Where is the IPL located?

[Ashen]

Pretty straightforward I guess. What chip on the GC MB is the IPL flashed to? Possible to do a transplant of the chip from a Different cube?

[emu_kidid]

in the picture I've attached, the red box indicates where the mask rom is which holds the ipl.

[Hells Guardian]

a transplant should be relatively easy as long as there are no console specific keys of some sort like in the wii. I don't belive there are but I've been wrong many times. Although I'd think it would be best to use a chip from the same revision board.

[Ashen]

We'll find out soon. I'm going to attempt a transplant today.

After all this time I've finally managed to kill my first GC motherboard, kind of on purpose, kind of not... Anyway the board still technically works, it just gets ARAM errors when loading games because of some components I removed. Going to take the IPL v1.1 chip from the "dead" board and try it out on a v1.0 IPL board. might be a good way to make the earlier v1.0 NTSC boards useful again (if you happen to have some dead later version IPL boards around). For Wiikey purposes of course.

Thanks guys!

P.S. Emu, its 99% done. Need a 8v step down regulator to run the fan off of cause the board gets a bit hot running the fan off 5v (its very quiet). Pics and video later

[Ashen]

Meh... Tried to remove the chip from the dead board and broke off 2 legs of the chip. Of course it had to be 2 of them that look like they go right to the ramchips. Oh well, I'll try again with the next board that I kill.

[KirovAir]

Meh... Tried to remove the chip from the dead board and broke off 2 legs of the chip. Of course it had to be 2 of them that look like they go right to the ramchips. Oh well, I'll try again with the next board that I kill.

Aw, that's too bad. I was very curious about the result.

[infact]

Too bad, that it happened to important legs.

When you have time, you may try this: http://www.binarydevotion.com/?p=46

[Ashen]

Hmmm. I may try that thx for the tip!

[werejag]

what chip is that anyways

[emu_kidid]

custom IC, has the rtc in it too I believe?

[werejag]

welll that sucks

[ShockSlayer]

I found this thread and tried this out, I couldn't get it to work, tried to transplant a IPL 1.1 to an IPL 1.0, both board revisions were DOL-CPU-11. After putting the original chip back on, the cube booted right back up, and whined about the time so yeah, emu_kidid, confirmed that the rtc is in there.

SS

[Ashen]

Today I successfully transformed a IPL v1.0 board into a IPL v1.1 board by transplanting both "MX" chips from a dead v1.1 board to a working IPL v1.0 board.

Its now Wiikey compatible. Yay!

These are the chips I swapped:

[emu_kidid]

great news, let us know if there is any weirdness when trying to save SRAM (clock settings in the IPL)

[Ashen]

Will do, I haven't fully tested everything yet. But I know the Wiikey Fusion went from the typical freezing on NTSC IPL v1.0 boards to working perfectly.

I'm not sure this will work on all boards either. The transplant of chips was from a IPL v1.1 DOL-CPU-11 board to an IPL v1.0 DOL-CPU-11 board. So it might only work with that specific combo. I'll have to test on a DOL-CPU-10 (all IPL v1.0) to really be sure.

[Ashen]

So I've tested this with another board. A DOL-CPU-10 board that I've transplanted the chips to from a DOL-CPU-30 board. Tested with bios battery hooked up and the system keeps time perfectly. Wiikey and everything else is working perfectly also. I had to do an extra step to get this board working correctly though. Here is what I did:

DOL-CPU-10/11 boards have a different clock crystal than later boards. If you're transplanting from a board with the newer crystal to a board with the older type timing crystal then you have to remove the old crystal and relocate the newer crystal also. If you are doing a transplant from a board that has the same type clock crystals then you only have to swap the two "MX" chips.

Here is what a DOL-CPU-10/11 board looks like stock. Note that some DOL-CPU-10/11 boards have a second clock crystal located to the left of the MX timing chip. You can leave that one alone if the board has it. We are only concerned with the crystal below the MX chip.

DOL-CPU-10/11:


Here is a DOL-CPU-30 board for comparison (DOL-CPU-20 boards look the same in this area):


DOL-CPU-10/11 Clock crystal traces:


DOL-CPU-20/30 Clock crystal traces:


And relocated:

As you can see, I removed the old clock chip and wired the new on directly to the IC legs.

Sorry for the crappy pics. Taken with my iPhone.

[shuffle2]

The IPL is xor'd with a bitstream which is generated from a port on EXI in order to give the plaintext (BS1 and BS2)
http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/so ... IPL.cpp#39
http://code.google.com/p/dolwin/wiki/Bo ... _Reversing

- in case you want to replace the boot code with your own instead of depending on replacement macronix chips