Wii DVD/Wiikey Fusion/WODE + GC Portable Discussion

[emu_kidid]

installed a sundriver SATA into a Wii just to see how it behaves - pretty nifty device for $20usd - I'm going to wait to order one of those pcb's instead of destroying another..

[Ashen]

installed a sundriver SATA into a Wii just to see how it behaves - pretty nifty device for $20usd - I'm going to wait to order one of those pcb's instead of destroying another..

They are actually very nice little devices. If it wasn't so easy to softmod and plug in a USB HDD attaining pretty much the same results I would have bought one of these a long time ago.

Some very exciting findings today:

I decided to hook the GC DVD drive back up to my cube setup to see what would happen if any of the DID0-7 lines were disconnected or swapped and to see if it had the same effect as the sundriver being hooked up. To make a long story short, The GC DVD gives either "an error has occured" or "cannot read disc" when these pins are unhooked or simply swapped around. This result confirmed my suspicion that the sundriver was still not initializing properly when hooked to my cube.

SOOOOOOO.... using my godlike powers of logic and deduction and my handy dandy voltage comparison chart I narrowed it down to 3 pins on the GC that could be hooked up incorrectly. Pins 7, 9 and 14(GC). So to make another long story short after playing a bit of the pin swapping game I finally have the sundriver initializing properly at boot (blue LED comes on for 2-4 seconds then shuts off, after boot the GC gives me the same error now that the DVD drive does when the DID0-7 lines are not proper AND I am now getting varying voltages out of the DID0-7 lines coming from the sun, not -0.60 volts like I was before). I am giddy right now. all thats left it seems is to get the bidirectional data lines proper and we may have a working mod!!

[sm4rty]

hmm when sundriver can work on a gamecube, the GC dvd drive could work on a wii right?

why not simply testing how the dvd drive of the cube have to be hooked to the wii to work.
or is this impossible?

[Ashen]

It may be possible for what we're doing to work in reverse like you say. But its kinda like 6 and 1/2 dozen. If it works 1 way it will probably work the other. Figuring out the pin matches is going to be the same difficulty either way we do it.

[KirovAir]

Just wanted to say that very interesting stuff is happening here, and that I'm following every step of the progress being made. :p
Keep it up.

[emu_kidid]

Nice work, there's only 81 or so possible combinations for those data lines now :p

when the wii was first released, drive modchip makers did exactly this as I recall. they hooked up the wii dvd drive to a GC and the GC drive to a Wii (not sure if they really got much out of it).

[Tchay]

God this is so exciting. Not trying to put pressure on you Ashen, but this is really getting me giddy. If things get more difficult. I might consider buying a Sundriver to help you do the "guess and check" work. Good luck man

[Ashen]

Nice work, there's only 81 or so possible combinations for those data lines now :p

Hmmmm, I was figuring it was going to be a lot more possible combo's than that. If this is the case I'd try all 80 of em till I got it right. I'll have to punch the data into minitab later and run a full DOE and see how many combo's it spits back out at me. I'm thinking though at this point without a logic analyzer this is going to get difficult.

God this is so exciting. Not trying to put pressure on you Ashen, but this is really getting me giddy. If things get more difficult. I might consider buying a Sundriver to help you do the "guess and check" work. Good luck man

You are not the only one getting super excited Tchay. When I got the sun to boot correctly yesterday if anyone would have seen me they would have thought I was nuts, I did a little victory dance around the room... lol. Anyway once we do get this working you can help me with slimming my mobo's ^_^ hows the ccube coming along?

Edit: Ordered a http://www.saleae.com/home/ USB logic analyzer. Got it shipped Fed-Ex ground so it should be here in a week or so I figure. Lets all cross our fingers it does what we need it to.

[emu_kidid]

Ashen, do you know the pin connector pitch or even better, the digikey part number for a suitable connector to add onto: http://www.proto-advantage.com/store/pr ... id=3400005

I'm 100% keen to get one since I don't like the job I've done soldering onto the ribbon cable (it's messy!)

[Ashen]

Emu,

This is actually the exact connector you will want from protoadvantage:

http://www.proto-advantage.com/store/pr ... id=3400013

It is a 32pin, 0.50mm pitch FFC/FPC SMT connector. I'm not sure exactly what part number on digikey you will need to specify (digikey's product descriptions are kinda vauge and I dont want to give you the wrong one). but it is exactly this connector (though it shouldn't matter if its the clip down type or slide in type):

http://www.allproducts.com/ee/joint-1/0 ... ector.html

I'm sure if you contact protoadvantage and tell them what you're after they can hook you up with no trouble.

This is a link to where I got my ribbon cables if you need em:

http://www.modchip.org/product_info.php ... cts_id=467

I should say that I'm not 100% sure its .5mm pitch (it may be .4) BUT the ribbon cable is 16mm wide so .5mm x 16 = 32 is my logic.

[Ashen]

Just got e-mail confirmation my Saleae has shipped, says the ETA is the 1st so I'm hoping it gets here Monday. Over the weekend my plans are to make my testing wires as short as possible to eliminate the latency issues I was having (hopefully).

My question now is what is going to be the best way to analyze the data lines? Should I run the logic while the system boots, after boot while idle or boot into a game that has a nice idle point in it like a title screen/name entry screen or something? I'm open to suggestion as this will be my first time trying to interpret logic. The nice thing about the Saleae is that the client software is freely available for anyone to download and install http://www.saleae.com/downloads/ and I can save analysis sessions and upload them here if anyone is willing/interested in helping to pick apart the data

[emu_kidid]

the data lines I think correspond to the DI registers. I've never interpreted logic, but if you can you actually get hexadecimal values out of it we can easily put together the first read values together as it will be the read to check that the game is a actually a GC disc.

Also, my connector from two posts up is ordered and confirmed

[gtmtnbiker]

I'll be glad to help try to interpret the Saleae data.

[Ashen]

my connector from two posts up is ordered and confirmed

Awesome how much was the total for one? Did they know what you needed as far as the connector went?

I'll be glad to help try to interpret the Saleae data.

Much appreciated ^_^ I will post the analysis files here for all interested to check out. Hopefully it will be quick and painless now that we have the right tools.

[emu_kidid]

total cost was around $27 with the connector shipped to Australia.

[Ashen]

Some test runs, more to come in the form of analysis files.

[emu_kidid]

awesome!

[Tchay]

So are the differences going to make things difficult?

[Ashen]

I'm not sure Tchay. More tests need to be run which I will spend a few hours on today. The way it looks in those test runs though is that DID0-7 do match up the way we originally thought with a few discrepancies. A 10 second analysis file turns out to be about 150megs. Gonna see if I can compress them some way before uploading.

Edit: Also the Wii analysis done so far has been using the sundriver, so the discrepancies may lie there. I will run some tests with the regular DVD drive hooked up later on.

Edit2: forgot to mention, my latency issues are gone now with my shorter wirrs. No more errors. Also Wii dvd drive runs with pins 32, 31 and 30 disconnected.gives error occasionally but a reboot always fixes it.

[Ashen]

Got some analysis done on both systems finally. For those interested here are the Saleae analysis files for both systems:

Wii: http://www.fileserve.com/file/XDyUmkz

GC: http://www.fileserve.com/file/PthRBnS

Saleae logic software download links:

32bit: http://www.saleae.com/downloads/logic/L ... 2-bit).exe

64 bit: http://www.saleae.com/downloads/logic/L ... 4-bit).exe

I should probably explain how I went about this so here we go. I have included "boot sequence" analysis files for both systems. These files correspond to all other pins on said system other than the bidirectional data lines (DID0-7) the reason for this is to help determine whether we have all the other pins matched up correctly. Since the Wii and GC boot differently what I did was to just boot the Wii up normal with Zelda: TP GC disc inserted and let it idle at the channel menu. For the Gamecube what I did was boot the system with the disc cover open and close it right after boot (also with Zelda: TP inserted) to get roughly the same effect as we do on the Wii. This way the GC does not automatically boot into the game but sits idle till the game is started. So in short these files are just the boot sequence where the disc gets mounted but does not actually start the game.

For the DID0-7 lines I used 2 different games. Zelda: TP and Zelda Collectors Edition. For both games I booted into the game and started the logic as soon (roughly) as the Nintendo logo showed up on the screen. Please keep in mind though that we are dealing with units of time measurement sometimes smaller than microseconds so the point at which I started the analyzer may vary seemingly greatly between sessions (making it hard to find the same points in the game between systems).

I ran each different analysis twice to make sure there are no discrepancies and for the Wii side I also ran some analysis with the sundriver and the DVD drive. Hopefully the way that I have named the files makes things clear as to what was going on at the time. I have not had a chance to make any comparisons between the data yet so you are essentially getting this info at the same time I am. Any help interpreting all of this and matching things up is greatly appreciated

Off to do my taxes now and hopefully have time to pour over this later.

[Ashen]

Two side by side comparisons of a point of time in TP that the data matches exactly. Safe to say I think that we were right in the DID0-7 pin matchup.

[emu_kidid]

Ashen, I think with the GC, have you tried perhaps toggling the disc inserted wires to "inserted" a few milliseconds after boot?

[Ashen]

I will try later on. Honestly i think the issue lies with the sundriver now. Comparing the logic data the sun seems to be doing lots of odd stuff the DVD drive isn't. I'll poke around with the sun a bit when i get home. Im also going to give in and try the wii dvd drive on the cube. Hope i dont fry it... Also looking at the logic data more closely i'd say the original pin matchup is accurate, pin 29(wii) still needs to be driven low by ground or some other means though. Dont know why when i swapped pins the sun behaved differently now. Oh well, back to the drawing board

[liquitt]

i just want to say that you're doing some awesome work there ashen! keep it up!!

[emu_kidid]

Ashen, when my adapter arrives I'll solder in the Sundriver using the latest pinout and poke at it using homebrew.