"New" Hwfly OLED/Core V5 Chip is Out on Aliexpress

[randy_w]

Was about to order some new hwfly oled chips on aliexpress and noticed hwfly v5 is out. Here's the picture:

According to the seller, v5 is similar to v4.1 in hardware but the footprint is the same as v4. Compared to v4, here are some major changes:
- v4 can't glitch consoles with toshiba emmc (THGBM***) but v5 can;
- Using same FPGA chip as original Team Xecuter chips;
- Added protection circuit on usb port

Only thing I'm concerned about is the toshiba emmc support. Is it true that v4 chip can't glitch oled consoles with toshiba emmc? I've done like 20 consoles by now, only seen samsung and hynix emmc. If anyone worked on a console with toshiba emmc, please let us know the result. Thanks.

Btw this constant hardware "update" thing with hwfly chips starts to give me a R4 flashcard vibe..

Post automatically merged: Oct 31, 2022

Asked my seller on taobao and just got a reply. According to him, v4 chip DOES support Toshiba emmc. The "v5" chip on aliexpress is from a different manufacturer and "has many issues". His taobao store also does not sell these v4.1/v5 "new" chips (with BGA FPGA), only v4 (with QFN FPGA).

Seems like a new player has entered the game and things about to get interesting.

 

[grcd]

Does that extent to the 4.1 Lite chip too? I purchased it assuming it is an improvement on v4.0. Can you clarify what is the difference between BGA/QFN and why would it matter?

 

[randy_w]

Does that extent to the 4.1 Lite chip too? I purchased it assuming it is an improvement on v4.0. Can you clarify what is the difference between BGA/QFN and why would it matter?

Yes I think so. If it has a BGA FPGA chip then it's from the same manufacturer as v5 chips.
Original v4 oled chip manufacturer also released a flashable switch lite chip called lite v4.2:

Which uses the QFN FPGA chip.

The difference goes back to when hwfly clones first came out. Basically those modchips with QFN FPGA don't have firmware protection on the GD32 microcontroller (larger chip), so people could dump its firmware, reverse engineer it and make a custom firmware for it. However, the microcontroller on modchips with BGA FPGA has firmware protection enabled, also they have a different implementation of the communication between the microcontroller and FPGA chip, so the custom firmware doesn't work on those.

Now since the v4.1/v5 chips claim they can be updated, I think the manufacturer just looked into the open source firmware and wrote their own FPGA code. I haven't touched any v4.1/v5 chips yet, since v4 is already very stable and there's literally nothing to improve. My seller on taobao also confirms this and he said the v4.1/v5 chips are less stable compared to v4.

 

[raging_chaos]

Asked my seller on taobao and just got a reply

Do they ship to the US? I lost contact with my seller after the whole SX thing went down and the majority I've talked to refuse to ship here. If they do can you DM me a link?

 

[randy_w]

Do they ship to the US? I lost contact with my seller after the whole SX thing went down and the majority I've talked to refuse to ship here. If they do can you DM me a link?

No don't think they can ship directly, but you can always use a proxy service like superbuy.
This is the link on taobao, just paste the link to superbuy and it will show delivery options:
https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=669784022963

 

[smasha]

Hey @randy_w
Does this one look okay to you v4.1 OLED (if not, do you have a link to an official one I should get?)
I don't want to deal with the clones if possible.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004276175281.html

Thanks heaps!