Best place to buy Wii optical drives?

[flamepanther]

No, the WiiKey Fusion has it's own little SD card reader. It doesn't use the Wii's card reader.

I see, so basically it's like a "lite" version of WODE. Still, SD cards are not an ideal solution. Any idea how much of an issue streaming audio is? One of the main things I want to play is Sonic CD on the import version of Sonic Gems Collection.

[Ziggy]

Ah, I see now. Why not wait and see if there will be a new chip that will work on your drive?

[flamepanther]

Ah, I see now. Why not wait and see if there will be a new chip that will work on your drive?

As I understand it, protection on D3-2 drives is different from the others because the new protection is on the controller board (which is now glued to the optical drive with epoxy). If the firmware detects non-official media, it stops the reading process right there at the drive. Previous drives simply passed on whatever data they read to the main board, where it would then be determined whether the data from the drive represented a legit disc. Solderless mod chips hijack the signal between the drive controller and the main board, and essentially lie to the main board about what's being read from the disc. Since a D3-2 drive will have already stopped reading at that point, there is nothing to hijack on its way to the main board. For a chip to allow reading from the disc on a D3-2 drive (and there is at least one chip that does), it has to interfere with the drive controller itself, and this requires soldering.

[Ziggy]

Oh, I forgot you needed a solderless option. Well you know, some of the more popular chips that need to be soldered have a solderless option. They have a "clip" that piggybacks onto one of the ICs on the driveboard for the required connections.
'
And I read about the epoxy boards. Apparently it's a nightmare trying to remove it.

[flamepanther]

Oh, I forgot you needed a solderless option. Well you know, some of the more popular chips that need to be soldered have a solderless option. They have a "clip" that piggybacks onto one of the ICs on the driveboard for the required connections.

Will look into this...

And I read about the epoxy boards. Apparently it's a nightmare trying to remove it.

I think that was the idea.

[Ziggy]

I think that was the idea.

Indeed. I think it's pretty funny!