jskyboo said:
@ZiggyStardog Sorry no one has addressed your post yet. I would recommend option 2, hack the black wii and use it to dump your games to usb. Then if you want to use the white as your primary just move the usb drive over to the white. I know you said you would rather keep the black pristine but who do you want to fool just others using it cause if so you can always remove anything they would be able to see like HBC, but it is highly recommended that you do NOT try to revirginize it. You won't be able to fool nintendo so its better to leave most of the hacks in place but hide what others can easily see. Option 2 is just way easier than option 1 so why replace the dvd drive if you don't have to, you already have the other wii. If you didn't already have a second wii maybe it would be a different discussion. Option 3 isn't bad but still why buy another dvd drive when you don't have to.
Thanks for the reply, I was beginning to think I was too noob for school...
Motives for leaving the black one intact are to keep from tying it up dumping when others might want to use it, and confusing them with the HBC etc, and risking putting the Wii in harms way with its tools in their hands. When I'm talking about hiding HBC, it's not from Nintendo. I didn't even consider re-virginizing, I can tell that that's likely a losing game.
There's also a warranty period to consider, but I suppose with two Wiis in-house I should be able to swap parts between them and get something running if disaster strikes.
It seems the black Wii's honor now hangs on how long it might take to dump what I have natively v.s. using an LG drive on a PC, and how best to hide hacks from the curious. I hear talk of native dumps taking 4 minutes or so, while dumps on a PC with an LG drive taking over 3 hours. I just don't know which if any of these numbers I should believe. I'm thinking even if I went for option #4, it might take even longer than option #3 to find the titles etc, even using the 3 hours per backup number. I haven't counted, but I guess I have between 40-50 titles-- although I might not want to archive them all.
As for the rest of my questions, I think I answered many myself after hunting around and running ModMii on a virtual Windows machine.
I see people use USB loaders with flash drives, not sure about USB DVD drives. I suppose there's a limited set of people with USB DVD drives, and if you need to buy something to archive to, it may as well be a hard drive. I can see scenarios where you might want to dump directly to a USB DVD burner if you could, to read on systems that can't read burned disks. (I realize that's not remotely possible with existing software, but it might be a fun hack). And I did some math and I think transfer speeds would make hosting ISO's and such on a remote server impractical. I'm guessing it would take 5-10 minutes to transfer the average game ISO even with a headwind.
Any pointers to more definitive DVD hardware information might help #1 and #2, if I go that route. I'm finding many of the cheaper DVD solutions are rebranded OEM drives, and Googling points to newbies prattling amongst themselves.
Thanks again for your help.