The only one I've seen in Australia without GC support is the blue Wii bundled with Donkey Kong Returns
Still good to know there's others, usually says on the box

This is... just awful. Damn cheapskates trying to cut down production costs, I suspect.

Yes, and they did the same move with the GameCube then by removing the digital port.

Just to let everyone know I have opened up one of these wii's and softmodded it and added a wode chip. I then added the original controller ports and memory card ports. Theb loaded a gamecube iso a.d voila it worked.

The wii unmodified will spit out original gamecube discs so it will only work with hdd loading.

Also the small filter components on the 2,3 and 4 gamecube controller ports have been removed. You just have to bridge the 3.3v, 5v and data line and they all work 100%

Thought I share that bit of information.

pictures please

i second that!

I wonder if its the drive mechanism detecting an 8cm disc and rejecting it or the drive firmware.. would be nice to swap out the drive and see if an older one works (pretty sure it would)

when a wode is working with gamecube images then it should be the drive which rejects the mini dvd because if its the wii software then it would the GC image loaded with a wode also.

look at what emu said again
"...drive mechanism or drive firmware..."

Thanks for the update on the new hardware. I soft-modded one for a friend a few weeks ago.

Apparently the drive board for the new GC-minus Wii lacks the square chip in the upper right of this picture, which is necessary for loading GC discs:



So, it looks as if it has the ability to play GC games, but won't read GC discs.

This picture shows the difference between the new (no GC) and old D4 drives:

I totally hate Nintendo for that..

@LOCtronics: Good find