to come across the wrong way. I have no idea what kind of person enterthehatrix really is. I know how things go on internet forums so I don't judge anyone. If you read the whole posting on benheck you would understand.

What is your background? What you're doing is pretty impressive for someone who doesn't have hardware experience if I recall correctly.

You will laugh when I tell you that I'm a process engineering technician for a pharmaceutical company... Not my dream job but after 11 years I have enough experience to be confident that I'm pretty good at what I do and it pays pretty well also. I went to college for Computer Aided Product and Systems Design (CAD/CAM) at a technical school in my state. While in high school and as summer work while in college I worked at a engineering firm as a draftsman. Long before I finished schooling I had decided that it wasn't really the type of work I wanted to do. I've always been into electronics and computers and just generally try to be knowledgeable about how things work. As a kind of side profession I fix computers and do console modding for people I know... or people that know people I know... me in a nutshell

[emu_kidid]

Ashen, unfortunately the guy who gave me the Wii pinout hasn't been around much since I got it, but I can try to get some more info. I'd suspect the Data lines D0-D7 should be in the same order still, but then again anything is possible.. I'm going to give it a try at wiring it up later this week, but I'll start with the earliest diagram we have and go from there.

[emu_kidid]

Nice setup btw, I'll have to post mine when it's back in shape.. had to pack it up because we've got some visitors staying over :p

[Ashen]

thx and thx! I finally got tired of moving all my stuff around everyday so I laid claim to a room in our house that doesn't get used much and setup shop there. you guys all say how neat it looks but its just cause you can't see the mess all around the outside of that pic.