Hacking Flatmii Wii giving a blackscreen

[Jineo]

So, I just installed a FlatMii into my system without a hitch, plugged in to my laptop, everything worked fine, and I played Boom Blox for a while. Then, I decided to try a GCN multidisk I had acquired. I went to the home menu, went to my laptop and started to move my mouse to the ISO load button, and my laptop starts to freeze up. Nothing was moving, ctrl-alt-delete did nothing, and after a few minutes I decided to turn off my laptop.

Once it was all back on (Wii had been turned off at some point during this), and I connected up again, the FlatMii did not show as connected to my laptop. I tried various combinations of having the software on when the Wii turned on, having the USB cable in or out when it was turned on. I checked every wire leading to the USB dongle, the FlatMii, etc. Everything was plugged in well and working. However, at the end of all of this, my Wii now gives a "Error has occured, please eject the disk and turn off the Wii." error. There is no disk in the drive, so this doesnt make any sense.

The error occurs within 10-15 seconds after the health/safety screen, but only when the USB is plugged in. With no USB plugged in, the error does not occur (Played 30 minutes of World of Goo without any problems). Normal disks still work fine.

I'm really hoping someone can help me and that it's a stupid error I made and the FlatMii chip isn't damaged. Thanks in advance for anything you guys can say.

 

[SanGor]

FlatMii is causing problems here too especially with GC games, ie no music in extreme G 3, ikaruga always returns to the main screen and so on.
The software has some odd protection which quits as soon as a debugger or a "monitor" application is found.
When the FlatMii software isn't running the HBC takes like 20s to start as if no drive is connected, which is also very annoying since I expected to get rid of the drive for good.

btw be sure you open the connectors and not just ram in the flat wires!!!

 

[BlindDude]

You prolly got this but do you have it set to stand alone or drive connected mode in the flatmii settings?

I havent had any problems with my flamii except that the first one they sent me didnt have the small 4 wire usb connector on th flatmii chip... I was like.."where does this cable go?" lol

Then the second flatmii they send was missing the black clip that holds the bigger ribbon down on the drive side, so I ran with no drive for a month or so.. I didnt have a 20s delay getting to the HBC.. Everything was great... I recently installed my drive again because of the usb loader and everything still works...
I blame it on luck and the fact that I read read read and then read some more until im not confused,, so much.

Have you tried a different computer? I know it might not me convenient but at least it will let you know if its your laptop or not?

Laptop specs? ram?

Also,, since the flatmii doesnt come with a usb cable,, the first one I tried didnt work, so I had to steal the ole ladies camera one.... SHHHHHHHH!!!

Edit,, Just thought about this one.. When the new games came out that required ios38,53,55 i think... My flatmii would give me a black screen after launching from disk channel, because I have :block update: enabled. What System menu version you on?

DONT UPDATE TO TRY TO FIX IT!! READ AROUND HERE BEFORE UPDATING!!!.. If you update without some needed files.. you will be stuck with no HBC...

 

[Jineo]

I have the FlatMii connected with the drive intact, and the config has the following options:
Update Blocker on
Drive Connected mode
Allow Wii Remote browsing on
(Browse path set to my ISO folder)
Enable Homebrew debug output console

Laptop is an IBM T41 thinkpad, processor Intel Pentium 1.6GHz, 1GB of RAM. I will try to find another decent laptop I can test, but I'm not a man of excess wealth.

The cable I'm using is a USB 2.0 cable I use for my Creative Zen mp3 player, and I use that almost daily, so I'm sure it works fine.

My System Menu version says 3.4U, but I followed the instructions given to downgrade it on this forum so I could install WADs. So I'm not really sure what it is now. (Downgrade was done weeks before FlatMii arrived).

Hope that helps; I'm going to try uninstalling the FlatMii drivers on this laptop and going again, and then trying another laptop if I can find one.

 

[BlindDude]

Your laptop seems fine... better than mine that is..
The minimum requirements for it I saw were 800MHz and 1G ram.. I have a 1.4GHz and only 512 of ram.

Your settings are the same as mine too.

The cable I mentioned DID work for the device it came with, but not with the flatmii.. Strange I know.. The cable was good but somehow different.

A big possibility is that your flatmii is damaged. Like I said both flatmii's sent to me were missing parts, due to bad handling, not by the reseller, but the manufacturer.

Did you do the test to see if your pc recognizes and connects to it before you installed it? Sounds like you didnt. If you didnt know, you can install the drivers on the pc and plug the small 4wire ribbon cable in and hook it up to your pc and it will connect and say "Connected OK" even without being hooked up to the wii.. This way you can check its function before having to take apart your wii.

You could possible take the flatmii out of your wii and take it to a friends, along with the drivers and exe, and see if it works on their pc. If not,, send it back for replacement? cuz it should work.. i got mine to work on all my pc's 3 with XPpro and 1 with windows 7.

 

[Jineo]

I did check everything before installing it into the Wii, and as I said, it ran Boom Blox perfectly (compared against a real disk). When I went to switch ISOs, the laptop crashed and since then I've had these problems.

I went to device manager to uninstall the drivers, and I found three seperate FlatMii drivers. As I recall now, when trying to get the device working again after the crash, it kept asking me to install the driver, so I did each time. Hopefully now I can get it to work again. I'll post back after I've done this.

EDIT: No luck on reinstalling drivers, same error as before. Going to try another laptop, then a PC that can definitely handle it. After that, I'll probably end up returning the chip.

 

[Jineo]

Sorry for double posting but I think this might be important. When I plug the USB into the laptop, the laptop definitely recognizes the chip as the Flatmii hardware, and does not ask to install drivers or anything (although it does pop up asking me to plug into a high speed USB port even though those are definitely 2.0 ports). However, the software does not recognize the chip as being connected. Hope that helps solve this.

EDIT: Obtained a new laptop, not as good as the first but still manageable. After installing freshly downloaded drivers and running the application, it connected fine. Will test an ISO shortly.

New laptop specs:
1.6GHz processor
768MB RAM
55gb disk space

EDIT2: New laptop ran out of power, so I decided to try the old one again while it was recharging (Power dock thing blocks USB ports on the new laptop). Lo and behold, the first laptop connects and works fine. I have no idea what I did, but it works. If I figure it out, I'll come post that.