There seems to be 2 prominent name in the world of Gamecube mod chips. Qoob and Viper. And since the Qoob has already been reviewed, I thought I might take up the challenge of writing a review for the latter as best as I can.
The Chip
What seperates the Viper Extreme from the normal Viper is that it comes with a USB adapter to flash bios and backup your games while the ordinary Viper flashed the bios via the printer parallel port. The journey started with ordering the chip from Divineo.co.uk (unlike the GBAtemp mods, I got no free product to review) and it arrived in a few days. This is what you comes in the box (if you have a crushed and broken chip, it's time to start tipping the postmen).
And by what you see is what you get, that's ALL you get and that means no instruction paper. Fortunately the front of the box had a website address that gives you the instructions and fortunately it's straight forward.
The Installation
It seems that most people are put off by modchips since pretty much all of them require soldering and I was one of them. But since I was determined to fit this myself with no help, I put in some soldering practice which came up to... 1 hour experience with the rest being advice from college lecturers. And so came the day of the installation and I can honestly say that it takes more time to take apart the console than the actual soldering and it came up to probably no more than 20 minutes altogether. With only 4 wires to solder and a point to join together, it's got less wire to solder than the Qoob chip and since 3 of the wires are soldering to points that are fairly generous, I think that's a bit of a plus.
Running the "Copies"
I'm sure that's the number one reason why people buy modchips. To run "backups" but will the Viper Extreme be what you're looking for? The first thing you do when you finish installing the chip and putting it back together is to put in the bios. Apparently the company that makes the chip also makes a bios called Cobra but you'll have to go to 3rd party sites to get it. When you first turn the chip on, you're given the choice of either flashing the bios via DVD or USB. Not to waste a DVD, I chose USB and the bios flashed without much fuss but in the end, I settled for an alternative bios called GCOS.
Unfortunately, this was the point where, through no fault of the actual chip, I ran into problems where the Gamecube is fussy about the type of DVDs it reads which in turn forced me to spend more money on better quality DVD and wait the next few days for it to arrive. It seems that it may take me 20 minutes to install but actually 2 days to run games! But like I said, this is not the fault of the Viper chip and more in the console not running every media without a problem and in the end, with the new media I got 6 games to run and I played all of them for 10 minutes each and none gave me any problems.
Conclusion
Yeah, you probably skipped to this part to get past the wall of text so I'd better sum it up. If you are looking for a GC modchip and can't choose between Viper or Qoob, they both do the same function in booting up backups but what probably gives the Viper the little edge is the ease of installation to the point where it could probably be called, "My First Modchip". Overall, while this is the first chip I installed, I find that it actually does it's job very well.
9/10
With thanks to Djgarf for the help. Sorry if I caused you a migraine
The Chip
What seperates the Viper Extreme from the normal Viper is that it comes with a USB adapter to flash bios and backup your games while the ordinary Viper flashed the bios via the printer parallel port. The journey started with ordering the chip from Divineo.co.uk (unlike the GBAtemp mods, I got no free product to review) and it arrived in a few days. This is what you comes in the box (if you have a crushed and broken chip, it's time to start tipping the postmen).
And by what you see is what you get, that's ALL you get and that means no instruction paper. Fortunately the front of the box had a website address that gives you the instructions and fortunately it's straight forward.
The Installation
It seems that most people are put off by modchips since pretty much all of them require soldering and I was one of them. But since I was determined to fit this myself with no help, I put in some soldering practice which came up to... 1 hour experience with the rest being advice from college lecturers. And so came the day of the installation and I can honestly say that it takes more time to take apart the console than the actual soldering and it came up to probably no more than 20 minutes altogether. With only 4 wires to solder and a point to join together, it's got less wire to solder than the Qoob chip and since 3 of the wires are soldering to points that are fairly generous, I think that's a bit of a plus.
Running the "Copies"
I'm sure that's the number one reason why people buy modchips. To run "backups" but will the Viper Extreme be what you're looking for? The first thing you do when you finish installing the chip and putting it back together is to put in the bios. Apparently the company that makes the chip also makes a bios called Cobra but you'll have to go to 3rd party sites to get it. When you first turn the chip on, you're given the choice of either flashing the bios via DVD or USB. Not to waste a DVD, I chose USB and the bios flashed without much fuss but in the end, I settled for an alternative bios called GCOS.
Unfortunately, this was the point where, through no fault of the actual chip, I ran into problems where the Gamecube is fussy about the type of DVDs it reads which in turn forced me to spend more money on better quality DVD and wait the next few days for it to arrive. It seems that it may take me 20 minutes to install but actually 2 days to run games! But like I said, this is not the fault of the Viper chip and more in the console not running every media without a problem and in the end, with the new media I got 6 games to run and I played all of them for 10 minutes each and none gave me any problems.
Conclusion
Yeah, you probably skipped to this part to get past the wall of text so I'd better sum it up. If you are looking for a GC modchip and can't choose between Viper or Qoob, they both do the same function in booting up backups but what probably gives the Viper the little edge is the ease of installation to the point where it could probably be called, "My First Modchip". Overall, while this is the first chip I installed, I find that it actually does it's job very well.
9/10
With thanks to Djgarf for the help. Sorry if I caused you a migraine
