Wii with newer drive plays DVDs with WiiMC

Hello everyone. It's my first thread here (I've posted on other threads, but never created a thread on this forum) and I hope it's on the correct section. I also hope that, after carefully reading the rules, I don't bring here any forbidden content.

To start from the beginning, I own a Wii for more than one year (next November it'll be two years since it was bought new). I upgraded to 4.3 before I knew about homebrew, so when I read about it I was very sad to discover I'd need to buy a game to install it. I have read a lot about homebrew for about a year at WiiBrew site, and recently I got the opportunity to get Lego Batman for free (gift card, don't start wondering about less ethical ways), I ordered it, installed homebrew, and I'm living very happily with it for exactly a week.

The first software I installed, after Homebrew Browser, was WiiMC. Now comes the interesting part: I never thought it would be able to play DVD movies, because when I input my serial number at wiidrives.com, it always told me there was a 100% chance that my drive had a GC2-D3-2 (v2) chip which AFAIK wouldn't allow other DVDs than official Nintendo discs to be played. Just to make sure it wouldn't play, I put a commercial movie DVD on the drive, select the DVD section on WiiMC and... the DVD plays perfectly! Not all the DVDs play, but at least one retail DVD and one homemade DVD-R burned movie plays. I can't get other homemade burned discs to play (these are DVD+R and DVD+RW, which may explain that).

I searched on the WiiMC and WiiBrew forums for a answer for this, but as I think it's more related to the drive and not to WiiMC, I posted here... does the DVD play because my drive isn't a D3-2v2 (thus making my Wii a bit special, because it wasn't supposed to play DVDs according to wiidrive's DB), or is it because WiiMC does read DVDs even on D3-2 drives (making this thread nothing more than a noobish question)?

Is there any way to know exactly what drive my Wii has without opening it and without using something like BootMii? I haven't installed BootMii because AFAIK it's very hard to remove it even after a NAND reformat, so I'll only install it when my Wii is two years old, this way I hope that I at least have a chance to format the system memory if e.g. the disc drive breaks, before returning it.

Sorry for wasting your time in something so simple... perhaps I'm not interpreting well the results of the comparison between the drives at wiidrives.com, WiiMC is able to play DVDs on all kinds of drives and chips, or I'm missing some other point... Unless my Wii really has one of the older drives.

Best Regards
gbl08ma

Is the Wii second hand? There's a chance the original owner changed the drive, or the outside case (thus changing the visible serial number) if so. I believe there are tools to find out the "true" serial number of a Wii with a changed case, but I'm not 100% sure what tool you would use. I think that the serial number is in "setting.txt", which you can dump with this app: [wiibrew.org] but it may not work with an updated Wii.

If it isn't second hand, it seems that the database you looked at is wrong. The only way to know for sure what drive you have is to open the Wii and take a look.

Hmm... so my Wii is a bit special...
I bought it new from a trustworthy online sales site, in a pack with Wii Sports Resort and Wii Fit Plus (and the usual Wii Sports, obviously).
I have already thought it has been refurbished, but its price wasn't the one of a refurb console. Obviously, Nintendo could always replace a faulty drive with an older one (of those that play DVDs) and sell the Wii under the normal price. The guys at the store could also change the case before shipment (e.g. if the case had a serious scratch), but I don't think that's probable as they would need to void all the warranty seals of the package.

After unboxing, the Wii also acts as brand new, asks for all the setup thing (if it had been formatted, it would do that too) comes with 4.2e, (which later I stupidly updated to 4.3e when it came out).

I'm sure no one has changed the drive (or the case/serial stick) after I received the Wii at my home...

So, it seems my Wii is a big exception to all the other ones (and they are LOTS) that were effectively opened and registered at wiidrives.com. I wonder if it's a single Wii, or if there are more Wiis with similar serials and different drives than the ones they would have according to statistics.

[start of dreaming blah blah]
It could also be that Nintendo had some (10,100,1000?) older brand new Wiis that hadn't been sold (with a older System Menu, like 3.0, 3.1), so they took them, updated them to the latest software version (4.2), put them in new boxes and in packs with Sports Resort, and ready for sale! I bought one of these and here I have a Wii which was updated to 4.2 by Nintendo, to 4.3 by me, and it's older than what it appears to be.
If all this blah blah was possible, will my Wii have anything that confirms it's an older one?
OR something much simpler:
The online shopping site had those packs for sale for ages... but how then my Wii was at 4.2e?
[end of blah blah]

It depends how old you think your Wii could be. One way to check roughly how old it is is to check the boot1 version. Check if there is a HackMii Installer log on your SD card (i think its called installer.log or something like that), and if there is, post the contents of that file on this site: [pastebin.com] and link to it here, then we can take a look at it and see if your boot1 is old or new. This is one thing that no one can update without replacing the entire motherboard of the Wii AFAIK, so if it is old, your Wii is old, if it is new, your Wii is new.

The other thing to check is the serial number in setting.txt, like I mentioned. As I said, that version of the application probably won't work for you. I tried to update it to make it work with a feature of the latest HBC which would allow it to work for you, but I'm not a programmer and couldn't get it to compile (in theory it should have been a relatively simple copy and paste from another app, but it seems I'm missing some files...)

I do remember of having a installer.log file on the SD card, but I moved it to a folder on another computer I can't access right now. I'll see if I remember to upload the contents of the file when I get access to it.

If you just run the HackMii Installer again (just put it in a folder within "apps" e.g. sd:/apps/hackmii_installer/boot.elf), and choose to exit without doing anything, it'll regenerate the log.

I posted the installer.log at my own server as I don't like pastebins very much (I used to have my own pastebin but I have taken it offline).
Also, I couldn't use a pastebin because currently I'm using Windows and the line endings weren't recognized in notepad (the text would have no line breaks) and they wouldn't be copied correctly to the pastebin. So, here at the following address, the file is much readable since any major browser interprets correctly Linux line endings no matter what platform they are running on.

HackMii installer.log for my Wii: [gbl08ma.cz.cc]

I forgot to say that BootMii can only be installed as IOS, but you can read that in the log.

Well you have a newer version of boot1. Which in all honesty doesn't conclusively prove anything, other than that your Wii isn't VERY old. It could still be fairly old, the boot1 update happened a while ago.

Well, at least we know that my Wii has been manufactured after the boot1 update and before Nintendo changed the type of disc drives and chips.

When exactly did updated boot1 Wiis and D3-2 drives started to appear? I'll go searching.

Result 1: "Some time in 2008, Nintendo fixed the strncmp bug in boot1 for newly-manufactured Wiis, preventing boot2 from being modified by e.g. BootMii." as seen on [wiibrew.org] - So my Wii was manufactured after "some time in 2008".



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/2011 06:44PM by gbl08ma.