The CycloWiz was the second Wii modchip to be announced, following on the heels of the Wiinja – however unlike the latter, it promised to sport a PCB with a quicksolder option, and an optional disable wire. Unfortunately for the CycloWiz, it suffered reputational damage because of certain affiliations, and on top of that, the WiiKey which was announced shortly afterwards promised more features on paper, such as being upgradeable via DVD, having region-free functionality, and having D2B chipset compatibility. The last setback was that when the CycloWiz started shipping, people discovered it had a bug which meant that a certain few games would suffer slowdown or not work altogether.
All this prompted Team Cyclops into action, firstly responding to the WiiKey announcement by updating the feature list to say that the CycloWiz would also be upgradeable via DVD, and then later on releasing a revised version of the CycloWiz to support D2B chipsets. They didn’t stop there however, as they promised an update that would fix the bugs and give the CycloWiz all the features that the WiiKey had – despite many rumours that the chip was not able to be reprogrammed inside the Wii at all. Despite a delay which had some CycloWiz owners expecting nothing but disappointment, the V3 upgrade eventually arrived, finally expanding the feature set of the CycloWiz.
The CycloWiz will now receive ports of open source chip firmware (such as Wiifree, OpenWii), should you prefer one of these alternatives. Even better is that these firmwares can be applied by DVD upgrade, just as the official upgrade is.
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