Hacking What is limiting softmods at 3x?

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Just a question, why is it that the top speed achievable by soft-modding is 3x?
Also, does Starfall read out of region discs at 3x or 6x?
Is it the cIOS that's limiting the speed or the loaders themselves?
 
When the softloaders use the Wii's DVD drive, it's set to DVD mode. And the custom DVD Wii has by default the firmware has it at 3X for anything DVD related. From what I read anyway.
 
dnmn8e said:
Just a question, why is it that the top speed achievable by soft-modding is 3x?
Also, does Starfall read out of region discs at 3x or 6x?
Is it the cIOS that's limiting the speed or the loaders themselves?
Not very sure but i think since the programs both CIOS and loaders are not directly on the drive they can not have full access to the drive
 
linkinworm said:
ekolimits said:
hmm... just wondering, once bootmii is out will loaders be able to run 6x?
no the problem is because we dont know any DVD drive firmware hacks
and the dvd drives firmware is untouchable by the wii itself? correct?
(read it while i was browsing for modchips)
 
dnmn8e said:
linkinworm said:
ekolimits said:
hmm... just wondering, once bootmii is out will loaders be able to run 6x?
no the problem is because we dont know any DVD drive firmware hacks
and the dvd drives firmware is untouchable by the wii itself? correct?
(read it while i was browsing for modchips)
good question
 
The native speed of original games on the wii is 6x - people just feel cheated somehow that they arent getting that .... cant understand why as all games i have work fine too
 
dnmn8e said:
Also, does Starfall read out of region discs at 3x or 6x?
I think they should read at 6x, as Starfall just hacks the System Menu so it doesn't reject (original) import discs, rather than being a softloader as such.
 
Anyone who says disc's running via a softmod don't have any noticeable difference, should really go and BUY the game as well and compare.

Loading times are affected greatly on backup discs.

Still, I can live with it
wink.gif
 
dnmn8e said:
Just a question, why is it that the top speed achievable by soft-modding is 3x?
Also, does Starfall read out of region discs at 3x or 6x?
Is it the cIOS that's limiting the speed or the loaders themselves?

The drive is the limiting factor here. The drive detects that the disc is a DVD-R and sets the speed to 3x, but it can't tell the Wii that the disc is a DVD-R. The backup launching cIOS uses changed dvd reading commands. The games use the commands for dvd reading as usual, but the cIOS calls the firmware commands for video dvds instead of the commands for game discs. So if you run an original game and you want to be 100% sure the drive uses 6x reading speed, don't use a backup cIOS.
 
Official Wii game discs are pressed, and in such a way to contain information that you can't put on a disc by burning it. an IOS can call two different functions (simply put) to the disc drive, one of them is the wii-disc read command; the disc drive does a build-in (in the firmware of the disc drive = untouchable by wii software) check to see if the pressed 'secret' info is present on the disc (so it knows the disc is official) and then reads the data at 6x speed.
The other command an IOS can send to the disc drive is a dvd read command. The command is recognized by the disc drive, so nintendo had the plan to make the wii read dvd's out-of-the-box, but they dropped it. Otherwise, the command wouldn't even be recognized by the disc drives firmware (it had to be build in). When the disc drive gets the dvd read command, it doesn't perform the check for 'pressed information', it just reads the data, but at 3x speed (dictated by the drives firmware).
A modchip basically takes over the job of the disc drives firmware (I'm not very familiar with this, so I could be wrong on the specifics), and makes sure that even when the wii sends a wii-disc read command, the 'pressed information' is NOT read and the data is read at 6x speed, thus allowing burned discs to be read at full speed.
 

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