Has anyone tried using a Wii Mini DVD Drive in a GameCube?

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teconmoon
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Joined: Wed May 18, 2016 3:18 pm

Has anyone tried using a Wii Mini DVD Drive in a GameCube?

Post by teconmoon » Fri Oct 14, 2016 5:04 pm

Hi there,

I know that work has been done on hacking a Wii Drive to work in the GameCube via the MegaDrive or direct soldering, but I was curious if anyone has gotten the Wii Mini drive to work?

I have a GameCube, a WASP, and a MegaDrive v3 on the way, and since the Wii Mini has a pretty small top-loading drive, it seems like it would be a good candidate for replacing the GameCube drive and having a disk drive available in addition to the WASP.

The Wii Mini drive seems to just be one connector that connects to the Wii Mini mainboard, but I can't imagine the protocol between that and the original Wii is too different.

It would also just be fun to do a crazy case mod on a GameCube and get a full slot-loading Wii Drive inside a GameCube :lol:

Edit: I just read somewhere that, "An optical drive that is not paired with the motherboard will not recognize game disks." in regards to the Wii Mini, so this might be a moot point
count.zero
Posts: 36
Joined: Mon May 12, 2014 3:57 pm
Location: Italy

Re: Has anyone tried using a Wii Mini DVD Drive in a GameCube?

Post by count.zero » Wed Oct 17, 2018 10:00 am

Well, that is necrobumping but I've saw a few technical information about wii mini and gamecube that are wrong. The wii mini optical drive IS NOT paired with the mainboard. I just bought two very cheap wii minis and swapped the drives and everything works. The main chip on wii mini pcb seems to be a DC2-D4. A gamecube disk is not recognized by the wii and I have no idea if the locks are in the firmware of the drive or in the system software (I saw contradictory infos about that).
novenary
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Re: Has anyone tried using a Wii Mini DVD Drive in a GameCube?

Post by novenary » Wed Oct 17, 2018 10:30 am

As long as it still has regular DVD support then Swiss can patch games to read burned media kind of like those inline Wii modchips did. The wasp probably even does that out of the box with "wkf on". Original discs should work in a GameCube out of the box if it's like the Wii family edition where it's the OS that's programmed to reject GC discs.
count.zero
Posts: 36
Joined: Mon May 12, 2014 3:57 pm
Location: Italy

Re: Has anyone tried using a Wii Mini DVD Drive in a GameCube?

Post by count.zero » Thu Oct 18, 2018 3:55 pm

Streetwalker wrote:
Wed Oct 17, 2018 10:30 am
As long as it still has regular DVD support
Being based on the D4 chipset it doesn't have regular DVD support. Probably is possible to replace the controller board but that would means also manually rewire the laser and spindle motor.
novenary
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Joined: Mon Dec 30, 2013 7:50 am

Re: Has anyone tried using a Wii Mini DVD Drive in a GameCube?

Post by novenary » Thu Oct 18, 2018 9:18 pm

It's not even worth bothering then.
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