Raiyu245 said:
This is a modchip - yes, it works differently to the current styles of Wii modchips which attack the drive's controller. This one acts as a man-in-the-middle between the drive and the main board - it pretends to be the drive. To be perfectly honest I'm surprised that noone's come out with something like this sooner. I know drive emulation is a messy business, but then so are the ways modern Wii chips work. Most of what I say here is stuff about this kind of modchip rather than this specific one...
The install videos boil down to "open the Wii, stick the chip down so it's not going to go flying about, connect it to the drive's cable, optionally plug the drive in to it, run the USB cable out through a hole in the case (like with the D2Pro, D2SUN, etc. upgrade cables) and (presumably) connect it to some sort of adapter to plug in to the PC and run the controller software. About the same level of difficulty as a Wii-clip install. Since it's not using the Wii's USB ports, it's not restricted to USB 1.1, and since there's always software running on a PC to talk to the chip, they can probably cut down on the hardware needed on the chip itself making it cheaper to manufacture.
The real advantage is that the only way to defeat this kind of chip is to change the way the Wii mainboard talks to the DVD drive. The IOS doesn't even know this exists - it just sees a drive. Then you just get the same arms race that lead to the range of controller chips (D2C, D2C2, D2E, etc) and it's already known how that sort of race turns out for the hardware hackers. It also breaks repair options for Nintendo, since a drive would only be replaceable with an identical model rather than the current way where any drive can be replaced with any other. The irony is that such a chip could allow for replacement with another kind of drive since it'd just have to emulate the kind the system wants anyway. This kind of chip increases the number of such battles Nintendo's got to fight to three - existing drivechips, softmodding and drive emulator chips. That's going to leave their ability to respond spread pretty thin.
Another advantage: those Wiis with broken drives could become useful again. Laser crapped itself? Replace the drive with one of these.
The disadvantage: the Wii's tethered to a computer. But that only applies to this particular chip - there's no reason that you couldn't have an external hard drive plugged in to this kind of chip, although that would require more processing grunt on the chip itself.
Then again, this is all assuming it's real - whilst it's very plausible to me, I'll wait until I actually see it for sale before I believe it. Even if it isn't, it's going to make other people look at this kind of method. Memor32/Memento for the PlayStation 2 triggered Free MC Boot/ESR - now almost any PS2 memory card can be a modchip. This sort of thing also opens up the possibility of third-party drive replacement.
